University of Richmond

Archive for the 'InterVarsity' Category

Into the Mountains on Fall Retreat

September 13, 2009

I have now returned from InterVarsity’s Fall Retreat. It was a weekend full of hiking, sports, games, worship, and community. We dealt with the topic of “What Is Love” and it was a great experience. I met so many amazing freshmen and also got the opportunity to simply get away from campus and get a chance to retreat into silence. This has been my third Fall Retreat to this retreat in the mountains on the border of West Virginia. And, for my first time ever, I crossed into West Virginia. It was a lot of fun and I made a slideshow to play at the beginning of InterVarsity’s weekly meeting. It has tons of pictures from the weekend and, since slideshows and media are a huge part of my life, I decided to simply let this stand for what I’ve been up to this week. I hope you enjoy.

Quote of the Week: “In great affairs men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small things they show themselves as they are.” -Nicholas Chamfort

YouTube Video of the Week:


Don’t underestimate social media

Finding a Routine

September 6, 2009

I’ve now become settled and made it through two weeks of classes. My room is now settled as well. I live in a suite in South Court, which is one of the older residence halls on-campus, but our room is great. It’s plenty large and has a futon for all of our friends to come over and crash. Here are some pictures and video of our room:


My dorm room
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My side of the room

Last week went really well and flew by. Fortunately, I’m starting to get into a routine now. I have five classes and they are all going well. There are a lot of group projects, which I don’t really appreciate, but I’m hoping that we’ll work well together and get the projects done. My courses include a Marketing course, Organizational Behavior course, and a Business Statistics course in our Business School. I also have a Theories and Models of Leadership course in addition to a class entitled Competition, Cooperation, and Choice. That course is led by the Dean of our Jepson School of Leadership Studies and studies Adam Smith’s works and has an economic focus which analyzes different group dynamics and motivations. That class has only nine students in the class, which is what enrollment was capped at. My largest class has twenty-five students, which is likely the largest class I’ve ever had here at Richmond.

A common theme of the week was meetings. I had a tour guide meeting, tour guide dinner, InterVarsity Leadership meeting, Alternative Spring Break Leadership meeting, four Speech Center meetings, a Class Cabinet meeting, plus a full schedule of classes. I am a Speech Center Fellow for a Rhetoric class, which means that I lead a lab portion which supplements their course with speaking opportunities. We don’t have TA’s teach courses at Richmond, but I do help with the lab component. I made the students introduce themselves and start talking in front of an audience by speaking on their current Facebook profile picture. Some stories were quite amusing. My favorite was a guy who studied abroad in Argentina this past summer and his tale of how he wound up at a gay nightclub.

Life isn’t just classes and meetings, though. I’m having a fair amount of free time to simply hang out with friends, watch movies, and play volleyball. InterVarsity had several events which made the week quite entertaining. One was a Freshmen Fellowship where I met some members of the Class of 2013 (all of whom are very cool) and played games with them such as Train Wreck, Catchphrase, and Encore. Another event was Saturday night and involved playing Sardines in one of our academic buildings and also having freshly-baked cookies and brownies while watching “Zoolander” on a projector screen afterwards. Because of this event, though, I wasn’t able to go on a road trip to Duke to watch our football team. We won the National Championship last year and started off this year with a solid win on the road. Tons of my friends went along on fan buses to cheer them on.

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My suitemate and InterVarsity helper making cookies

Quote of the Week: “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” -Thomas Jefferson
YouTube Video of the Week:

A crazy hole-in-one

Getting Settled

August 29, 2009

So, it feels like I just left campus for the summer, but I’m back once again. Somehow, I find myself as a Junior. I’m still trying to figure out where the first two years of my college life went. Man, time is flying by. Unfortunately, this weekend is also disappearing, so I need to keep this post relatively short. To say that’s easy, though, is rather difficult. I’ve had five classes this week, a million and one welcome back events, plus meetings and tons of other stuff I would love to share with you. Before all of those activities, though, I arrived to help the new freshmen move in. It was broiling hot, but I was actually quite helpful for two freshmen and their families. The next few days of Orientation found me representing InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at several open houses and events. I also had the fun opportunity to document several Orientation activities as the photographer for our school newspaper, an opportunity made available through a friend of mine. It further astounded me how much time had passed since I was doing these exact same activities.

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The freshmen meeting each other for the first time
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The unexplainable Orientation event of Playfair
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Having fun at Playfair

Being the Events Coordinator for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, this week was rather chaotic. We hit the ground running with events that are planned via e-mail communication, which is often sporadic and quite difficult. We had a cookout to welcome the new students to UR as well as to give the returning students a chance to reunite. We had 200+ people attend and went through 150 hot dogs and 150 hamburgers. It was a huge success.

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Our shopping trip for the cookout supplies
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Taking charge of the grills
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Spontaneous hot dog eating contest

We also hosted a Field Day after the first week of classes ended on Friday. There was Ultimate Frisbee, watermelon-eating contests, a “snowball fight”, soccer, and a water balloon fight. The weather wasn’t ideal, but I was able to relax after a chaotic week, due to the lack of a routine in my life. At the Field Day, I reconnected with friends I hadn’t talked to over the summer as well as made new friends, such as Mark from Northern Ireland. I must quickly add that all of the current freshmen are really amazing and cool. Those of you who are prospectives will have a tough act to follow, but I have faith in you.

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Watermelon-eating contest

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Julie wearing her watermelon as a hat


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Aftereffects of the “snowball fight”
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Everyone was absolutely disgusting after Field Day

While I did do many other things this week, such as move into my room, have organizational meetings, and numerous other things, classes are what I shall conclude with mentioning. I have three Business courses (Marketing, Business Statistics II, and Organizational Behavior) as well as two Leadership Courses (Theories and Models of Leadership and Competition, Cooperation, & Choice). They all seem pretty good. I attempted to drop one Business course since I had taken a very similar course in the Leadership School in the spring, but it wasn’t meant to be. There looks to be lots of reading and it’s still uncertain how many papers I will have, or how long they will need to be, which is slightly disconcerting to me.

I’ll make sure to update you as to how classes are going and what they’re about, in addition to some pictures and video of my room, but that will have to wait. There was so much other stuff going on in my life to share with you first.

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Our neighbor, Cameron, reading us a bedtime story from
Billy’s Organic Chemistry textbook

Quote of the Week: “But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. they laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” -Carl Sagain

YouTube Video of the Week:

Since summer is the time for barbecuing, here is the most unhealthy thing in the world, except for the deep-fried Twinkie perhaps