Author Archives: yy354

The end of this semester and a new semester of Rose

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In this Rose cafe, our house professor dean Garrick Blalock talked about what Rose means to people living in Rose and a farewell talk to him, since he will be leaving next semester.

This is a really touching moment for me to learn about all the thoughts and efforts that professor Blalock and our House assistance dean Jarrett Anthony to make this place a welcomy and warm home to the residents. Especially the efforts that they put into for Rose Scholar program, which is a unique program on west only for Flora Rose. Comparing to the active citizen programs which my friends are doing in other residence halls, I find Rose Scholar program is great in that it can really keep people who like Rose and want to put in the effort to continue to live in Rose, actually get to continue to live here. I think really like this program for that i get to know a lot of different ideas through the coffee chats that I have not foreseen before, and I also made some friends during this process. It was an amazing experience for me to have an hour a week to listen to interesting ideas of people who are experts in the field that I’m not familiar with and their perspectives on things that I ran across everyday.

While enjoying these interesting activities and a good variety of activities every week almost everyday, I think what I’ve overlooked is organizing and planning of the professor, deans and students put into these. For example the professors that were invited to give the talks, the themed talks led by house fellows and the activities we have such as massage, observatory. I’m really grateful for the amount of work and thoughts that our professor Blalock and dean Anthony put into this to make this such a rewarding experience to us, and after each activities, I really felt my time were well-spent.

Since this is my last rose scholar post this semester, I really want to thank our amazing professor dean Blalock for the caring of students living in Rose, the great amount of work to make Rose House a supportive home for the residents and the insightful ideas that he shared with us in weekly cafe talk. I really think I will miss the thoughtful talks and ideas by professor Blalock, and he has brought such an amazing change to the system of continue occupancy at west, which is the system I would suggest should be applied to other residential halls at west.

Also a lot of thanks to our assistance dean Jarrett, for the weekly email of upcoming activities, and cares and reminder emails to the residents. As a Rose resident, I can feel the cares that the house deans and fellows give to us and the help that they are willing to give, and I ‘m so grateful for all the effort that you put into and I fell really lucky to get to come back to Rose and live here agian next semester. Thank you again for everything and wish all the best for future life!

 

The Power of Language

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The movie Arrival, we watched this Friday is a very interesting science fiction movie about aliens, UFO, but instead of depicting the appearance and personalities of the aliens, it emphasis on their language. The story led by the main character a linguist Louise Banks, who managed to communicate with the aliens learn about their languages and figure out their intentions to earth.

This movie reminds me of the Cognitive Science class that I’m taking right now about how humans learn new languages and the universal language grammar. In this movie, the weapon that the aliens bring to the earth is their language, which could foresee the future and the past. This is a huge power, but yet the ending of the movie Louise realized her sad future if she fall in love with Ian, and have a child with him despite the fact that she know the child’s fate. This is really devastating because she has to follow her fate, and she can’t change it. The timeline explanation has always been a tough problem for this time travel story, because if we change the present how will the future change is always unknown and it’s easy to reach a contradiction for either way of explanation. Luckily, this movie mostly focused on the communication and how the main character unravel the mystery of the language instead of showing how the further story develops after humans have the power of knowing the future. This decision made the audience enjoyed the movie , instaed of picking the logic contradiction within the assumption of the movie.

Therefore, overall this is a very enjoyable movie, and I’m glad that it reminds me of some fun knowledge I learnt from my course.

Interesting knowlege of bike system

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This was really so far the best table talk I’ve been attended!

It was led by our GRF Seema, talking about the bike sharing system in the world. She was very knowledgeable in the city planning, the capital and the history of the bike sharing system, and engaged us in this super interesting conversation. I’m especially interested in this topic because I use bike sharing a lot in the city transporting from subway to school, or for the walk that is too far on foot, yet too close for a car. I never thought about how advertising company would like to fund or start the bike sharing business, which totally makes sense, since they can do advertisement at the bike station and on the bike, and as people riding the bike around the city, so does their advertisement. It’s a business model that is beneficial to everyone, and more sustainable compared to pure funding of the government.

Also, I learnt that the first bike sharing system was in Amsterdam to protest against too many laws in favour of car drivers.

I enjoyed this table talk so much, and I’d love to have more such interesting conversation about business or city planning in the future.

A relaxing moment

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This week I was thrilled to see that we are having the massaging activity, since I enjoyed it so much last semester, and it was such a great experience so I signed up for it immediately. And it was indeed such a wonderful ten minutes experience and it literally made my whole day.

