Welcome to Live and Learn. A production of the honors program of the University of Connecticut. I’m Danielle Chaloux and this is Season Two.

This week, as we welcome students back to campus, we are welcoming them back to another semester and another opportunity to get involved. We’re sharing a conversation between Christine Wilson, the Director of Student Activities and two Honors student leaders: Himaja and Colby. Here’s Christine:

Christine: Himaja, we’re going to start with you. You started to explain how Peer Allies Through Honors, PATH and what the purpose of the organization is, but I would love to hear some more about the organization, how it’s organized and some of the things the organization does.

Himaja: Absolutely. PATH is essentially made up of the mentees, which are the Honors freshman students, the mentors, which are the upperclassmen Honors students, and the coordinators that run the whole show behind the scenes. Essentially, what we do is we plan events to really bring mentees and mentors together and so we ask mentees and mentors do, at a minimum, 3 events per semester and we host a wide variety of events. Recently we hosted a cookie decorating and pumpkin painting event for PATH. That was really cool; we had a great turnout and everyone really enjoyed it. So we do a ton of cool, fun activities to initiate and help foster that bonding between mentors and mentees.”

Christine: So I’m curious about this coordinator position that you mentioned. Are these coordinators students?

Himaja: These are students, yeah. It’s been great, we have eight coordinators, we all work together. We have two event coordinators, we have marketing coordinator, which is me, and communications. we have a head coordinator, peer ally relations as I mentioned and a digital coordinator who deals with updating your facebook profile and helping to bring together mentors and mentees.

Christine: that’s great! I love the way that you’re organizing this with leadership that you’re really reimagining what it means to be an officer in a student organization. To really be more in tune with how students actually live in student organizations now. That’s great.

Himaja: Thank you.

Christine: Alright. So, Colby, would you mind talking about the Honors Council a little bit?

Colby: Honors Council is what I consider to be a general home for Honors students here on campus. So, what we do is we try to aim to make the Honors community on campus more enjoyable, more inclusive, and promote a well rounded student through Honors. We have a couple different avenues we do this through. We like to host events and through those events we provide leadership opportunities to underclassmen, through sort of similar to what PATH has through coordinator positions. So, this semester we have two positions. One through community service and one for our largest event of the year: International Night, where we are having underclassmen help us with that. We also focus on community service. Like I said, we have a community service coordinator and we are also a great connection to Honors faculty. Throughout my time here, with Honors Council I have gotten to know many of the Honors faculty and staff and they have been entirely supportive of our initiatives and are a voice for the Honors students throughout campus.

Christine: There are two things in there that piqued my interest that I’d like you to follow up on. One of them is you talked about a well rounded Honors student. What is your opinion about what “well-rounded” means?

Colby: A well-rounded student balances their coursework as well as being engaged with their community. And that can be something all the way from what we do. We’re very focused on the Honors program and giving a positive environment for Honors students. Or it could be playing on an intramural team, getting to know other people. Just being involved; not just going to your classes and it being the end of the day. You’re involved in more.

Christine: Thank you. On a big campus like this life can become so compartmentalized so quickly. Right? Your eating is separate from your working out is separate from your classes is separate from your organizations. And I really like that you’re drawing together your academic life with your extracurricular lives. I think that’s important. I’d like you each to talk about the impact of being in your student organizations on your academic work. Has it had an impact? If so, what has that been? And you can use this as practice for an interview question later because someone might as you this if you’re interviewing for a job. So, tell me about your involvement and how that helped you develop your skills. Himaja, would you like to go first?

Himaja: Yeah, absolutely. Being in PATH has definitely helped me academically in ways I probably wouldn’t have imagined at first. I would say the number 1 thing is time management for sure. It really helped me generate a skill to multitask and to make sure that I’m scheduling things right, keeping on top of things, making sure I’m doing my work for the organization. At the same time, making sure I’m putting enough time into my academics. So that definitely was an important skill that I learned just being involved in an Honors organization in general. And specifically for PATH, it’s definitely taught me a lot of leadership. Running an organization with over 200 members, mentors and mentees combined, it’s a really big organization on campus. Running the show and making sure we’re communicating effectively, we’re addressing issues that pop up, we’re really helping to give the mentors the resources to really bond with mentees. That takes a lot of leadership, planning, thought and effort and PATH has really taught me a lot of that that I applied to my academics, without even thinking about it on a daily basis.

Christine: That’s great. Sounds like it’s had a really good impact. A lot of lessons. Colby, what about you?

Colby: A lot of the same aspects. Where it’s time management or something like that and leadership working as a team. But I wanted to talk about something a little bit different. One of the things I realized that working with the Honors council is integrating policy and practical solutions to what I do. So, what I said earlier, I’m a chemical engineer and there’s a lot of disconnect between the research being done and how politicians and government officials are utilizing that in order to make effective policy. And, one of the things that i have been able to learn a little more about is policy, making decisions. In the past I have done a couple of outreach programs about Honors living and learning communities and the sophomore honor requirements. I have made a couple of surveys about that in order to poll the general population and then report back to the Director of the Honors Program to give her student opinions and data to work with to inform her decisions. My involvement in Honors Council has really pushed me to pursue an environmental policy aspect of my career that I’m not sure would have been so strong had I not decided to join newsletter my freshman year.

