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Leaving the Nest

Posted by | Posted on May 6, 2012
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“He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep and every path was its tributary. ‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,’ he used to say. ‘You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no telling where you might be swept off to.’”

J.R.R. Tolkien

My friends Catherine and Joe in Jordan. The three of us we were known as the "Three Musketeers"

I can only start my final freshman blog by looking back at my first blog post, written a year ago, “Midway on Our Life’s Journey”.  In it I compared my college application process to Dante’s Inferno, revealed that I had no idea what I was going to do in college, and made a lot of jokes about going to a Catholic high school.  The blog ended like this:

“No matter what I decide to do, I will forever be one of the lucky ones. I will make the absolute most of what I’ve just been handed: a four-year golden ticket to wherever I chose. I’m not stuck in Limbo anymore. I know where I’m headed next.”

When I wrote that blog, I had no idea how weird my friends would be.

When I wrote that I had no idea what this year would be like.  I had no idea that I’d make so many new friends in every team and extracurricular I joined.  I had no idea that I’d ride down rapids.  I had no idea that I’d be writing a blog trying to explain what my freshman year was like as I finished up three final essays and projects, packed my things into storage, and shopped online for clothing appropriate for a summer in Salalah, Oman and a fall in Washington, D.C..

I suppose one could make the argument that this time last year I didn’t know where I was going, and that in writing the blog I was simply being an optimistic little 18 year old who had, truthfully, no idea what she was getting herself into.  I only found out I was selected as a State Department Critical Language Scholar and going to Oman this summer in mid-March, and only found out in mid-April that I received an Aitchison Public Service Fellowship in Government and was going to be living/interning in D.C. this fall instead of staying on the Homewood Campus.  One can further argue that I don’t know where I’m studying abroad in the coming semesters, that I don’t know if I’ll try to apply to the 5 year BA/MA program with SAIS, that I don’t know where I’ll be after graduation or even after lunch today.

The Class of 2015 bloggers at the beginning of the year.

Knowing where one will be in the physical sense is admittedly tricky.  Especially at Hopkins, there are so many paths to take and so many places to explore that I’m quite certain you can go wherever you want.  The bloggers at Hopkins Interactive will be spread all over this world this summer.  JHU_Tess is going to be in London, JHU_Kate in France, JHU_Lauren in Africa, JHU_Ian in Italy, JHU_Erica, JHU_Allysa, and JHU_Cate in California.  I have little doubt that when we all arrived at this school we never imagined where we would be physically this summer, but I think we all knew mentally where we were heading next and knew that by coming to Hopkins we were already there.  We knew that by going to this school we were going to be mentally ready for anything that came our way.  We knew that no matter where we ended up, we were going to try our damnest to be successful.  We knew that wherever we went, we’d be able to take our experiences at Hopkins and know that regardless of how often our physical location changed, we’d always be able to say, “Mentally, I’m already where I want to be.”

Watching "A Very Potter Musical" during Intersession.

The thought of leaving the security of the Homewood Campus for Washington, D.C. so early has definitely made these last few weeks of classes much more poignant.  This is not just the last Arabic class of my freshman year, it is the last time I will sit in a Homewood classroom for at least ten months.  The night of watching Rome with my friends wasn’t just the last time we’ll hang out freshman year, but the last time I’ll live in the same building with them for at least ten months, maybe even until our junior year.  By the time I’ll come back to campus, the Brody Learning Center will be done, my friends and I will have to look at apartments, and I’ll officially have to declare my major.

So, to all the people along the way that made this year what it was – my friends at Hopkins and from back home, my professors who asked me what a girl from Las Vegas was doing on the East Coast, my teammates and coworkers who didn’t let me quit, my family who went months without seeing me, a certain mayor of NYC who gave me the scholarship that allowed me to come here in the first place, the team of SAABers who picked me to share my stories – thank you.

I guess I’ve almost survived my freshman year of college.  There’s still quite a bit of moving around to do in my future.  I stepped into the Road last August by coming to Hopkins, and there is no telling where I’ll be swept off into.   Going out your door, going across the country for college, and going across the world for a summer are all dangerous businesses because there’s a chance the adventure might not go as planned.  Maybe you don’t go to your first-choice college.  Maybe you get homesick because you haven’t seen your family in four months.  Maybe you don’t speak the language or know the culture.  Maybe you don’t know where the Road is taking you.

But maybe that’s what makes it interesting.  Maybe all the pressure and all the work and all the nights you spend wondering what the heck is going to happen next make you mentally strong to the point where no matter where you are, you’re always exactly where you’ve always wanted to be: ready for a challenge.

 “At dusk the three of us encountered an elderly lady and her beagle hiking toward us. Teetering along on a walking stick, she wore a motoring cap and held a bunch of wildflowers. I said hello and asked her where she was going. She replied in Welsh, ‘Rydw i yna yn barod.’ We looked to Erica for a translation. ‘She said, “I’m already there.”’”

-“A Ramble in Wales,” from National Geographic Traveler

A Year in Gifs

Posted by | Posted on May 1, 2012
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It’s the last week of classes for my freshman year of college so I’ve been feeling a lot like this lately:

This semester’s been an emotional roller coaster to say the least, and when all is said and done this week I’ll still have a massive research paper due on the fifteenth.  I started to write about this past year, really write about it, but then I couldn’t do it.  Not yet.  I can’t properly look back on the semester until it’s finally over,  that last paper is gone, and I’m headed back to spend a few days with my family before hopping on a plane again.

