About Amber Slater

I'm a junior English and Spanish major with a Writing minor. I work in the Writing Center, run cross country, and edit the News section of the McDaniel Free Press. Last semester I studied in Costa Rica, and I'm contantly scheming a new plan for travel. I'm a fan of tea drinking, hammocks, and The New Yorker.

MAWCA Writing Center Conference

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Amber Slater

Like Clara mentioned in a recent post, conferences are a valuable part of the college experience because we get to explore our passions and find out what other colleges or organizations are doing in our fields of interest. Yesterday, six members of our Writing Center staff, myself included, attended the Mid-Atlantic Writing Centers Association conference in California, Pennsylvania.

The theme of the conference was 3D, so after our sessions we wandered around campus with the 3D glasses they gave us and admired the statues.

The morning part of the conference consisted of sessions in which students and Writing Center directors from other schools shared their most recent research. I attended two sessions about working with non-native English speakers and one on the various roles that a Writing Center tutor might take on during a session. I especially enjoyed the very first session that I went to because it was a round-table discussion about working with ESL students, so the session took on a dialogue format and I was able to both contribute some of my favorite tactics and learn from various staff members at other schools.

The keynote speech took place after lunch, and the speaker addressed the importance of remaining inquisitive and not simply accepting a well-known narrative about our workplace. She questioned, for example, the tactic of reading out loud in the Writing Center and whether more research needs to be done about the usefulness of that tactic.

The basic message of her speech, to constantly question what is accepted as the norm, applies to my general outlook on college life. This time is for us to find what we are passionate about, conduct research, and question answers!

A spring cleaning long in the making

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Amber Slater

I have never necessarily been inclined toward neatness. In high school, my friends joked that I lived like a nomad, with enough stuff to live on for at least a week strewn haphazardly in the back of my car. My room wasn’t any better; a path leading to the bed was sometimes the only section of carpet that was visible.

When I was a freshman in college, my organizational skills only slumped. People would walk into my room and not be able to maintain eye contact due to the explosion of things on my floor. I lost my keys so often in the mountain of my things that my roommate took it upon herself to hang a hook by our door so that I would stop panicking each time I had to leave the room. I was convinced that I was busy and had no time to organize my stuff, but I came to dislike spending time in my room because it was so cluttered.

During my sophomore year, I moved into an apartment and wasn’t much better. While I made sure to keep communal spaces clean, I could barely negotiate my side of the room. Still, keeping my personal space remained pretty unimportant in comparison to my schoolwork and social life.

My major turning point came when I studied abroad in Costa Rica and lived with a host family. My Mamá Tica was obsessed with cleanliness and I only had a small amount of my things to keep organized. I took time each day to organize my closet and drawers, gaining a new found satisfaction in my spotless floor and not having to frantically dig around every time I needed my sunglasses or a particular pair of shoes.

Now, I live in the Spanish house on campus, and part of our grade involves cleaning the communal spaces of the house. We operate on a weekly rotating schedule of vacuuming, taking out the trash, and cleaning the kitchen. Compulsory cleaning plus a particularly orderly roommate have driven me to keep my room organized this year, and tonight I did a particularly hefty spring cleaning. I went through all of my school and personal items and made a collection of things to take home tomorrow when I visit my family for Easter tomorrow.

Now, looking at my vacuumed and dusted room, I feel incredibly satisfied. It may have taken 21 years, but I finally realized how much more peaceful I feel when my things are orderly rather than scattered on the floor. Cleaning all the time is still not my inclination, but it has become more of a habit over these past few years. The best development: I love spending time in my room.

Get liberal artsy: experiment!

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Amber Slater

It’s easy to slip into a routine here, with our classes and work and practice schedules. Here’s some advice: try to avoid routine. If a new club forms mid-semester, go. If someone invites you to see a speaker on a topic you know nothing about, go. If a class looks fascinating, take it, especially if it is outside of your major.

Today, our Student Government Association hosted a student involvement fair. Representatives from Greek organizations, clubs, and organizations like Relay for Life manned tables from 11-2, looking to recruit members and ready to answer questions from interested peers.

We typically have an involvement fair at the beginning of the school year, mostly for the benefit of freshman so that they can see what extra-curricular activities are available on campus. What I LOVED about today’s event was the inherent message that organizations are always open to new members and that it is never too late in the year to get involved.

Additionally, class listings for the 2013-2014 school year have been posted. Browsing courses is possibly one of my favorite hobbies; I take time to look at pretty much every subject area to check out interesting classes that are being offered outside of my disciplines. Like getting involved with clubs, taking classes outside of your area of study can be a great opportunity to meet new people and deepen your understanding of the world. This is part of the reason I like attending a liberal arts college: we are forced to experiment through the McDaniel Plan!

When choosing how to spend your time in college, never let yourself too comfortable. You are never too busy and never too involved to experience something outside of your comfort zone.