Christine: Himaja, let’s talk about what’s challenging in your student organization. You’ve talked about how meaningful it is, how inspirational it is, but we all know that things can be challenging sometimes. So, what’s challenging about your organization for you?

Himaja: One thing we’re trying to work on is effective communication and making sure we can document who comes to which event. So just making sure we’re properly recording attendance and giving credit to those who come. Also, making sure to properly congratulate mentees and mentors who really put in their time and effort into path to make sure both of them succeed.

Christine: So Colby, would you mind talking about a challenge, in a different way, maybe a challenge that you’ve encountered in your organization that you’ve overcome?

Colby: So, one of the challenges that I’ve tried to work on while serving as president of the Honors Council is collaboration with other Honors orgs. That has always been one of the hardest things to do. You have your own executive board, with your own idea on how an event will run, who’s going to run what part of it, who’s booking the room, who’s doing this and that. You have a set way of how you’re doing things in your organization. When you reach out to other organizations it can get a bit hairy as to “okay how much do we want to work with them on this” “oh I want to keep this part for us”. Something that we’ve worked on a bit, but still working through, is the collaboration with others. So, for example, International Night, which is an evening of cultural performances, hosted by Honors Council as well as Honors for Diversity, another student organization here on campus. we’ve been working on getting groups together, figuring out decorations, figuring out the food that’s going to be at the event, working with catering, all of that stuff. In the past this has just been an Honors Council event and last year we reached out to them to collaborate with International Night. And, we didn’t do a whole lot with them and we basically did everything the way we had done it in the past. The “status quo” International Night from our perspective and honestly sort of tacked their name on it on the side. So, this year we tried to be a bit more proactive and given them opportunity to work with us on International Night and I think it will be a great success and you’ll see the added perspective from their part at the event.

Christine: In my experience in working with student organizations, you point out one of the most difficult things. And it’s not just student organizations, I would say it’s sort of people. It’s amazing how fast a group can become its own culture and when you go to collaborate. We talk about it as “difficulty communicating” or “difficult to work together” but it really is melting two cultures and it is extremely difficult. And some days I think maybe we have 651 groups because people make their own thing, just because it’s easier than trying to join a group that already exists and I think students instinctively know this when they come to talk to us. They say “I know there’s an X, but my Y is different.” It’s easy to see for someone like me from the outside to say they’re splintering, but what I know students are trying to do is do something on their own terms. So we don’t prohibit that. But there are only so many resources so when they do go to work together, like what you’re talking about it can be challenging. Thank you for sharing that and I also appreciate your honesty in sort of articulating what happened last year and that you went down a different road this year and you had a different result.

Danielle: That’s all for this week. For past episodes and for a chance to win an Honors Program long sleeve t-shirt visit honors.uconn.edu/podcast where the code word is Martin Luther King.

 

Danielle: Welcome to Live and Learn, a production of the Honors Program at the University of Connecticut. I’m Danielle Chaloux, and this is a special finals episode.

Danielle Chaloux (DC): Can you please introduce yourself for me?

Graham Stinnett (GS): Sure. My name is Graham Stinnett and I’m an archivist at the Archives and Special Collections which is located at the Dodd Research Center.

DC: And briefly, what is the Dodd Center in general?

GS: So the Dodd Center is largely programming organization that oversees human rights related programs, offers awards to NGOs and folks doing work around human rights, continuing the work of Thomas J. Dodd who was in executive trial counsel during the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, as well as being a senator and a congressman of Connecticut. But more so his sort of stamp on the human rights record is kind of what the Dodd Center tries to continuously advocate for. And so there are all kinds of things. We teach classes in the Center; the Human Rights Institute is there, Judaic Studies is there, but largely, 3/4s of the building is made up of the archives and special collections.

DC: And what are archives?

GS: Just generally archives are kind of the collected memory of individuals, businesses, organizations. We, being the University of Connecticut Archives and Special Collections, we are kind of the one stop shop for all of the recorded past of the university. That’s everything from the corporate functioning of the university itself to student organizations that have recorded and documented their work over the existence of the university. And then further to that it’s kind of the one of a kind, focused collecting of objects that have enduring value—important historical objects, documents, papers, media, digital materials, etc. We kind of work in all frames of the recorded past.

DC: Can students use these materials and resources?

GS: Absolutely. So, kind of a big distinction between a library and an archive is that the only thing you can’t do is browse the stacks and you can’t check out material like you can in the library. The library has this fantastic kind of freedom to it where you can walk through the stacks, browse book by book. When you come to the archives, we kind of oversee how you handle the materials because a lot of the stuff we’ve got is very rare, fragile, old. It has preservation and handling requirements, so a lot of the stuff needs to be kind of minimally impacted by the research that we’re trying to facilitate. So, you can come in, you can browse the materials that we have online, and then you can request one of those objects, or a book, or a newspaper, or a photograph, whatever it might be. And then we’ll bring the box to you in the Reading Room which is located in the Dodd Center, and you can spend all day just kind of, you know, perusing through the research collections we have.