So, like any good teenager, I filled the time when I should have been writing my really deep, thought-provoking blog by mindlessly surfing the internet for gifs to describe my year.

When I found out I got into Hopkins

When everyone thought I was pre-med

When my friends and I were really bored the rest of the summer

When I climbed 40 feet on a rock wall, baked a cake without an oven, and rode down a rapid on Pre-Orientation

When I moved in and my roommate gave me cookies

When everyone in my dorm went to the Blue Jay Ball

When my laptop broke the first day of classes

When I got a job as a videographer

When I discovered the glory that is the FFC

When I was accepted into SAAB

When my friends and I had to figure out how to do laundry

When Adam Riess won the Nobel Prize

When my partner and I won a novice debate tournament on a case about economics

When stayed at my friend’s house for Thanksgiving and ate a lot

When I went back to Vegas and finally got my license on the 4th attempt

When I saw my friends again during Intersession

When the debate team went to Dartmouth in January 

When the mock trial team went to NYC

When covered grades were over

When I found out I was going to Oman

When everything was due the week before Spring Break


When it was Spring Fair

When Loyola thought they were going to beat us

When my friends and I found out we were living together next year

When I think about how I felt freshman year

What Are We Busy About? The Classes Blog

Posted by | Posted on April 24, 2012
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“It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”
--Henry David Thoreau

 

As I frantically try to finish my last major paper of the semester other than my research paper, it’s finally hit me that I have two weeks of classes left in my freshman year of college.  All my finals are either in the form of essays or final presentations, so I could hypothetically fly home the weekend of May 3rd and finish my research paper at home.  I decided to stay a bit longer, though, for reasons that will be discussed in-depth in my next blog.  I’m hoping to be more productive in writing my paper here than at home, perhaps finish up some video projects, and maybe relax a bit before heading home for a week or so break before flying back to DC to meet with all the other participants in my summer program in Oman.  Things are happening very fast and at times it’s been absolutely insane to think of what I’ve done this past year, but that, again, is for my next blog.

I will also reveal why the videographers put a camera on a tripod on a table during Spring Fair.

 

During SOHOP I had the chance to meet with a lot of perspective students and their parents, and a question I was asked numerous times was what classes freshman take at Hopkins.  Since we don’t have either a core curriculum or a department containing the vast majority of students, this is a question that’s impossible to answer except on an individual basis.

 

First-Year Arabic

This class is a continuation of the class I had last semester, so for an in-depth description you can check out my classes blog for last semester.  Arabic is definitely getting harder as we go along and get away from simplistic vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure, but my perceptions about this class have changed rapidly since I found out that I’ll have to speak nothing but this language for two months this summer.  In the meantime, I’m taking advantage of the language lab to practice and talking with past students from Hopkins who have traveled to Oman.  Here’s the obligatory dubbed Disney song in Arabic!

American animated movie about Greek mythology dubbed in Arabic.  It almost beats the American animated movie about a Chinese legend from my older blog….

Beginning Farsi I

I was a little hesitant about taking two languages concurrently, especially two languages written in a totally different alphabet than English and Spanish, but this class has been an absolute blast,  The twelve or so people in my class (including JHU_Kevin) all talk a lot and we get to carry on conversations in Farsi, eat Perisan sweets, and watch Persian movies.  Our professor is really sweet and always willing to stop class to answer questions about the language.  Coming in knowing the Arabic alphabet was a big help in the beginning of the class, but now at the end of the semester people are pretty much on an even playing field.  It’s also interesting to see Arabic loanwords in Farsi and vice-versa, like when you see Spanish influences on English.  Here’s a video showing one of my favorite movies, The Emperor’s New Groove, dubbed over in Farsi.

Freshman Seminar: US-USSR Cold War

I wanted to take full advantage of the Freshman Seminars offered at Hopkins, so this is my second and last one.  When I first signed up for the class I thought it was going to be a basic class about the history or politics of the Cold War, but this class has been very interesting in that we’re much more focused on the cultural aspects of the Cold War, like movies, books, newspaper articles, etc.  We’ve watched spy movies like From Russia with Love and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, we’ve read books examining the role of Holywood in American pop culture, and we’ve listened to Russian protest songs.  The class has been totally unexpected, but it’s been fascinating seeing the Cold War in this light.  Everyone in the class can also pretend to be super hipster by saying things like, “Well I find the American remake of Solaris to be severely lacking.”   Here’s a clip from the 1979 BBC miniseries based of John Le Carre’s novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. 

Zionism, post-Zionism, and Modern Hebrew Literature

I signed up for this class because one of my friends took a class with the same professor in the fall and absolutely loved it.  This class has been very useful in giving me a different perspective on Middle Eastern politics as seen through various works of Hebrew literature.  I’ve always had a soft spot for Hebrew poetry since having to give a presentation on Yehuda Amachai my sophomore year of high school, and we’ve been able to look at politics through some great works (including a vampire story!)  This class also has an abundance of guest lecturers coming to speak to our class, which has been a great experience because it’s allowed me to hear a lot of interesting lectures on modern Israel.  Some of the guest lecturers have come in to talk about the politics of creating the modern Hebrew language and the shifting meaning of the binding of Isaac in Israeli politics.

