Monday, July 11, 2011

A New Home

Today was the first day of class! I woke up this morning feeling totally disoriented. I checked my alarm clock and attempted to drift back to sleep, but I kept waking up to door slamming and the noise of feet pattering down the hallway. When I woke up for real, about an hour later, I got dressed and headed down to breakfast at the nearby dining hall.

Of course, class was probably the best part of my day. Although I was initially very nervous, Dean Kisa was amazing at putting us at ease. She is welcoming, funny, and kind. (Also, she has an awesome laugh!) Today we learned about leadership and female status in society. Wow, what a shocker! :)

Learning about female status in society was fascinating because I had never gone that in depth with this topic before. Some of the statistics we learned were pretty horrifying, while others very encouraging (regarding the progress of women in society). I think I’ll enjoy learning about this topic more than I had even originally anticipated.

We also played name games and other icebreakers in class. I had fun chatting with people during activities and during meals and getting to know interesting facts about them.

Since “women” is only one half of the class, we also covered the topic of “leadership.” We explored the concept of leadership and what it means generally as well as what it means to each of us individually. We have lots of class discussions and I love hearing what everyone else thinks. I am working on participating a lot in class and improving my own leadership skills.

After dinner we had a Leadership Institute community night. These events are mandatory and encompass the entire Leadership Institute, as you might expect. We then break off into our classes and have workshops led by our leader fellows, RAs from our dorms who act as TAs in various classes. Our leader fellows are Tiffany (I talked briefly about her yesterday) and Laura, two very friendly and helpful college students. (Actually, Laura may have just graduated.) I think Tiffany is especially interesting because when we did class activities she seemed to share some similar characteristics with me, but she appears much more confident and outspoken. I aspire to become a little more like her in that way.

Today was a great day. It was especially interesting because of the diversity of the students here. I now have a friend from Rhode Island who grew up in Cape Verdia, an island nation off the West African coast. She is fluent in Creole, which I thought was amazing. I also have a classmate from Hong Kong and floor mates from Madrid, London, and Ecuador. This is only a few of the international students, not to mention the wide variety of accents that I hear from the United States.

2 comments:

  1. Sounds like you had a great first day of class! Any chance you'll get to catch the USA v France Women's World Cup game tomorrow???!!! It sounds like something that might be of special interest to your group!

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  2. Is that last picture of the upstairs lounge In Harkness? If it is, they made it nicer since last year!

    Exactly which qualities do you share with Tiffany? That's awesome that you found a "personality parallel" with Tiffany! Those kinds of similarities in reactions and experiences can make learning from someone so much easier!

    Hugs and I hope you enjoy all of your days at Brown as much as you did this one!

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