DC: Excellent. And so today we have a piece of one of the collections to share, and for the listeners at home, what have you brought out for us?

GS: So, this is from the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection, which is one of our larger collecting areas we have in the tens of thousands of literature books. And that ranges from very basic kids books to pop-up books to young adult literature to critiques of how children are written about or how they’re portrayed or illustrated. So today I’ve brought a copy of Aladdin from 1908 and it’s called Aladdin Or The Wonderful Lamp and Other Stories from the Arabian Nights.

DC: And so what we’ll do today is we’re gonna read the story cause we know you all have finals and are a little bit stressed so hopefully this brings you back to a nicer time of maybe lighthearted childhood.

GS: Okay, Aladdin Or The Wonderful Lamp.

Story:

GS: Once in a large city of China, there lived a boy named Aladdin, who was so lazy and careless that he would do nothing but play to the grief of his mother, who was a poor widow. One day when Aladdin was playing in the streets as usual with his idle friends, a stranger came up, and began to talk to him. He said that he was Aladdin’s uncle, and meant to do great things for him, and, kissing Aladdin many times, he asked to be taken to the house where he lived. Very much surprised Aladdin led the way to his home and told his mother the strange uncle had come to see him.

Now, the stranger was really no relation at all to the boy, but a wicked sorcerer known as the African Magician, who wished to make use of Aladdin to carry out a secret he had made. He had learnt by his arts that a wonderful magic lamp was hidden beneath the ground in a certain part of China, and knowing that if he had this treasure he would be the most powerful person in the world, he soon found out the exact spot where it lay, and made up his mind to get it. But, though he had learnt where the magic lamp was hidden, he was not allowed to take it himself. And having noticed, as he walked about the streets of the nearest city, that Aladdin was a sharp boy, he had decided to make use of him for his purpose. He soon made the poor widow believe that he was indeed the boy’s uncle, and saying that, he now meant to provide for all of his wants. He persuaded her to let him take Aladdin out for the day.

Aladdin was delighted to go, and, his pretended uncle, having bought him some gay new clothes, took him to visit the best parts of the town, and gave him many nice treats. After a while, he led him away from the city, right out into the country, saying he wished to show him a very beautiful garden. And Aladdin, though now very tired, was still ready to follow his new friend. When they came to a certain lonely place they stopped, and the magician made a fire. Throwing some incense into the blaze he uttered a few words of magic. Instantly the ground opened, showing a little cave, with steps leading down below.

“Go down those steps,” said the magician to Aladdin. “And you will find yourself in a most beautiful garden, at one end of which a lamp is burning. Bring me the lamp; we shall both be rich for life. But first of all put this ring on your finger and it will keep you safe from harm.” The magician placed a ring on Aladdin’s finger, and then the boy ran down the steps at once and soon found himself in the loveliest garden he had ever seen. On every side were trees laden with fine fruits which Aladdin fancied were made of brightly colored glass. And, thinking them very pretty, he filled his pockets and loose tunic with them, little dreaming that they were really dazzling jewels of priceless value. He soon found the lamp, burning at the top of some steps, and putting out the light he placed in carefully in his vest, and ran up the steps to the mouth of the little cave.

“Give me the lamp boy!” cried the magician impatiently. “No!” said Aladdin. “Not until you help me out of this hole.” The magician was so eager to snatch the magic lamp, that these words sent him into a violent rage, and throwing some more incense into the fire, he uttered certain words that caused the ground to close over the cave so that Aladdin was buried alive. Having thus failed to get the treasure he wanted, and not having power to open the ground a second time, the magician went back to Africa in a great rage, and poor Aladdin was left to his fate, knowing now that his pretended uncle was really a wicked sorcerer. For a long time he wept and cried out for help, but no help came. At last he clasped his hands together in despair and prepared to die.

As he clasped his hands together, however, he happened to rub the ring given him by the magician, and instantly there appeared an enormous genie, who said, “Who dost thou want? I’m ready to obey thee.” “Then get me out of this!” cried Aladdin. In a moment he found himself on the ground above, and, full of joy, he ran off home and told his mother of all his adventures. Next day, finding there was nothing to eat in the house, Aladdin said he would sell the old lamp he had bought from home an evening before. But just as his mother began to rub it up, to make it a little cleaner, there suddenly appeared another hideous genie, who said, “What dost thou have? I am ready to obey thee.” “Bring us something to eat” said Aladdin. Instantly the genie brought a fine feast set out on rich dishes of silver and then he vanished. Aladdin and his mother sat down to this feast with great delight, and afterwards, by selling the silver dishes one by one, they were able to live in comfort for a long time.