Comparative Sociology of Religious Fundamentalism

This is hands-down the absolute hardest class I’ve taken in my life, and it’s also been the class I’ve learned the most in.  I’m the only freshman in this upper-level class, and one of the few non-Sociology majors.  The class can be daunting at times: our professor assigns hundres of pages of reading a week and encourages us to look at even more perspectives outside the required reading, and I have a 25 page research paper due at the end of the semester.  Even if the amount of work is scary at times, I’ve learned so much about various fundamentalist movements around the world.  Although some fundamentalist groups, like Al-Qaeda, are very well known, there have been so many others we’ve studied over the semester by having a new “case study” every week.  So far we’ve studied  Israeli fundamentalist groups, Indian fundamentalists, the Pakistani Jamiat-i-Islami, the Muslim Brotherhood, American Protestant fundamentalists, and so many others.  I’ve been able to do extensive research for a research paper in the class, and 7,000 pages of reading later (I counted) I finally settled on writing a paper on the influence of Pan-Arab Movements on the Second Sudanese Civil War.

The semester  has gone by so fast.  It’s definitely felt more overwhelming than my first semester, but I mean overwhelming in the best possible sense of the word.  I’ve had to many amazing opportunities this semester and have lined up incredible opportunities in the future, and as my freshman year winds down I’ve begun to realize that several goals I had in mind when I came to college have already been achieved, while I’ve added goals that I never even knew existed before this year.

Viva Las Misconceptions

Posted by | Posted on April 7, 2012
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“I’ve been writing this story for about two years now, and this is my first trip to Las Vegas,” the author explained, as our English teacher passed out thick packets of paper to each of us.  “I was so shocked at the stuff you guys had here!  Your school has a church in it!”

“It’s a Catholic school.”  Everyone smirked.

“It was just so weird, seeing a church in Las Vegas!”  The author smiled.  “Now kids, I want you to read the story so I know I’m on the right track.  It’s about a kid just like you from Las Vegas whose dad is an Elvis impersonator and who goes to school on the Strip!  I want you to tell me if what I think Vegas is all about is true, and don’t go easy on me!”

With dread filling our little high school freshman hearts, my classmates and I began to read.

 

Going to a Catholic school in Las Vegas is like being Italian and using pasta sauce from a jar in that it’s weird and sooner or later someone’s going to ask you about it.  Even taking out the confusion about churches existing in a place called Sin City, growing up in Las Vegas is going to get you some weird questions from outsiders.  I had people literally freak out the first few weeks of school when I introduced myself to them, with reactions ranging from “Do you even own a coat?” to “I bet you party ALL THE TIME!”

“Stereotypes, man,” sighed my best friend from her dorm room in California via Skype.  ”Only Vegas people get Vegas.”

When I went home over winter break I noticed something odd happening when people would ask me where I went to school.  Going to Johns Hopkins is is like being Italian and using pasta sauce from a jar in that very few people do so (the last few years have only let in about four kids a year.)  People back home literally freak out when they find out where I’m going to college, with reactions ranging from “What kind of doctor do you want to be?” to “Don’t you feel unsafe in Baltimore?”

“Hopkins just has this reputation,” sighed my roommate (or, rather, she texted me and I read it in my head as a sigh.)  ”I feel like you have to come here to understand it.”

Then it hit me: Johns Hopkins and Las Vegas both suffer from some massive image problems because the stereotyped image of both places is all most people have in their heads when they hear their names.  If that author my freshman year of high school had decided to write a book about Johns Hopkins without visiting it first, it may have been about a kid just like me who went to Hopkins as a pre-med BME/ChemBE double major and had no life because she spends all her time in the library hiding out from both the roving bands of violent criminals hanging out outside the library doors and from the cutthroat kids inside the library who kept stealing her notes before a test.  And this book, like her book about Vegas, would make everyone furious because those stereotypes are not what these places are in the slightest.  

 

Career Field Stereotypes

 

In Vegas Everyone Works in a Casino and At Hopkins Everyone is Pre-Med 

They didn't have an Elvis costume small enough for me, so I was unable to staff this stand of Hangover merchandise. This failure will haunt me throughout my life.

Vegas truth: Okay, my best friend’s parents are blackjack dealers and my dad provides food to most of the restaurants in the casinos.  I’m not going to argue that no one works in a casino, but there are plenty of other career paths you can take in Vegas.  My friends’ parents have the usual assortment of doctors, teachers, lawyers, television weathermen, and government workers that every other city needs to function. One of my classmates had parents who worked for -get ready for it – the water authority.   Hardcore, right? Clearly The Hangover was an accurate portrayal of my hometown.

Hopkins truth: There are pre-meds (in fact I’m living with three of them next year), but the school is more balanced than people seem to think it is.  International Studies is our largest major on campus, we have a pretty even split between natural science majors, engineering majors, and socials science/humanities majors.  Even if you want to argue that there are a lot of pre-meds, one of the great things about Hopkins is that you can be pre-med and major in anything you want as long as you complete a few pre-med required classes, so I know political science major pre-meds, writing seminars pre-meds, and English pre-meds.  The students here are certainly not one-trick ponies.

Lifestyle Stereotypes

 

In Vegas Everyone Parties All the Time and At  Hopkins Everyone Studies All the Time and Is Mean

Vegas Truth

My friends and I going wild on New Years Eve...by playing Super Smash Brothers.

