A Day at the Arnold Lounge

I woke up this morning thinking about Cohort #2! They are finally in Providence.

After a three day weekend, it was difficult waking up at 7:30AM again. Nonetheless, I felt better about seizing my day. Our group met up during class and we made an outline of what we needed to do for our project. I made a list of what each person in the group needed to do and what statistics we needed to support our main points. I was in charge of covering our introduction and definitions. Jose focused on introducing the debate topic: the best way to deal with the California budget deficit will be to raise taxes opposed to cutting spending. Andrew covered our solution, which was to raise taxes. As a group, we looked at solving the problem of a $25.4 billion deficit from both sides of the debate. Cutting spending seemed like a good idea in the short term, but we found that raising taxes would have less of a negative impact on the GDP and would slowly but surely generate revenue for California. This project made me look critically at the situation and develop a strong argument based on statistics and the interest of the people. We worked a little in class before Professor Coleman gave his lecture on aggregate supply and demand curves.

Andrew, Jose, and I met in the Arnold lounge to swap research and finalize the PowerPoint presentation. Andrew and I have a lot of public speaking experience from Forensics Speech and Debate at school so filling our 5 minute intervals of the presentation was relatively easy. We helped Jose with some bullet points to cover in his part of the project. He was uncomfortable with talking in front of us in our mock presentation. After running through our slides and speeches, we all felt better about presenting tomorrow. As a whole, I'm satisfied with my project and with the people in my group. I've worked so well with Andrew this summer and I'm glad that I had the chance to work with another student from another state. Andrew came up with an impressive quote that we are using for a strong concluding statement.

Later in the night there was an art class in the Arnold Lounge (that was a hot spot today). A dual majoring Brown/RISD student, Josephine, held a small discussion seminar with a small handful of Summer@Brown students. We had to express a random word that we picked from a basket in art form. My word was "humble". I really could not think of anything so I made simple designs and tried not to get too fancy. There was one guy there, Zach, who I met from the first RISD tour. He is an amazing illustrator. We are going to hang out and draw tomorrow. He also gave me the website for his sister's art, who is currently studying at the University of Southern California (one of my top choices for college).

I cannot wait to meet up with cohort #2 tomorrow. It is always nice to see some familiar faces. Skype has been great. I have been able to web cam my friends and family to rave about Rhode Island. Adapting to the east coast was not that hard for me. My floor mates have rated my room "most homey" out of the entire basement of Jameson. Visitors often stop by to look at all the mail on my wall. All the postcards and letters are wonderful and fun to receive.

I'll expand more on my presentation tomorrow. Professor Coleman has a lot in store for us! He is the same professor for Game Theory so he told us to bring in our laptops so he can show us some of the material he is teaching his other class. Time to rest up for a great day tomorrow.