The Rose Cafe with Sam Beck, a social and cultural anthropologist who is also the Director of the New York City Urban Semester Program, approached the session in a different manner from previous speakers. The topic of the night was advertised to be a discussion of the New York City Urban Semester Program (which, by the way sounds like a pretty cool program), but rather than simply providing a lecture and traditional talk of the program, he sought to engage all the attendees in a more personal way. In fact, he asked each of us to discuss what we were majoring in at Cornell and what our future goals and aspirations are, and then attempted to discuss how the New York City Urban Semester Program could be useful in the context of these academic and career goals. I found this approach to be more enjoyable, as the back-and-forth engagement we had with the speaker allowed us to hear many of Sam’s individual feelings and thoughts regarding a wide array of subjects, and we definitely discovered his wittiness and sense of humor :).

As each student talked about their studies and future goals, Sam offered a lot of feedback and advice that I feel an anthropologist is especially equipped to make. For example, he asked a lot of questions regarding what motivated us and why we were actually pursuing these academic and careers paths, and I think in general, people don’t necessarily spend enough time thinking about such important questions. Thus, for young people such as ourselves, it definitely is especially germane for us to think more critically about our current and future paths!