If you’re from New York, do you visit the Empire State Building all the time?  If you’re from D.C., do you go to the Library of Congress all the time?  If you’re from California, do you go to the beach all the time?  I suppose there is a small portion of Las Vegans (pronounced veh-GAHNS, not VEE-gahns like that diet where you’re nicer to animals than I can ever hope to be) who party it up nightly, but the majority of us are worried about other things (paying mortgagees, keeping jobs, keeping our grades up) that almost make us seem, you know, normal.   If you are a Vegas kid, you are forever considered the “party kid”, even if your craziest moment was not properly ejecting a flash drive from your computer, because when people think “Las Vegas” they think of The Hangover and New Years Eve and bachelor parties and all the insanity that go with them, but most people going crazy in Vegas are not the locals.

Hopkins Truth

No one’s going to look at a resume and go, “Hopkins?  What a joke school!”  People get that Hopkins is challenging and that’s why we have such a good reputation.  Like the small portion of Las Vegans who party it up every night, there is a portion of kids at Hopkins that will live in the library, but the majority of us are doing other things because we realize that a GPA is only one part of what college is about.  Kids here are some of the most active extracurricular participants that I know, doing stuff like hosting a Model UN conference for 1,600 high school students or participating in the performing arts, because they’ve realized that students cannot live on classwork alone.

Persian candy being modeled by our resident beauty JHU_Kevin.

There’s an entire community here filled with kids that do amazing things outside the classroom.  About 25% of students are a part of Greek Life, so there are definitely parties here, (that are also open to non-Greek students) and most clubs or teams will have their own get-togethers.  As for meanness, I’ve seen time and time again more collaboration here than I did at my high school.  Everyone realizes that you’re not going to get any better grade by hurting the person next to you in class, and it’s much more productive to work together so you both succeed.  Professors, too, care a lot about their students.  My Persian teacher brought us Iranian cookies and deserts for class one day because he thought we were doing such a good job!

City Stereotypes

 

 Las Vegans Live in Casinos and Hopkins Students Live in a Slum

Vegas Truth

The road leading to my house. Note the lack of both casinos and Elvis Impersonators.

I live about 15 minutes from the Strip and five minutes from a casino, (fun Vegas tidbit: even though most casinos are in a certain area, there are also casinos spread throughout the Valley) but you wouldn’t know it from the quiet suburban neighborhood.  I pay more attention to the gorgeous mountains you can see from my window than the casinos, and the only time I realize how close I am is on New Years Eve and the Fourth of July when all the hotels and casinos have massive fireworks shows that I get to watch from my friend’s balcony.  Vegas is largely suburban outside the very touristy Strip, but we also have gorgeous desert and mountains surrounding us with a ton of parks to go hiking in (one of these parks also contains Mojave Max, a desert tortoise who performs a similar function to Punxsutawney Phil in that he comes out of his home to tell us if winter is over.)  We also the largest man-made lake in the Western Hemisphere, Lake Mead, that was created when the Hoover Dam was built during the Great Depression.  A ton of people take their boats out on weekends.  A lot of people barely even go to the Strip because there’s so much other stuff to do.

Hopkins Truth

JHU_Joseph, JHU_Erica, and JHU_Ian are lying on the ground, victims of...laughter.

If I had a dollar for every time someone told me I was going to get shot in Baltimore, I would be richer than Hopkins alum Michael Bloomberg.  A big reason for this stereotype of Baltimore being a dangerous city comes from the fact that The Wire was such a successful show that focused on the seedier aspects of Baltimore (in the way that CSI: Las Vegas gives people a picture of Vegas that focuses on its seedier aspects.)  I’m not going to suggest that you walk around ten blocks off campus talking loudly on your iPhone and carrying your MacBook, but this advice applies to every college that isn’t in a rural area.  Baltimore is a city, and like every city there are nice areas and not so nice areas, but the area around Hopkins is extremely safe.  We have a ton of security (led by a former Secret Service agent) keeping an eye on the students, and in my first year I’ve never had a time where I felt unsafe (or perhaps the criminals were scared off by my imposing 5 foot nothing frame.)  Greater Baltimore also has a ton of things to do, and I thank my involvement as a videographer for Learn More, See More, B’More for allowing me to see a lot of Baltimore as a freshman.

Weather Stereotypes

It’s Always Hot in Vegas and It’s Always Miserably Cold in Baltimore 

 Vegas Truth

This happened.

It’s not always hot.  I wore jeans, boots, and a turtleneck sweater to take an AP exam last year-in May.  The arid climate (humidity is still a strange concept to me) means it can go from pleasantly warm to freezing with winds up to 40 mph in a few hours. It also gets very cold here in the winter, and the greatest thing is that any snowfall at all results in an automatic snow day because no one owns snow shovels in a desert!  Shaking snow off a palm tree is something I was able to cross off my bucket list last year.  When it’s hot, I won’t lie, it is hot, (after going up to Dartmouth in -14 degree weather for a debate tournament in January I was able to brag that I had experienced 134 degrees of temperature fluctuation throughout my life) but, as the locals say, it’s a dry heat.

Hopkins Truth

Hopkins covered by....invisible snow I guess? I was told there would be snow and was lied to.

It’s been warmer here than in Las Vegas for a significant number of days.  My parents were taking cover from hail back home when I was walking around in a tank top and skirt this February.  I think it’s legitimately snowed once in Baltimore this year, which is a far cry from the weather I was expecting when I lugged a parka and a brand-new pair of snow boots to Hopkins in August.  A lot of kids I know, and this applies mainly to West-Coasters, worry that the weather on the East Coast will be terrible, but this year has been a lot better than I thought.