Aladdin now began to improve very much, leaving off his idle ways and growing into a sensible young man, and as he made it his business to talk with merchants and wise men, he learnt much from them and soon found out the real value of the jewel fruits he had brought from the underground garden. It was about this time that Aladdin first saw the sultan of China’s only daughter, the beautiful    Princess Badroulbadour, and falling in love with her at once he made up his mind to marry her. So one day he sent his mother to the royal palace with a dish full of the precious fruit jewels. Telling her to present these to the sultan as a gift from him, and to ask the Princess’s hand in marriage at the same time.

After going to the court for several days, Aladdin’s mother at last was brought before the sultan, and laying her gift at his feet, she asked him to allow his daughter to be married to her son, Aladdin. The sultan was delighted with the dazzling gems, and he said if Aladdin would send him forty golden basins full of the same kind of fruit jewels, carried by forty black slaves led by forty white slaves, and would also provide a splendid palace for her to live in, he should certainly be married to the princess. When Aladdin had heard what the sultan had said he took the wonderful lamp and rubbed it hard. Instantly the genie appeared and asked his commands. Aladdin told him what he required, and the genie vanished, but soon returned with forty golden basins of jewels, forty black slaves, and forty white slaves. Aladdin at once sent the slaves with the golden basins to the sultan, and then he desired the genie to bring him a handsome suit of jeweled trimmed clothes, fit for a king, a splendid horse to ride upon, and forty richly dressed slaves to attend on himself. He also ordered gorgeous robes and slaves to be brought for his mother. And then the genie instantly carried out his commands. Aladdin then dressed himself in his glittering garments and rode in great state to the palace, where he was received very kindly by the sultan, who promised that the marriage should take place directly, he had provided a suitable palace for the princess to live in. So, when he returned to his home at night, Aladdin once more called up the genie, and ordered him to build a gorgeous palace, with walls of solid gold, and windows, doors, and pillars, all covered with precious gems, and to set it up in the open space opposite the royal palace.

Next morning, the golden palace was ready, it’s dazzling jewel windows glittering to the sunlight and when Aladdin entered he found it completely furnished in splendid style, with lords, ladies, and slaves in attendance, with great treasure of gold and silver laid only in a secret place known only to himself. The sultan was now perfectly satisfied, and that very day, Aladdin was married to the beautiful Princess Badroulbadour. He was very happy indeed, and lived the life of a splendid prince. But trouble was yet in store for him.

The wicked African magician was still alive, and having learnt by means of his arts of all that had happened to Aladdin, he made up his mind to try once more to obtain the magic lamp. So, he came back to the capital of China, and soon thought out a cunning plan. Learning that Aladdin was away hunting, he dressed himself up as a poor merchant, and buying a basket full of small lamps, he went from street to street crying out, “New lamps for old lamps! Old lamps for new lamps!” He soon made his way to Aladdin’s palace where he was seen by one of the princess’s ladies, who said to her mistress, “A foolish fellow outside is giving away new lamps in exchange for old ones. Shall I give him that rusty old lamp in Prince Aladdin’s room, and get a nice new one for it?” The princess, having no idea of the real value of the magic lamp, answered, “Yes. It down at once by all means.” The attendant did so, but no sooner had the cunning magician snatched the old lamp from her, then he rubbed it hard, and the genie appeared. “Carry me and Aladdin’s palace with all inside it to the middle of Africa!” cried the magician.  And instantly his command was obeyed.

When Aladdin returned from hunting next day, he was full of dismay to find that his palace and beautiful princess had disappeared, and, guessed it once that this was the work of the wicked magician. The sultan was in such a rage that he declared that Aladdin should be killed unless his daughter was soon restored. Aladdin set off at once to look for his princess and palace, but, finding his search in vain, he had at last flung himself down in despair on the bank of the river, thinking that he might as well drown himself. In his grief he had forgotten the wonderful powers of his magic ring, but as he laid by the river he had happened to rub the ring, and instantly there appeared the same genie he had seen in the cave. Aladdin was delighted to see the genie, and he said at once, “Set me down beneath the window of the princess’s room in my palace, wherever it may be.” Directly as he had spoken, he found himself in the midst of a lonely plain in Africa, outside his own splendid palace.  He soon made his way to the room of the princess, and, full of joy, they rushed into each other’s arms. The magician was, happily, in another part of the palace, so Aladdin and the princess were able to arrange a plan in getting rid of him. Having settled everything, Aladdin hid himself behind the curtains, and, then the princess sent out one of her ladies to invite the magician to come to a little feast with her. The magician came in good time, looking quite delighted for, until now, the princess had refused to have anything to do with him, and he wished above all things to win her favor. And directly he arrived, a grand feast was served.