Local lunches

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Amber Slater

It seems, when catching up with friends, that protocol is to go out to lunch. I did a lot of catching up over the break, so I bought a fair amount of lunches. I’m also a local student, so I was reminded how many good places to eat are right in town! Here are a few that are on Main Street, within walking distance from campus:

J Café

What I like most about going here is the element of comfort. The walls are a bright green and the benches are strewn with pillows. The menu offers a great variety of fare, and I’m always impressed with the freshness of the food. If you go here, it is absolutely necessary that you get a cupcake. Some of their flavors include chocolate coconut, key lime pie, and sweet potato with a caramel icing.

Raphael’s

While you should be prepared to pay a little more here, the food is excellent and I’ve always had great service. One of my favorite options is to do tapas here with friends. When the weather is nice outside, they have a back deck where you can eat. Dining out there always makes me feel like I’m at the beach!

Thai Classic

You’re guaranteed to get delicious food fast when you go to here. The staff is incredibly friendly and attentive. Though I’m obsessed with their vegetable Pad Thai, everyone I’ve ever gone with has loved their choices as well. I also recommend getting a Thai iced tea if you pop in.

Besides these, Main Street offers a ton of great dining locations worth checking out! Eating out is a great way to shake up your normal dining routine and explore town if you’re not from the area.

Free Press archives online

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Amber Slater

For my job at the Writing Center I am putting together a presentation about our student newspaper, The Free Press, as a promotional tool to recruit new staff members. My boss made the suggestion that part of this presentation should be a section highlighting past staff members who have gone on to have prominent careers in journalism.

My immediate thought was to scour the Internet and see if Wendy Ruderman, alum of ’91 and Pulitzer Prize winner, had ever written for the Free Press. Ruderman came to McDaniel to speak when I was a freshman, and she told us both about her time at McDaniel (well, then Western Maryland) and her award-winning investigative series “Tainted Justice.” She is currently working on a book about the process of writing the series.

My search immediately led me to the archives of the Free Press, which are compiled on our library’s website. I found that in 1990 Ruderman was a staff reporter, and some additional browsing led me to a profile about her after she wrote a play which was performed at school. In the profile, she said that after her graduation she wanted to be a writer in San Francisco. “I am willing to write for a tampon box,” she said. “You have to start somewhere.”

Since then, I’ve been thinking about the contexts in which the archives can be useful to students. For other Free Press writers, it would be interesting to browse them in order to recycle story ideas. In a broader sense, anyone interested in notable alums could see if anything was written about or by them when they attended McDaniel. Finally, it’s hilarious just to browse through old editions and look at the ridiculous mullets and perms everyone had. Our archives give us a sense of what McDaniel was like for students before us, a sense of history that is not often tangible.

Whiteford and Rouzer tutoring

Posted on March 10, 2013 by Amber Slater

We’ve started some new initiatives at the Writing Center this year, one of them being Sunday night tutoring in the freshmen dorms. From 7-9 PM, I work with girls in Whiteford while Charles does appointments with guys in Rouzer.

Our Sunday night tutoring is ideal because students who have never been to the Writing Center before can work with us in an environment they are comfortable and familiar with. Also, there’s the additional perk of not having leave the dorm in order to get writing help!

As with all of my Writing Center sessions, students can come at any stage in the writing process. I might work with one student on brainstorming a thesis while the next appointment focuses specifically on double checking in-text citations.

Interested in scheduling an appointment with the Writing Center? Check out our website and make an account! We still have a lot of open appointments during midterms week.

from http://writingcenter.mcdaniel.edu/

If you can’t make it to the Writing Center this week, here’s a few tips you can use on your own:

1. Read out loud! You’ll catch things that your eye just scans over when you read normally.

2. Read “backward.” Start with the very last sentence of your paper and read it for grammar. Move up to the next sentence and read that one. Then keep going. Because your eye isn’t scanning to the next sentence, your reading slows down and you’re able to catch sentence-level errors.

3. Talk it out. Stumped on where to start, an idea for a body paragraph, or how to end? Ask your roommate let you talk about it out loud. Don’t try to make it perfect, just work through the ideas you want to convey. When you say something you like, write it down before you forget!

Dreading midterms? Don’t!

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Amber Slater

This coming week, the bags under our eyes will grow, our hair will become slightly more disheveled than usual, and a sharp increase in those wearing sweatpants will sweep the campus. The coffee will course through our veins and we’ll yearn for the chance to go home and sleep for ten days straight. It’s inevitable; it’s midterms week.

We’ll be busy, yes, but there are definitely tricks to ward off stress and keep from looking like a cast member from The Walking Dead. I have a tendency to get anxious during test weeks, so I’ve developed some strategies for staying on top of midterms and finals week:

1. Work out! Even though some days I absolutely do not want to work out when I am busy with work, I try to drag myself to track practice because it gives my brain a break from studying and the endorphin rush keeps me awake way longer than coffee.