 

Reading the story of an Elvis impersonator’s son taught me a valuable lesson about stereotypes: they doggedly exist, no matter how hard you try to kill them and no matter how false they may be.  Little did I know back then that I would eventually be going to a school full of stereotypes like everyone going to medical school, stealing each other’s notes from the library, and generally being filled with misery.  Like the stereotypes of my own home town, I’ve found these all to be totally exaggerated or just flat out wrong, but the only way you’re going to find out for yourself is if you come out to visit.  You’ll have to plan your Vegas trip yourself, but for admitted students SOHOP is right around the corner and a great way to see for yourself what Hopkins is all about!

 

 

 

Featured image is not my picture (it belongs to Wikipedia user Lasvegaslover) and can be found at this page.  

Why Hopkins? So You Don’t Lose Your Dinosaur

Posted by | Posted on April 1, 2012
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I have always loved dinosaurs.  The first movie I ever saw was Jurassic Park, my little 5-month-old self giggling in a drive through while the people around me screamed when the T-Rex appeared onscreen and ate people.  As I got older, I’d head out to the dirt on my backyard as we were putting a pool in, and start digging for fossils.  I knew I wanted to be a velociraptor when I grew up, but then I found out that might not be possible so I decided to be a paleontologist, except when I turned eleven and wanted to be a wizard, when I turned fourteen and wanted to be a lawyer, and when I turned seventeen and wanted to be an infectious disease doctor specializing in counter-bioterrorism (out of these career fields, I’m forced to say that a velociraptor is one of the least ridiculous ones.)   The comedy Step Brothers came out, in which the father of one of the brothers gives a speech about growing up and being told to leave his childhood dream of becoming a dinosaur behind in pursuit of a supposedly more practical medical degree, mistakenly thinking he will have time to pursue his real dream of being a dinosaur later on.   He concludes by telling his son and stepson that he regrets favoring the safety and security of a medical degree over his true passion of being a dinosaur and tells them, “Don’t lose your dinosaur.”

Also, the dad in the movie went to Johns Hopkins. Credit for picture goes to http://www.ugo.com/movies/dinosaur-man

 

As my freshman year comes to a close, I feel as if this past year has been spent in rediscovery of my “dinosaur”, my passion, what makes me happy.  My senior year in high school was spent in seven AP classes, three of them science or math, because people left and right were telling me that the sciences and quantitative fields were one of the few chances left to get a decent job, that no one was going to hire an international relations major.  When I’d finally had enough of problem sets and thermochemistry and announced that I was going to focus on political science and international relations, a surprising number of my classmates acted as if I’d just announced that my life goal was to become a velociraptor.  ”Good luck getting a job.  At least I’ll be employed,” sneered a soon-to-be engineer (perhaps he was a little miffed that I was going to a school with an excellent engineering program?)  When I arrived at Hopkins I was terrified that I was going to waste all the opportunities I’d been given by being admitted and that this summer, like so many of my high school classmates graduating in the years before me, I’d be packing my bags to head back to Vegas and fight for a minimum-wage job for the summer after a grueling first year.  I was scared that I was going to have to make the choice between being a dinosaur and being a doctor, that I was going to have to pick between happiness and success, that there was going to be absolutely no way that I’d get to do what I wanted to do.

I think a lot of kids have this problem, especially if they go to very good schools.  There’s always the double thought of “Will I be able to handle this?” and “Should I want to handle this or should I do something else?”  I’m not going to lie, there is a definite opportunity cost (hey economics!) to going to a school like Hopkins.  You’re going to spend four years, maybe even five if you do a combined bachelor’s and master’s degree program, here and you want to make sure that this is the best possible way you can spend those years of your life.  It’s a tough place.  Can you handle Hopkins?  Should you handle Hopkins?

The answer to both is yes.

Me this summer with my Arabic alphabet book....

My friends and I came to the school much the same way you probably feel right now.  Many times my roommate has turned to me and remarked, “How did they let us into a place like this?”  She’s had a role in every major theatre production on campus this year and found that her love for neuroscience was worth more to her than staying in what people told her was her comfort zone.  Another friend started out the year as a Writing Seminars major and found that she wanted to go back to something she’d started in high school: computer science.  She’s doing two separate paid internships this summer.  As a freshman.   My friends and I didn’t have to worry about having to take general education classes in areas we weren’t interested in, but hit the ground running first semester with classes that truly interested us.

....and almost a year later with my Arabic and Persian books.

My entire first semester was filled with classes in Arabic, international relations, theories of international relations, world history.  Our second semesters have become even more specialized.  I’m currently hard at work on a research paper comparing the roles of Islamic Fundamentalism on the civil wars in Sudan and Afghanistan, taking Arabic and Persian concurrently, and discussing Palestinian-Israeli relations in a class about modern Israeli politics.

Certainly, there have been moments where I have been told that taking Arabic will ruin my GPA, that I’m wasting my time doing what I’m doing now instead of focusing on Latin America/China/whatever, that I should “get out more” and party a bit harder, but at the end of it all, I’ve definitely spent a year discovering what I want to do, rather than what I’m told to do.