The princess chatted and laughed, pretending to be very friendly with the magician, and presently she offered him a cup of wine, in which a deadly poison had been mixed by Aladdin. The wicked magician dazzled by the smiles of the beautiful princess, drank off the wine at once, and instantly he fell over on the couch, quite dead. Aladdin now rushed forward, and, searching amongst the dead magician’s clothes, he found to his great joy the magic lamp. He rubbed it at once, and when the genie appeared he commanded him to set the palace down again in its proper place in the capital of China. This was instantly done. And when the sultan looked out of his window next morning, he was full of surprise and joy to see Aladdin’s dazzling palace, standing in its place once more. He quickly went to embrace his beloved daughter, and rejoicing for her safe return were kept up all over the country for a long time. And now that the wicked magician was dead, Aladdin was safe from harm and the sole master of the wonderful lamp, and he and his beautiful Princess Badroulbadour lived happily together to the end of their lives.

DC: The end!

GS: And what the listeners couldn’t see were some of the illustrations that came along with it. So there’s one, subtitled “The genie carries Aladdin’s palace into Africa.” and it’s kind of a gaunty man with leather straps on his feet and his shins and he’s got a big, winding robe up around him that ultimately comes up onto his head and he’s carrying off this gigantic pagoda looking palace over what is probably the Nile. There are camels, there are elephants, there are little lions, lionesses, around the banks of this river. The coloration is kind of a cross fade of psychedelic greens and blues and purples. It’s kind of basic but that’s one of the only colored images in the book.

DC: So if you’re interested in learning more about archives, what are some resources you can check out?                            

GS: Well one of them is the podcast I’m working on that is hosted at whus.org, and it’s called D’Archive. Every week I interview somebody who does research in archives or works in an archive or a library, someone who is a specialist around materials that we have. And I play audio samples from our collections which are kind of hard to listen to often. Things have come from real to real tape or come from cassette or vinyl, so having to do that electronic migration of a lot of the media is the work of an archivist, basically. Having to make sure that things are still accessible to this day, even though that media is slowly disintegrating. So that’s something you can check out, and it’s a weekly feature. We also do exhibitions, come on by the Dodd Center if you can! Archives and special collections are open Monday to Friday, there’s always somebody there to answer reference question or to chat about the great stuff that we have.

DC: Excellent. Thank you so much.

GS: Thank you.

DC: That’s all for this semester. We’ll be back in the spring with the next season of Live and Learn!

{Outro Music}

 

Live and Learn Episode 8

[Danielle Chaloux]: Welcome to Live and Learn, a production of the Honors Program at the University of Connecticut. I’m Danielle Chaloux, and this is Episode 8 for the week of November 13th. Dr. Nicholas Leadbeater of the Department of Chemistry will be hosting a Lunch & Learn on Tuesday, Nov. 14th, at 12:30 PM in the Buckley Classroom. All majors are welcome to join Dr. Leadbeater in an informal conversation over lunch. RSVP at honors.uconn.edu/lunchlearn. And on Thursday, Nov. 16th, stop by the Student Union Theater at 7 PM to hear from the Pollinators Protection Panel, featuring beekeepers, professors, and the state apiary, talking about the necessity of bees and how to save them.

[DC]: This week we’re talking Education Abroad with Katie Ouimette, a junior Art major and global student mentor in the Study Abroad Office. Katie has recently returned from Australia and speaks about her experience. We’ll also hear from Matt Yates, the associate director of Education Abroad.

[DC]: What is the importance of Study Abroad?

[Matt Yates]: It’s very important in this day and age. We all know that this world is very globalized and that there are a lot of different, competing ideas and perspectives and cultures, and in order to make sense of that, it’s important to engage, not to pull back. It doesn’t matter what your perspective is and your personality if you’re not really somebody who is a people person or you don’t really see yourself going out a lot, that’s fine, because there are so many ways to engage with difference: difference of opinion, difference of religion, difference of language, no matter what you’re studying, you can find a way to globalize that. And that’s important of course, not only for the practical things of getting a job but to become a better person. We have an ethical obligation to work with other people, we don’t live in a world where we can get to do whatever we want, for better or worse. And so we should do right by them, we can only do right by them if we talk with them, if we engage with them, if we get to know who they are as people. Going abroad isn’t necessarily just about taking classes in your discipline, which I hope people do, that’s great! They can make academic progress towards a degree, they can take languages that will give them practical skills to get jobs, but it’s also really about learning who you are as a person, and how to ethically act towards others in a way that will help this world become a better place.

[DC]: And what about Honors students specifically? Can you earn Honors credit abroad?

[MY]: Yes, that is possible. We do have some programs that are more geared towards Honors students, so that’s something that advisors can help recommend to students depending on what they’re looking into, but yes that is possible.

[DC]: And what about thesis research?

[MY]: I would be more than happy to help students try to find programs in which they can do that. Research can often be very customized, right? So, it’s maybe more a matter of doing a impending study, network with faculty members, and then, not necessarily “studying abroad” but going abroad and registering with our travel registry so that you get insurance and are connected with the resources that you need in order to be successful and save for when going abroad.

[DC]: For a student who is maybe just starting out their UConn career, what advice would you give them, specifically regarding Education Abroad?

