Author Archives: sv324

Advocacy as Means of Service

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The speaker talked about the emotional subject of social justice in mainly sexual abuse, domestic violence with human services that are offered right here in Ithaca. Laura Rodriguez De Simons works for an advocacy center that deals with these issues and provides some form of social justice. She talked about her path in pursuing her interests that ultimately led into this line of work. She was initially interested in learning how poverty arises as she pursued her degree in economics. After gaining some experience in the field with non-profit organizations, she was able to decide that she wanted to go into advocacy work in relation to poverty as a factor to sexual violence. It is these non-profit organizations that are able to provide the services without financial help. Laura gave the major advice of volunteering in advocacy non-profit organizations to see if the person is actually interested in the work. Especially, with sexual abuse work it is important to see if you can handle the work and be dedicated to it. The organizations love volunteers since they are dedicated to the cause. She suggested that students even work for hot line with domestic violence issues. Laura mentioned that she got a MBA due to its practical use and she uses it everyday when managing a team of 10 advocates as she does in the shelter in Tompkins County for sexual violence advocacy. We also got into an interesting discussion about the opiate problem in Ithaca and it was sad to hear how many clients of the advocacy center are struggling with opiate addiction and shows how big the opiate addiction issue is in Ithaca and Tomkins County.

Research is a Struggle with Great Rewards

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This Rose House Cafe Series was interesting to see how a researcher goes about searching for sources in writing his book. It is obviously not easy to write a book, but I had no idea the exact challenges that went into making one. The speaker’s adventures opened new insights to me about the research process.

I thought it was hard to select one specific topic that the speaker wanted to focus on for the book but how he involved so much history to support his main idea/point. He talked about the history of the regime of the Khmer Rouge and how people under the regime worked on construction and mechanical projects that brought upon great influence and connection to China. I liked how he made that connection in his research and presented that in the book.

It was interesting to listen to his adventure of finding Chinese documents on the projects worked under regime of Khmer Rouge. It was impressive in how he tried to use the documenter center in China but was not allowed access and did not give up and tried the national archives of Cambodia, where he stumbled upon numerous research secrets. It was a great lesson to see that even if one door closes another door opens for a new opportunity. Also, I thought his story showed a great lesson on the Cornell community where the librarians at the national archive actually were trained at Cornell and they helped him to gain access into the archives.

His story also showed the importance of networking where his post-doc student was able to gain him contacts with people who actually worked on some of those projects in the Khmer rouge regime and was able to interview with them. It was great to see how he enjoyed the interviews with the people.

Overall, this talk gave some great insights and lessons in how to pursue research for a book or anything in life in general.

Better Stress Management

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Andrea Gerding and Sarah Rubenstein- Gilis talked about the important topic of how to sense stress and be able to cope with it. Stress is manifested in many ways and differently for different people. Some people said that they experience tightness in the chest, mental breakdowns, and mind racing over many things. I personally get extremely tired when I am stressed. Meditation is a great way to stay in tune with your body. They gave the good advice on how to tackle your work in periodic chunks and that you should give yourself more purposeful breaks. Purposeful breaks are short times of doing another activity that gives you more energy and makes you more motivating. For example, I see Ellen DeGeneres and Jimmy Fallon show clips. For longer breaks, I love to go to the gym. Seeing Facebook over the breaks actually depresses the mood for people and people tend to watch Facebook longer in losing track of time. There were some interesting tips that were given to understand how to have better sleep. Typically a person needs 9 hours while most students get much less than that. Sleep helps with emotional management and cognitive function and in fact tissue healing occurs in the seventh hour. That is critical to get for people who worked out excessively the day before. They touched on the exercise aspect a lot, which deals with me since I have made it a habit to go to the gym every weekday in the morning. Some nights I have to go to the gym since I could not make it in that morning and sometimes it helps me sleep and other times it keeps me awake. The primary way I motivate myself to exercise is that I keep my exercise clothes outside for me to see when I wake up to remind myself to go right away. Lastly, I liked how Andrea and Sarah ended with meditation. A lot of times meditation is unclear exactly what needs to be done. The key problem with me is that I tend to sleep when I start to meditate where as proper meditation actually requires you to be mentally active. Overall, I found this talk extremely helpful to understand my sleeping patterns and my mental health to help me improve my ways.

