Palabras to Words

Posted on April 14, 2013 by Amber Slater

Each year, I try out a couple new clubs, hoping to meet other people like myself on campus who share my interests. Sometimes I continue going after the semester ends, and sometimes activities get replaced with something new. One of my major extracurricular undertakings this year has been Palabras to Words, our ESOL tutoring club. Adult native Spanish speakers come to McDaniel to work with students on their English skills. I had been interested in joining during my first two years at McDaniel, but I was also scared that my Spanish wasn’t good enough to communicate and help teach English.

I decided to go this year because my spoken Spanish and confidence had risen significantly after spending last spring in Costa Rica. What I learned is that it’s not exactly necessary to know Spanish if you want to teach English, depending on the level of your tutee.

I work with Mateo, a man who lives in Frederick and has been in the United States for the past ten years. He is studying to get his GED and hopes to join the military after he passes. He is also learning to play guitar, is interested in philosophy, and is a big fan of The Doors.

During our hour-long tutoring sessions, Mateo and I have worked on reading comprehension, pronunciation, vocabulary skills, and grammatical concepts. We’ve even done some math for GED preparation. My favorite exercise that we do together, however, has to do with song lyrics. Because he loves The Doors and classic rock in general, I like to pick the lyrics to a song each week and take some important words out. Then, we listen to the song together and he figures out which words are missing. This is a great way to build vocabulary and help him understand the songs he likes to listen to on the radio.

Working with Palabras to Words has allowed me to learn what teaching ESOL involves as I have thought about getting certified after graduation. I’ve also had the chance to keep working on my Spanish and meet some awesome students and community members. All in all, I definitely want to stay involved with this club for the rest of my time at McDaniel!

Relay for Life fundraising

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Amber Slater

This year I am participating in Relay for Life for the first time with a team from the Writing Center where I work. Being on a team involves both personal and group fundraising in the weeks leading up to the event on April 26^th. For me, personal fundraising has involved sharing my goals with my family and sharing my fundraising page via social media. As a group, my team is focusing on two major projects: a raffle and collecting tips.

The tip jar idea was my boss’s, and it stemmed from how many people pop into the Writing Center to use our stapler. Now, at different stapling hotspots around campus we have tip jars encouraging students who use public staplers to donate their change when they use them.

The raffle project is my favorite method we are using to gain funds because we have been reaching out to the Westminster community for donations and have enjoyed an overwhelmingly positive response. My coworker and I went to some local businesses the other day to talk about Relay for Life and in just an hour we had a gift cards from both CUP, a local tea shop, and Classico’s, a family-owned Italian restaurant. We also got a promise from an Italian deli to fill an entire basket for us.

Besides the places where we secured definite donations, we explored some cool places on Main Street, such as a bookstore called Eclecticity that displayed a ton of local art and had a room where you could fill up at bag of books for $5!

I was a little intimidated by the idea of approaching businesses for donations, but the response has been so positive that I am looking forward to making contact with more organizations. And, of course, all this fundraising is making me really amped for Relay for Life in general!

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.

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.

Snagging a summer job

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Amber Slater

Even though our semester has just started, now is the perfect time to start hunting for a perfect internship or summer job. Applications for internships often close within the next month, so waiting until April to begin your search may keep you from finding the perfect fit for your interests and skill set.

Getting started with your search can be rough. Each year when I begin, I try to make a mental list of things that I’m looking for in a job so that I don’t get hung up on opportunities that seem awesome, but don’t fit what I need. For example, a lot of awesome internships are unpaid, but I never look seriously at them for the summer because I need to make money. Keep elements like location and your ideal salary in mind when you start your search.

The next step is to comb through the available positions in your interest area. An easy place to start is the Center for Experience and Opportunity (CEO) office. They can help you find a fitting organization and assist you with crafting a great resume and cover letter to make you shine in a pool of candidates.

If you’re interested in looking online, there are a ton of websites that students can sift through to find the perfect summer job. My favorites include:

Idealist- a collection of jobs, internships and volunteer opportunities all over the world

Baltimore Collegetown- great for summer or during the semester, postings of internships in the Baltimore area

Campstaff.com- Who doesn’t want to spend their summer gallivanting around the woods? A great way to connect with camps around the country

Though summer seems far off, remember that the key to snagging your perfect summer job is to start looking early!

Avoiding the muffin top

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Amber Slater

Now that we’re getting into the second week of school, I’ve already noticed a significant drop in numbers at the gym. Resolutions fade, the wind is blowing, and bed is warm. I get it.

In order to combat my natural urge to hibernate starting around Thanksgiving and ending when I can wear short sleeves, I put myself in a position where I absolutely can’t skip working out. For me, this position is the track team. I go because I love my teammates, want to stay in shape for cross country, and know that I will be held accountable if I don’t show up.

There are some people who have the dedication and drive to roll out of bed each morning, do a self-designed work out, and get great results. I admire those people deeply, but I am not one of them. If you’re like me, the key to maintaining fitness lies in finding what you love to do and finding a community of people who share that love.

Besides organized sports teams, you can find this community through intramurals and classes at the gym. Intramurals are offered year round, and I know from running by heated debates on the intramural soccer field that they take it pretty seriously. Additionally, there are all sorts of night classes offered through the gym that can help you add some regularity to your workout schedule. While some staples include Zumba and Body Combat, this semester a kickboxing night class and yoga class will be offered. Such activities require a fee, but it is much less than what you would pay at a typical gym.

Also, let’s not forget gym classes! We are required to participate in four gyms throughout our time at McDaniel, but I have friends that sign up for four per semester. What better way to hold yourself accountable for working out than to work out for a grade, right?

None of us want to watch a muffin top sag over our jeans as the semester unfolds. If you’re in an exercise lull, consider the various ways to get involved with an existing community of people like yourself. When you know that you’re going to see friends and improve your fitness, you have every reason to get out of bed and make that trek to practice, to the gym, or to the field.

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