[Katie Ouimette]: My first piece of advice would be going to talk to your academic advisor and let them know that that is in your mind, so then you can plan accordingly and then you can know what program you want to go on and what program will offer the course you want to take while abroad, a lot of people, plan to take their gen eds abroad so that they don’t have to worry about taking their specialized classes in their course. So that, really just planning ahead and letting all of your advisors know, and even coming in and talking to a Study Abroad advisor, they’re more than open to talking to people who are years ahead from studying abroad.

[MY]: Talking about students who come in and I’ve talked with a lot of juniors and seniors in high school who say “I know in my second semester of my junior year I want to do this program” and like wow you’ve done a lot of research and you know exactly what you want to do, there are students like that. And then there are students who, one of the best students I have ever worked with was a student at Kansas State who came into the office the day before the deadline to apply to one of our most intense academically challenging exchange programs in Australia. And he completed the application on time and went and got scholarships for a lot of the programming he worked on while in Australia. He’d liked to say he came back with “down one penny” because he had enough scholarships and work while he was there, he was able to cover the costs of not only his program but also the traveling he did while he was there, so you don’t have to plan everything out to be a successful student is my point. It’s great if you do, and that’s what we’re here for, we’re here to talk about that process, the strategic process, it’s best that you do, I recommend that you do try to think things out and that’s what we’re here for too. If the moment strikes and you feel like the opportunity is there, come talk to us we can definitely see what we can do.

[KO]: That’s another thing I noticed. I was one of those students who was not together at all. I had no clue where I wanted to go, I know that I wanted to abroad, I’ve been thinking about going abroad my whole life, but I just waited and waited until the deadline, so you have to be flexible, and you have to think “Ok, I can’t go to Barcelona so where should I go?”, and I waited and waited so that a ton of deadlines were passed, so I kind of ended up in Australia, and I went and had an amazing time. So really being flexible and sometimes things don’t go to plan, even if you do plan ahead years in advance.

[DC]: What would you say to students who are on the cusp of leaving to start their semester, year, or experience abroad?

[KO]: I think one of the cliche things people always say is “never say no” and always be open to experience, and when someone says “Oh, do you want to go try this weird food”, try it! If they ask you to go on some trips say, “yes of course I’ll go” or “of course, I’ll try it” because you’re never going to get that chance again, and if you do it might be a little different, and to always take every opportunity that you can.

[MY]: I think that’s very well said, I would definitely jump on the food piece, I’m a big foodie, and part of the reason why I love Education Abroad so much is because I love to try new things, and to talk about that. And that’s something that I worked with with my students when I was teaching them at Kansas State was that I asked them to try different foods in Hong Kong and in Paris, two very very different cities, and to discuss it, because food is a very social thing, it’s something that we all have to engage in. Katie was saying earlier how it’s in the small things that you kind of have culture shock in, based on unknown assumptions I think that’s dead right, because another topic, not just food, that I like to talk about with students is, because we can all relate to it and it’s also kind of fun, is toilets. Like how to flush a toilet when you’re going abroad can be so different and force you to challenge you to think about something you never really thought about. In the states, for most of the toilets you just flush, right? But you may be prompted to think about how to do that when you’re abroad. And that can be uncomfortable and unsettling but it can also be exciting because this is something that I never thought about before. This is a way in which the culture is formatted, for whatever reason, has a different approach. Food is the same way, sleeping habits, when people eat, all the different things that go into our lives that we don’t have to think about are brought to our attention full force whenever we’re abroad and that can be very unsettling but also incredibly exciting and it makes you become a lot more open to experiences and open to other people’s stories, and doing right by them, and helping the world become a better place.

[DC] If you’re thinking about studying abroad, there are options that work for almost any constraint. The Education Abroad Office in Rowe 117 is a great resource to ask the questions you’re worrying about. Live and Learn visited the Puerto Rican and Latin American Cultural Center (PRLACC), located on the fourth floor of the Student Union. We spoke with two undergrad student workers, Ashley Amaro and Stephanie Andrade about the programs and community of the cultural center.

[AA] Our programs are usually student run and they do give more of an idea of what you can do to better yourself as an individual and to give you more of an idea that you are as capable as anyone else on this campus to get as far as you want to. And it’s giving you that motivation to push yourself further while also giving you that community that’s also pushing you forward. You can come if you want to expose yourself to different cultures around the world and embrace all the different parts of Latin America. We do have another program called Cafe con Leches where we have a guest speaker come in and we talk about social issues or we talk about things that impact a person’s life on campus.

[SA]: One of the biggest things is that we want to be a resource to people so we even smaller things, we had one just recently which was “How to Apply to Jobs as a LatinX Student”, the kind of things you want to say on your resume, like your second language, they try to teach you on how to emphasize that, especially the LatinX community, but could be absolutely anyone.