“Freedom” in high school generally started when you got your license and a car and you had control over what you did on the way to and from school, and possibly on the weekends.  Now, in college, every single thing you do in the course of a day is up to you.  Sleep in, join a club, wake up at five in the morning, make a tower of doughnuts, prank your suitemates-the choice is utterly yours.  This choice makes it easier for you to figure out exactly what your “dinosaur” is and what makes you happy-passing organic chemistry, learning to turn a cartwheel, learning all the legends of your school so you can be a tour guide, or making the mock trial team.  Whatever your dream is, you have the ability to make the choices to make it come true at Hopkins.  And if you come here willing to work and willing to grow, you’re going to find yourself, as I did, not having to make the choice that the father in Step Brothers did.  You don’t have to give up your dinosaur.  Maybe your dinosaur will change.  Maybe you’ll come in wanting to go to medical school but later find that you’re considering law school.  The fantastic thing about this school is that there are no “good” programs and “bad” programs.  The overall excellence of education means that even if your dinosaur changes, you can still hold onto it without sacrificing your education.

I’m going to spend my summer in Salalah, Oman with the State Department this summer learning Arabic, one of the few freshman in the country chosen for this Arabic program for which graduate students make up 35% of acceptances. In taking this program I’ve had to turn down positions with district attorneys and the Democratic National Convention.   I’ve stayed up until five in the morning watching all of Archer with a friend at a mock trial tournament, and I’ve stayed up until five in the morning writing a paper on the tyranny of oil and its impacts on Iran and Saudi Arabia.  I’ve visited every major city on East Coast except Boston, and I’ve traveled around Baltimore with the cast of Learn More, See More, B’More.  I’ve debated in a tournament if God should abolish Heaven and Hell, and I’ve been asked to analyze the comparative sociology of religious fundamentalist groups like the Taliban and American far-right Protestant groups.  I’ve walked through the third floor of an admissions office filled with acceptance envelopes and rejection letters, and I’ve strolled into the library to pick up books from the top graduate school in international relations in the entire world.

 

And I’ve held onto my dinosaur through it all.

 

Me holding onto a physical, not metaphorical dinosaur last summer....

Me holding onto the physical dinosaur, now named Josiah Barlett, in my dorm room.

A Partial Vocab List

Posted by | Posted on March 17, 2012
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“When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.”

- James Earl Jones

After a semester and a half of college I’ve realized that the type of work you have largely depends on the type of classes you take.  My friends in the natural sciences tend to have more lab write-ups to do, my engineering friends have problem sets, my humanities friends have more essays.  I find myself in a strange position when it comes to the type of work I do outside of class: I’m taking a lot of social science classes that require essays on things like the differences between Iran and Saudi Arabia’s fundamentalist movements, but I’m also taking Arabic and Persian this semester.  My Arabic and Persian classes give me a lot of vocabulary words to learn each week, words like student (for Persian دانشجو (daneshju) , for Arabic  طالب (tawlib)), library, (مكتبة(maktaba) کتابخانه (keetabkhane)) and professor (استاد(oostad), أستاذ (oostadh)).  Much of my work for these classes is learning new vocabulary words every week, then one day it hit me: wasn’t I also learning new vocabulary words everywhere, not just in these two classes?  What if I made a vocabulary list for my semester like I made every week in Arabic and Persian?

Second Semester Vocab List 

Caesaropapism - From my Comparative Sociology of Religious Fundamentalism class.  It’s the idea of combining the power of secular government with the religious power, or making it superior to, the spiritual authority of the Church; especially concerning the connection of the Church with government.  This is one of those words like “Mogadishu Line” and epistemological that you need to have in your arsenal to throw out during arguments.

SMERSH- Russian acronym for “death to spies”. The counterintelligence agency founded by Joseph Stalin primarily to test the loyalty of the Red army during WWII, but probably most remembered as the Soviet counterintelligence agency in the James Bond books.  In my Cold War class we had to read From Russia with Love and watch the movie.  The video is a fan made trailer for the movie version.

مجنون(majnoon) -- Arabic for crazy.  This is probably one of my favorite words in Arabic because it sounds like something my Italian mother would yell at me when I was younger and I poured an entire container of baby powder all over my room because I wanted to play in snow.  It’s just a very fun word to say and can be used in many different situations.  Below is the screen of a computer in the Language Lab that I use to help me with vocab.  It is quite majnoon that one of the vocab words is “hovercraft”.

צבר (sabra)/صبار (subbar) -- Hebrew and Arabic for cactus.  While I confess to liking cacti, the word has a deeper meaning: according to my Modern Hebrew Literature class it’s used to describe a Jewish person born in Israel.  Apparently the qualities of the cactus like sturdiness, the ability to survive in tough conditions, and a soft inside were supposed to be the ideal qualities of the people of the new nation of Israel.  I’d really like to extend this definition to include anyone who grew up in a desert, primarily because I’d really like to refer to myself as a cactus and see peoples’ reactions.

Fun fact: I have killed a cactus that was in my care by watering it too much.

 

бард (bardt)-Russian for bard.  In my freshman seminar on the Cold War we learned that many singers and songwriters expressed their dissatisfaction with the Soviet government by writing songs, called “political songs”.  These singers and songwriters were called bards and they were sometimes sent away to camps, but sometimes gained great underground popularity and after the fall of the Berlin Wall became very successful musicians.  This clip is from a bard named Galich and the song is called “Silence is Golden”.  It attacks the current culture of the Soviet Union for admiring people who don’t speak out against the government and gain wealth by keeping quiet.

That’s it for this blog.  I just recently found out that I’ll be putting my Arabic vocabulary skills (or lack thereof) to use this summer during a State Department program in the Middle East!  I don’t know where I’ll be sent, but for now I’m spending Spring Break back home in Vegas with my family and looking forward to a week without due dates for work!