Coaching Tennis

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Coach Tanasoiu shared some incredible insights into the lives of student athletes. Being friends with some student athletes on campus, I got to understand their lives better with the Coach’s talk about particularly tennis team. He first emphasized about how time management is crucial when you have to practice for hour in the early morning before class, attend class, and do another 3-hour practice in the afternoon in middle of all the studying that needs to get done. His reminder to the team about how privileged they are for representing the university motivates the team to always be focused on the team expectations. A great piece of advice that he tells his team is that adversity is your best friend, which is so true in that your obstacles in life whether it is competing among teammates for playing positions or interviewing for jobs is what pushes you to perform at your best level. Moving stories that he shared about his personal life dealt with the importance of relationships in particular the support of parents and coach. In his life, his parents sold a car to make sure he got the opportunity to fly from his town in Romania to Miami for the Orange Bowl competition. He was extremely grateful for all the help of his various coaches in taking care of him throughout his path all the way to now Men’s Varsity tennis coach at Cornell. The recruiting focuses on these relationships when trying to help the player make a decision between multiple university offers. He talked about how they are recruiting one of the best Russian tennis players next year because they had talked to not only to the father, sister, and coach but they also included the mother, which other universities did not do. Coach Tanasoiu shared the interesting aspects of recruiting. When they look for players for the team, they make sure he has great work ethic for improving in the sport and has a good academic potential. Since the team is so international, some of the players are on the pathway of heading to possibly play professionally and they feel that college tennis will put them off that path. However, Coach Tanasoiu feels that America is one of the few countries that allow people to further their education and play sport at one of the highest levels. Overall, it was a pleasure hearing Coach Tanasoiu talk.

The Struggles of Undocumented Youth through Imagery

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Esmeralda spoke about her extremely interesting PhD work in the dreamer initiative and undocumented youth. Many of the youth are eager to become educated in the United States and are struggling to get out of the label as undocumented youth. The undocumented youth did not even realize that they were undocumented until they went to seek jobs and waiting for admission to educational institutes. In fact, policies had to blame someone for being the cause of the youth’s immigration and thus place the blame on parents for the immigration. The narrative placed criminalization on the parents when indeed the parents were innocent. Anti-immigrant legislations were being created in the early 2000s. Esmeralda is involved in helping undocumented youth have a voice through her research of literary visualizations. A very interesting image that was shown to us was two road signs. One caution road sign for immigrants was actually kept near an interstate highway in San Diego, which was shocking to me. The sign was depicting a caution for a family running in fear and frantically holding the child. However, the other road sign is more supporting the Dream act where the immigrants are all in cap and gowns showing the immigrants’ mission to educate themselves. Undocumented youth overall are facing discrimination when it comes to filling forms for education and jobs. It is inspiring to see how she does literary research on the word “dreamer” in the message to speak out for undocumented youth in all their benefit to be educated and help the economy of the country. Another interesting image that she delves into to draw a parallel with history and that was an image of the Immigrant rights march in 2006. The image draws similarities between immigrants and the African American experience. Overall, the talk shared an unique perspective on learning about the undocumented youth movement through images and other visualizations.

The Realm of Environmental Humor

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Professor Sachs presented an interesting talk on humor involving environmentalism and how the humor takes on different environmentalists in wide range of issues. The main issue that comedians make satires for is environmentalists’ opinions on climate change. While climate change is a very serious matter to ponder about and enforce us to change our ways, Professor Sachs wonder why environmentalists are the unique group of people that do not like making fun of themselves. Many different types of people do humor in order to support their cause but environmentalists shy away from that. The society seems that they are pushing a lot of unreasonable changes while society is trying to battle different social issues. A humor piece that stuck out for me was the prius ad that had eco-friendly car with spikes. The humor criticizes how environmentalists are expecting drastic changes from the community to better the environment and sometimes these changes are not even considering how human life might change. These types of humor resonate with us as the audience because the comedians are brave enough to voice the message through such a humor display. It is hard for people to make fun of themselves but it can show the community a strong message of advocacy for their cause. Thus, Professor Sachs presents the opinion and trend that environmentalists should accept the challenge in making fun of themselves to better resonate their messages to the bigger group and become accepted by them. It is indeed risky to do comedic approaches to present the environmental issues but currently people are not taking environmentalists seriously to begin with. So, there is nothing wrong for them to try this approach to reach a middle ground with their knowledge about the environment and what people think about the same issues as well. Professor Sachs thus advocates that environmentalists should take a chance and explore the realm of comedy as a way to express the serious issues coming down on Earth.