[AA]: The community is very family like, you have someone to talk to at any point in time that’s not going to judge you for any decisions you made or the classes you take or for switching your major five or six times, or even if you had a bad grade on your exam and you’re questioning who you are, there are people there who are going to motivate you. You can be of any ethnicity, of any culture, you can be somebody who’s never dropped by the center before, and you just need someone to talk to, they are there for you. How we can make you feel comfortable, knowing that when you’re comfortable and you are relying on people around you, you do the best that you can be. Being a part of this campus, it’s not just making it past your academics, it’s about making bonds that will last a long time.

[SA]: It’s very diverse. I want people not to think that they come in and they’re going to find one kind of LatinX student, and it’s not like that, they are so different. Typically there’s always music or talking and you can also find all sorts of majors and stuff like that, and that’s one of my things that you find all sorts of different kinds of people in the center and they’re always welcome to help you. I get to work with people who are genuinely driven to try and help people. Recently we just had a meeting and we talked about how we can help Puerto Rico with everything that’s happen and I think that’s amazing that I’m a part of something much bigger.

[AA]: This is a center that is so dedicated to helping the society around them and helping the communities within the LatinX community, and the drive to help other people. We see how we’re all working together to make sure they get to what their goals are, and that’s my favorite part of the center, it’s knowing that they want the best for me. They’re going to do whatever they can, and what’s in their power, to get whatever I need, and I reach my goals.

[DC]: That’s all for this week. To provide feedback and to enter to win a limited edition Honors Program long sleeve t-shirt, visit honors.uconn.edu/podcast where the code word is GLOBAL.

[Danielle Chaloux]: Welcome to Live and Learn, a production of the Honors Program at the University of Connecticut. I’m Danielle Chaloux, and this is Episode 7 for the week of November 6th. On Tuesday, November 7th, at 5PM in Laurel Hall 201, Dr. Erin Cox from Counseling and Mental Health Services will discuss strategies and tips to manage stress levels, perfectionism, and demanding schedules. We’ve heard from Dr. Cox in Episode 3, so check that out for a teaser. This week, we’re going to get a peek into ANTH 2400: Analyzing Religion. It’s an Honors Core class taught by Jocelyn Linnekin. Here’s Professor Linnekin.

[DC]: Can you provide a brief overview about what that class is?

[Jocelyn Linnekin]: This is the course where I, um, mess with their minds as much as I possibly can. I want to make them rethink, push, probe, everything they ever thought about religion. It’s very wide ranging, it’s challenging, but I think I guide the students through very well. It’s very excited because with Honors students you have a tremendous amount of discussion and they’re smart. It’s great fun!

[DC]: And what are some of the topics in this wide-ranging course that you’re covering?

[JL]: I start out with, what is religion, and I ask if religion has to be theistic, do there have to be deities, do there have to be supernatural beings? So we start out with various definitions of religion. And rather quickly move into different famous scholarly approaches to and rejections of religion. I rather like putting Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, alongside anthropologists,and the K’iche’ Maya Book of the Dead. It’s intended to be a juxtaposition of very different sorts of sources but, having Freud and Marx and Nietzche and the Christian mystic Gregory of Nyssa, and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, just go home and tell them you’re reading THAT, they’re going to know the tuition is worth it.

[DC]: What’s the importance of this course?

[JL]: My pitch for this class initially was that there are few institutions that are more implicated in today’s crises, conflicts, politics, one hardly needs to say, religion is implicated in so many arenas of life globally from one end of the earth to another. That the wide ranging nature of this course, I hope makes them better world citizens, better informed, better able to understand conflicts that seem overtly religious but actually there are always underlying claims that could be ethnic or national or based on territory.

[DC]: And from a student perspective, here’s Nathan Friday, a sophomore studying Biomedical Engineering with minors in Math and Computer Science and Engineering.

Last semester you took an Honors Core class.

[Nathan Friday]: Yup.

[DC]: What course did you take?

[NF]: The course I took was ANTH 2400: Analyzing Religion, and it’s really, I don’t know, I really liked the course just in general because it felt very different than a lot of the other courses I’ve been taking up until that point.

[DC]: How is it different?

[NF]: Just in terms of engagement, assignments, and expectations in the classroom I think. So, you know, we had a lot of expected readings that we’re supposed to do, so that we could come to class prepared to talk about whatever concepts she wanted to bring up. She really focused on bringing up a wide range of examples for each concept that we talked about, despite the fact that it was kind of a point of the class that it’s very difficult to make broad assumptions about any particular belief system. There is an interesting element to that, that you can talk about things in a general sense but we also had this caveat that nothing applies to everything universally.

[DC]: At the end of the semester, when you looked back at the class, and you said, “Oh, you know, in my ANTH 2400 class, this is what I learned.”

[NF]: What I learned exactly from it? Oh, man. I would say that I learned an appreciation for the anthropological method more than anything else, you know, understanding the role of ethnography, that kind of thing, where somebody goes into the field and does work with these people who are completely different from them in some senses. And, it really comes away with a different understanding, and you can spread that to other people, and help expand our view of the world.

[DC]: And how did this class square with your very science heavy major coursework.