Best in Baltimore: Architecture

Posted by | Posted on February 26, 2012
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As I was flipping through the photos on my iPhone en route to New Jersey this weekend for yet another debate tournament, I noticed something odd about the pictures I had taken from all my trips this year: there were a lot that focused on architecture.  Over half of the pictures I’d taken in Philadelphia, Hannover, and New York City focused on buildings and not on people.  I suddenly realized that I sort of liked architecture, a realization that was confirmed as Pavlos, my debate partner, and I got hopelessly lost on the Princeton campus about four times and we started talking about the many examples of Gothic architecture present at that school as we wandered around aimlessly.  When I got back home on Saturday night, I thought to myself, “Have I ever actually taken a look at the architecture of my own town?  There have to be some pretty cool looking places, right?”

After combing through my pictures of Baltimore, I came to a conclusion: Hopkins’ Homewood campus has some of the best architecture in Baltimore, and this video should definitely show that.

 

 

Motion to Hold a Dance Party: Tales from JHUMUNC

Posted by | Posted on February 13, 2012
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I’ve just spent the entire weekend running on seven hours of sleep, spent $25 on coffee, and watched Israel and the Vatican argue about witchcraft.  What madness have JHU_Ian and I gotten ourselves into now?  JHUMUNC!

Closing ceremonies for the conference.

JHUMUNC is a student group whose sole purpose is to put on a Model United Nations conference for high school students around the world.  The group rents out an entire hotel in the Inner Harbor and creates special committees to focus debate on certain issues, just like the real United Nations.  Some of these committees, like the Human Rights Council, exist in the real United Nations, but JHUMUNC mixes things up a bit by having a bunch of interesting committees that aren’t currently part of the United Nations, like a Soviet Bloc committee during the Cold War, a committee based on the Roman Senate, and a committee based on the Peloponesian War.

Kithmina in the role of a lifetime.

We also had a lot of fun making current United Nations committees, such as the International Criminal Court, relevent to high school delegates during the conference.  The ICC in our conference posthumously tried ex-Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi by having Hopkins students act out parts as witnesses in a trial, with one of my debate partners, Kithmina, testifying as Gaddafi himself.

One of the coolest parts about the conference was meeting all the delegates.  My high school didn’t have a Model United Nations team, but I wish it did because it would have allowed me to meet people as cool as this sooner!  My committee was focused on human rights challenges that could exist in the year 2030, and we focused on two specific topics: the effect of genetic alteration of humans on human rights, and the effect of climate change on human rights.  Our delegates all represented a different country, and while Israel and the Holy See hotly debated religious issues when it came to altering the human genome, the delegation from Ecuador ultimately won an award for her performance during the committee sessions.  Some of the delegates even brought the people running the conference presents, like a school from Qatar that gave one of the heads of my committee a Middle Eastern comic book that can be summed up as a sort of Arabic X-Men comic teaching toleration.  It’s even received a shout-out from the President.  

 

The other cool thing about JHUMUNC is its location.

The view from my hotel room.

We rent out an entire hotel in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, which is a great place to hang out.  I hadn’t been there since Orientation this past August, so my friend Emily and I used some of our downtime between committee sessions to explore Little Italy and get some killer pasta.  Some of our delegates also went on trips to the National Aquarium and loved it, and the conference has a tradition of a committee lunch where Hopkins students take delegates to a unique restaurant in the Inner Harbor for lunch.  Some of my friends took delegates to Irish restaurants, some to a delicious place called Miss Shirley’s, and some to one of the most delicious places of all: Five Guys’.

All in all it was a fantastically exhausting way to spend a weekend.  I can’t help but think that many more of our world’s problems could be solved if the delegation from China motioned for a dance party in the Security Council and the Russian Federation motioned to make paper crowns for all delegates

 

Semester Obsession: Travel

Posted by | Posted on January 29, 2012
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“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine

With Intersession wrapping up, internship applications piling up, and my age going up, (my nineteenth birthday was this past Wednesday) I’m in an oddly reflective mood.  In two days I’ll be a second semester freshman.  I don’t really know what to think of that except to look back on my last semester and try to find something defining about it.  Yes there were friends and classes and video shoots and trials and debate rounds, but as I thought about it more carefully a common denominator appeared in everything I did last semester that made that time so memorable: I traveled more than I’ve ever traveled before, being on campus perhaps five weekends since Orientation. With that thought in mind, I pulled up my iPhoto and tried to find pictures of all the places I’d been with my friends and teammates, all the crazy bus rides with Mock Trial, flying up to Dartmouth in a plane with propellers for debate, driving over to Hamden in a zip car with the cast and crew of Learn More, See More, B’More.  If not traveling means that I only read one page of a book, consider this blog proof that I’ve done substancial reading these past few months.

Trip One: Appalachian Trail (Pre-Orientation Trip)

Trip Two: Baltimore Inner Harbor (Orientation Trip)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trip Three: College of William and Mary (Debate Tournament)

Trip Four: Hamden (Learn More, See More, B’More shoot)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trip Five: Washington, D.C (for fun)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trip Six: Penn State (Mock Trial tournament)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trip Seven: American University (debate tournament)

What our international students thought the layout of America was. The Americans' map of Europe is too shameful to post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trip Eight: University of Pennsylvania (mock trial tournament)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trip Nine: Bethesda, MD (staying with my friend Emily for Thanksgiving.  Also I really like cupcakes.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trip Ten: Back home to Las Vegas (for Christmas!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trip Eleven: Dartmouth (debate tournament)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trip Twelve: NYC (mock trial tournament.  I stayed with my friend at Columbia while the competition was at Fordham.)