I like being massaged because it reminds me of the tensions I hold every day and the importance of relaxation. When the massagist press my back and my whole body will relax and my breath will go even, and my brain also fells clear. It was a really wonderful moment, and you really think about nothing in the brain but to follow the music and feel the body as water scatter out and floating around. Breathing is important, and normally my breathe is quite shallow, but when i was being massaged I can feel I’m breathing deeper, and sometimes when I was having difficulty falling asleep I will always reminding myself of the massaging feelings to relax.

After the massage, I feel myself as light and energetic as in the morning, and more efficient and focus doing my works and study, which is really surprising and wonderful. It’s so interesting of how much relaxation can bring us focus after. I really like this activity overall!

Lightening up your resume

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I’m really glad that I attended this workshop hosted by our GRF Seema, who is super helpful and patient in telling us how to write a professional CV and resume. As most of the students attending this workshops are sophomores joniors and seniors, we all really need to learn about CV and resume for applying for internships, and building up the skills for applying to jobs after graduation, or applying for graduate school. So this is a very important skill that we should all learn. However, as an arts and sciences students, we don’t feel as prepared in terms of how to write this kind of self-presenting forms in a professional way. I’m so glad that I came to this workshops, which made me realized so many misconceptions that I had and how should I change my resume.

I especially like when she told us in the perspective of how the other side of the table think about reading a resume. Since as job recruiters, they may only spend a few seconds to scan a piece of resume, so to stand out in numerous applicants, we need to know what will the recruiter looking for and what we should put on one piece of paper. We went through the basic components of resume from name , education, experiences, relevant courses, and additional skills, and how should we form and organize the font and avoid too colorful background, and also avoiding confusion to the reader is also important.

I learnt a lot from this workshops and I edited my own resume after this workshop and I really feel it becomes more professional thanks to the help of our GRF Seema!

Life and Believe

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This is my third time watching Forest Gump, and I’m inspired by it everytime I watch it, but this time, I see more of its religious aspect and the message that it tries to send to the audience. The most famous sentence from this movie “Life is like a box of chocolate, you never know what you gonna get”.  If we think about this movie, almost everyone besides Forest Gump planned their future, Jenny wanted to be famous,  his soldier friend planned to have his boat and cook shrimps, his commander Taylor planned to die in the war. However, none of their lives go as they planned, they all came to the destiny that they may never think of, yet the movie tells us this is life. The unpredictability of life is one of the topics in the movie, it recounted some of the US presidents, famous people of that era, yet their lives are also not decided by them.

Forest Gump is the only one in the movie that doesn’t know about his plan his future his destiny, he has his beliefs and he just runs to where life leads him to. I was deeply touched by the legendary life of him and inspired by it when I first watched this movie, but as the third time watching it, I can’t help but started to question this theme. It has its own philosophy and based on the examples that this film tells, they indeed support this philosophy, but they’re so many cases that I can think of that people achieved nothing because they don’t have a long-run goal for their lives. Admittedly, life is versatile and changes all the time, and so does our goals and plans. If we just follow what await for us, then we will never be prepared enough when the chances that we really want come.

Overall, it’s really interesting to watch this film again and see difference perspective that i didn’t see before. I enjoyed this film a lot.

Discussing Law and Justice with Judge Miller

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As a student who spend most of the time on stem subject, I used to think of the world as clear and defined, especially when it comes to law enforcement and sentence. Since there’re written laws, all we need to do is to sentence accordingly. However, this talk with judge Miller changed my former perspective and made me realize that life isn’t just right or wrong, there’s so much in the middle, and when we are making a judgment, we need not only consider the surface and come to a conclusion of right or wrong, because there’re so many other things about them that we don’t know.

Also, as an international student, there’s a lot of the American laws and the citizen’s right that I wasn’t familiar with, so this talk is very educating in telling me about the right that I have. For example, judge Miller mentioned a case that two policemen searched a person walked by just because they smell Majorana on him, despite the fact that he rejected the search. Even though they found it in his jacket that he put aside, this can’t be used as an evidence on the court, because they didn’t have a concrete and supported reason before searching him.

Overall, I found this talk really different from the past talks, partly because judge Miller is our alumni and he has so many interesting stories to share with us. The talk made me start to think about the human aspect in how the court rule the matters, and how the judge comes to a decision. I’m also inspired by the hopes that judge Miller mentioned at the end of this talk, about two main things in the society that are awaiting for our generation to solve, which are education and healthcare.