Melancholy and all its beauty in origin

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Sara presented an extremely insightful presentation of melancholy with showing her exploration into not only its English roots but also its connections to literary pieces. I always treated melancholy as a word used for description but never knew the origins of the word. Melancholy actually means literally black pile and is associated with the season of autumn, since it is cold and dry. This root gives us a feeling that melancholy naturally happens. It brings up the question whether we are just melancholy or not or does melancholy naturally come upon us. I do feel sometimes that even though people might not be affected by melancholy for long periods of time, we are most likely to be affected when autumn and change of seasons occur. We associate melancholy with depression but actually there is a difference that you can see in the roles of the emotion in different disorders like bipolar. Sara offers the side of melancholy to be important in the development of individuality. She delves into Freud’s interesting perspective in which melancholy can be related to love in which we can love and hate something at the same time. When that is gone, we tend to feel guilt and have this attachment to the past that makes us be in melancholy. This type of melancholy is beautifully displayed in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie ‘Vertigo’, which from the scenes showed to us seems like it is a great movie that I might be interested in seeing. The scenes that were shown to us was setting the incident that melancholy can be associated with remembering the past in an almost beautiful way. This beauty with melancholy was especially seen when the detective is observing Madeline in the museum as she has her hair twirled into a simple spiral fashion and bouquet of roses. Overall, Sara’s presentation was incredibly insightful and changed my perspective on melancholy.

Ithaca and its Developments

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  • Living as a student on Cornell Campus, I seem to live in a bubble and know actually little about the population and the locations in Ithaca. Lisa Nicholas provided great and informative to learn more about the city we live in. It was incredible to hear that Ithaca is an employment hub and in fact people travel to Ithaca for their work. Ithaca is developing now and in fact are working towards a more diverse housing. Most are still student housing but we are working towards more affordable and manageable housing. It was interesting to learn that even though Ithaca is a small city and more spacious in the country type area, more younger students are living in the urban areas. Thus, they do not have cars and the car ownership decreases with the younger population. The improvement in aesthetics of Ithaca commons was shown and in fact brought the memories of my summer when the construction was going on. The commons indeed has a rich culture for Ithaca where many different types of people, including the residential citizens and students, enjoy the many activities that Ithaca had to offer. She shared with us an upbeat music event that showed the diverse population of Ithaca that attended it and the overall sense of community in the city. A very exciting news that has made Ithaca buzzing is the construction of a new boutique Hilton hotel in the downtown Ithaca. It is amazing that Ithaca is now having so many popular chains of hotels and indeed shows Ithaca as a more visited destination for many people. However, the people are a little concerned about how the hotel will fit and change the feeling of downtown in that they hope it will not change to like the lifelessness in downtown Atlanta. At the same time, the boutique hotel will fit in more with the quaint, small-town environment vibe around downtown Ithaca. The fitting of a new building is important to the acceptance of a construction project and thus people did not like the 11-story housing due to its imposing style in the massive area it would accommodate. Also, I had no idea about the Waterfront Trail and Lisa gave me an idea to go for a bike ride or walk there. Overall, the talk was very engaging and helpful in learning more about Ithaca and how beautifully it is developing.

The Political Economy over time in Africa

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Professor Walle shared his story and discoveries of political economy trends of development for Africa. Africa is a continent that displays a unique financial history and track that we are not fully aware about. The countries such as Nigeria were once rich with agricultural resources and oils and this lead to them being colonized for exploitation. However, even after being independent, these countries were still not developing to their potential that they were once were in the beginning primarily because of corruption. Professor Walle noticed mainly that high-level corruption in finances was one of the main forces that put many African countries behind in economic growth. He wanted to delve more into these types of issues and thus was his motivation in investigating the financial trajectory in different countries. Personally, it was amazing for me to hear how he had obtained an economic background from London School of Economics and applied his knowledge in the field working in two countries. He noticed that the Ministry of Health had lost most of its budget most probably due to high-level corruption that was politically motivated since the President would not put the Minister of Health in jail. Thus, Professor Walle believes that democratic styles of government would help to improve the economies of these countries in Africa. Most democracies are economically stronger than their neighboring countries. Very few examples of no democratic governments are economically progressing, such as China and Ethiopia. I found interesting that Ethiopia has many Chinese people because China in the recent two decades have decided to invest a lot in Africa. It is incredible to see that it had grown from one Chinese restaurant to many restaurants. Overall, the talk had provided numerous economic insights that helped me gain a new perspective in political and economic developments.