Semester Obsession: Pretending I’m Steven Spielberg

Posted by | Posted on January 15, 2012
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The second weekend of college, I dragged heavy camera equipment through the neighborhoods of Mt. Vernon, Hamden, and Towson.  One of my coworkers saw me with a tripod bigger than me, handed me a still camera, and said, “Play around with the camera and have fun.”

I’m happy to say I’ve taken that advice this semester.

If I had to list every single thing I’ve become obsessed with this semester, this blog would crash our servers.  FFC cookies, proper pronunciation of the world nuclear, Downton Abbey, and mochas were some of the new things  I became obsessed with, but nothing has seemed to make me stay up late and work long hours more than the art of video and still photos.  I’d never had a real camera before coming to college, and  in my high school broadcast media class I’d never had absolute freedom to make the videos that I wanted to make.  Certainly when I graduated I didn’t expect to continue with any sort of work behind a camera or in an editing room.  I was an international studies major, and I was going to have to give up my little hobby of videography until I noticed a post in the 2015 class Facebook page asking for someone with videography experience to send in a portfolio of work and interview for a job with the Admissions Office.  I knew I needed to work first semester, so I applied, and three days after I started college I had a job as a videographer/editor.

So what do I do? It’s sort of a complicated answer.  I shoot video, I take pictures, I edit video, and as of this Intersession I can create digital motion graphics.

Pictures are the easiest to explain.

He haunts Keyser Quad nightly.

 

 

If anyone has seen me at a school event, I’m usually running around with a camera.  This sometimes has hilarious results, like Ghost JHU_Ian over here (caused by a problem with the shutter speed on the camera I was using, so the shot was exposed for such a long time that the shot both saw Ian in the frame and emptiness when Ian was not in the frame, hence his ghostly appearance.)

 

I also end up using photoshop a lot.  I haven’t gotten to the point where I can edit out a Photobomber or airbrush JHU_Noah’s face so that he looks less like a Greek god and we don’t feel bad about our own appearance by comparison.  This is really useful for when you have pictures that didn’t come out quite as light/bright/colorful as you’d like, and it ends up looking pretty cool by the end of it, like this picture of JHU_Lucie and JHU_Noah in Hamden (incidentally, this picture was taken on my first official day of work.)

 

Video’s where it gets a bit trickier.  For those who take video, you know that just hitting the record button doesn’t mean your job is done.  Making a full video requires a ton of separate shots, sometimes hundres, combined using audio and transitions in a way that makes it look like you planned to use those shots all along with exactly that piece of music.  When I’m not out filming, much of my time is spent piecing together longer videos from shorter clips of videos in a program called Final Cut Pro.  Every single video that comes out of our office, and in reality a lot of the movies and television shows you watch, all start out in this program looking something like this:

When you see the finished product, it’s hard to visualize all those boxes and lines and cross fades that made the video more than just a series of clips.  This is the amount of sheer stuff that a relatively short two minute video takes.  Now imagine editing a movie like The Social Network on this program.

There’s more to my job than just pure video editing.  I’m working this entire Intersession on learning a program called Adobe After Effects.  Essentially this program specializes in something called digital motion graphics, which is just a really fancy way of saying that this program lets you create graphics and then give the viewer the impression that there is a camera moving while focused on these graphics, when in reality this “camera” doesn’t exist at all and it’s just a very clever computer trick.  This program is used to make a lot of title sequences for movies and television, and I’ve seen examples of people making everything from fully animated magic books to the beginning of Tron Legacy to the title sequence from Inception.  As with Final Cut, it all starts out on a screen like this:

And sometimes you have to use math like this:

We meet again, math!

The final product took about 12 hours to figure out (it was the first project in this program for both my coworker Will and myself) and looks something like this:

 

I guess the simplest way I can describe my love for this is that it’s unlike anything else I do at school.  A lot of my activities are built around rigidity and structure: debate team will always have tournaments on Friday and Saturday, mock trial openings need to be written in such and such a way, essays need to have one inch margins, definitions on tests need to be at least two sentences.  But if you do something with a camera, anything at all, there are no rules.  You can turn a knob and make everything go out of focus and snap a picture that way, or you can upload the file on your computer and alter the color so that everything is green and it’s like you’re looking at some alien planet.  When you go to make a video, there’s no set formula for how to pick what music to use.  There’s no page in a textbook to tell you that you should use that clip of the bluejay giving high-fives to students here, or that clip of your classmates dancing like maniacs at the Blue Jay Ball here.  With my schoolwork, my debate, and my mock trial, I have to play by the rules, but with a camera you make the rules yourself.

People ask me all the time what my job is like.  I usually just say, “Amazing”, but for the sake of this blog I have to go a bit farther than that.  I have amazing coworkers who have turned into awesome friends.  I get to travel all around Baltimore and interact with its people.  I’ve fed a giraffe, stopped in the middle of the road to snap the perfect picture, spent 8 hours learning how to animate a turning page, and never been bored for a moment.  I guess from now on when people ask me what I do for a living, I should probably just use a quote from Mr. Spielberg himself:  ”I dream for a living.”