[NF]: It was refreshing, honestly. The previous semester I had taken a presidential election class as one of my UNIVs, and, I liked the break from the science sometimes, you know, because I do like politics, religion, I like those topics and I like talking to people about that. I like the interaction you can get in those kinds of classes. It’s why I’m taking a modern drama class this semester, is that I like that interaction you can get. It doesn’t happen as much in the science heavy courses.

[DC]: How will you apply the things you’ve learned in these classes that are nothing like your major to your major?

[NF]: I don’t know if I feel like I have to apply to my major, I feel like it makes me a more well-rounded person just in general. And I think that benefits me.

[DC]: Here’s another sophomore student, Nandan Tumu, studying Computer Science and also took ANTH 2400 last semester. Is there value in that interdisciplinary nature?

[Nandan Tumu]: I think there is enormous value in it, personally, I think that no matter how much of the sciences or how much of the field you know, everything boils down to people. At the end of the day you’re going to be working with people. The products you make are going to serve people. And your users are always going to be people. You’re going to work with people to create everything you create. Understanding religion, something so critical to how people carry on their daily lives, is I think important to understand. Because, if you do understand that,if you understand where people are coming from, you can build deeper connections with them, you can understand their drive, you know, what makes them tick.

[DC]: What’s the biggest takeaway you had at the end of the semester when you kind of had that moment of reflection on, “Well, I learned a lot this semester.” What was the thing that stood out for this class.

[NT] How much of an understanding I’d gained of other religions. There’s a lot of source text we read in that class. And, when we discuss it in class, I think that, our understanding of the material is deep in a way that’s unlike any non-Honors class I’ve taken. What we read and how we discuss what we read really makes a difference in terms of an Honors Core, because the discussion is not surface level, it goes deeper than that. The thoughts that your classmates bring to the table are sometime ones you never thought of before. And Professor Linnekin’s method of teaching the class I think really furthers students’ understanding of religion as a whole.

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[DC]: Live and Learn spoke with the Women’s Center about what they do on campus, how to get involved, and what the cultural centers can do to help the student population be more aware of the world around them.

[Stephanie Goebel] My name is Steph Goebel, I’m the outreach committee chair for the Women’s Center here at UConn. The Women’s Center was created to establish gender equity here at the University of Connecticut, so it came out of campus activism, activism around equality in access to the field house, equality for university professors who weren’t receiving tenure on the basis of gender, just to continue to make sure that we’re educating the student body on what gender equity is and how they can help and pursue that as students here at UConn and then as they go into the greater world, achieve that in the spheres of influence after the university. It’s also to make sure that the university is holding themselves accountable to that equal treatment of everybody regardless of gender. They are able to create programs that address topics of gender-based violence, gender-based issues like pay equity, one thing we’re very focused on is campus safety, so they do things like the SlutWalk, and then they have the Speak Out afterward. And then we talk about different issues pertaining to what it’s like to be a woman on this campus, what it’s like to be a man on this campus as well. So they’ve got the Men’s Project which focuses on masculinity and the role that plays in young men’s lives here at the university and how masculinity influences the way you think about so many things. It’s also focused on making sure we’re not exclusionary in our work, that our work isn’t sexist or that it’s not classist and that we’re working within that to make sure we’re achieving goals on that sort of multi-dimensional level because everything is sort of interconnected.

[DC]: So what is gender equity, as a definition?

[SG]: It’s being treated in everybody’s eyes, regardless of gender, especially as a university student or somebody who teaches here that you’re going to be treated on the basis of your work, rather than your gender.

[DC]: And the Women in STEM program, what does that involve?

[SG]: That’s run by my friend Kavya. She runs it like this mentorship program, so you’re assigned another student who’s going to be your mentor in that program. It’s for younger students who are in that Woman in STEM program, and to make sure these women feel comfortable in the field that they’ve chosen, that they continue on with it. Especially, as a woman, when you’re one of the only women in the classroom. And I think it sort of encourages you, that yes it is hard but it can be done, and I’ve done it before and I’m so passionate about it and I love it so much now.

[DC]: What advice would you have for students who are maybe just starting their UConn career.

[SG]: I think it’s really about knowing yourself, finding out what your interests are, and being ok with that you don’t have something to fill every box, that if you’re passionate about something, run with it. And that your free time is so important, that element of self care is so important, it’s more important than your resume or how long it is. I think that coming to UConn, I would hope to tell myself, to take it slow and dive in headfirst, and experience and understand that you don’t have to be perfect.

Coming to the Women’s Center, coming to one of the Cultural Centers, figuring out how your identity plays into the work that you do here and how it informs the education you’re getting here, how it informs the work that you’re eventually going to do, understanding the intersection of your identities, because the Cultural Centers aren’t just for people who are of that identity, it’s for everybody to learn more about those cultures.

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[DC]: That’s all for this week, stop by honors.uconn.edu/podcast and enter for a nifty long-sleeve t-shirt with the code word “self-care”.

 

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