2. Connect with your friends. Make sure to schedule time for those important to you even though it may not seem like there are enough hours in the day. Like working out, you get a break which may help you think clearer when you return to studying. Something as simple as dinner with friends can help you regain the motivation to tackle that big paper that is due in a few days.

3. Schedule rewards into your study sessions. Tell yourself that if you study for another half hour, it’s totally cool to mindlessly roam around on Pinterest for 15 minutes after that. Giving yourself something concrete to work for and breaking studying into segments can make it less daunting.

Good luck with midterms, McDaniel, and remember: you’ve got this!

The Real Food Challenge

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Amber Slater

I became interested in food justice when I read the book The Ethics of What We Eat by Peter Singer when I first started college. After learning about the mistreatment of animals and workers in the corporate food system as well as the environmental effects of factory farming, I could no longer justify eating meat.

From that point, I continued reading about the problems in the food system and came to realize how various elements seemed intertwined with the things I was studying in my classes. When I became serious about studying Spanish, for example, I began to read about how many immigrant laborers are treated and discovered that oftentimes workers who pick the shiny fruit in our grocery stores work in slave-like conditions.

Thus, I’ve always been skeptical about how sustainable the food served in our cafeteria is because feeding such a large group of students each day is such a massive corporate endeavor. Additionally, once I had my own kitchen, I grew skeptical and confused about the food that I was buying for myself. Is it really better to buy local? Why are fair trade foods so expensive? What does free range REALLY mean?

Last night, a speaker on campus presented the most succinct and full interpretation of the elements of food justice that I have come across, and told us about how the model can be used in large dining endeavors such as those on college campuses.

The image is part of the Real Food Challenge, a national movement to unite food activists of different types under the common goal of improving food quality. From those who are concerned about losing culture through dwindling crop diversity to environmentalists who are concerned with emissions of factory farms, the Real Food web is a catch-all that serves as a uniting model.

http://www.realfoodchallenge.org/sites/realfoodchallenge.drupalgardens.com/files/katie%20cloth%20wheel.jpg

In college campuses across the country, students have been tracking the food in their dining halls to determine how much, according the parameters set by the Real Food Challenge, is “real.” The answer, because most schools contract large corporations to supply food, is not much. The food we are served in the cafeteria is rarely grown sustainably, and farmers around the world are not paid fair wages for the food that ends up on our plates.

The goal, once a school pledges to join the challenge, is that by the year 2020, 20% of the food served in the cafeteria will be real. Here at McDaniel, we are at the beginning of the process to achieve this goal for better food! Stay tuned for information on our next step.

The McPlague

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Amber Slater

Starting around dinnertime and late into the night of Tuesday, Feb. 26, students found themselves battling for space in public bathrooms due to extreme flu-like symptoms. At 10:45 AM, a campus-wide email alerted the McDaniel community that we are experiencing an outbreak of gastroenteritis, a virus.

Though many students are sick and stuck in their rooms, various campus services have reached out to those affected in order to keep the school week running smoothly. Here are a few examples of ways that students can gain help from campus offices:

Online appointments with the Writing Center are typically only available to deaf students, graduate students, and students studying at the Budapest campus. This week, any student can sign up for a virtual appointment so that sick students can still have someone look at their papers.

Glar is offering a system for sick students to use their meal plan. Roommates may swipe the card of an affected student and, with the help of a Sedexo manager, pick out food to put into a Styrofoam container to bring back to the dorm.

Those who can’t attend class don’t need a note. While students are encouraged to keep in touch with their professors about missed work, they don’t need a doctor’s note based upon the high volume of students who have not been able to attend class.

Because we live in such close proximity, viruses spread alarmingly quickly on college campuses. Though students may feel alarmed by the number of affected students, there are resources that aim to help students make it through the week.

McDaniel Bucks

Posted on February 24, 2013 by Amber Slater

I have ten minutes between classes, and I am starving. I ran out of deodorant. I really REALLY want Coldstone. Take a second to guess what all these problems have in common.

They can be solved using McDaniel Bucks! When you have a meal plan, $50 is automatically added to your McDaniel 1Card each semester to use at both on and off-campus locations. Additionally, you can load money onto your 1Card when you spend it all.

Here are some more situations that can be remedied by using McDaniel Bucks:

You’re out of quarters. Many of my friends hoard quarters for when they need to do some laundry. This year, you can just swipe your card when you need to do a load. Students can also stop digging in their pockets for change at vending machines, as the 1Card is accepted at many campus locations.

You’re sick. Whether you need to pay for tests at the Wellness Center or pick up a prescription from CVS, your McDaniel Bucks can help you pay for medical transactions.

You want to track how often you hit the gym. Each time your card is swiped at the gym, it shows up on your online account. This way, you can see how active you’ve been throughout the semester.

McDaniel Bucks can help make everyday transactions easier, and options for using it off campus are continuing to grow. To learn more about the 1Card and McDaniel Bucks, click here.

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