Hello everyone,
I hope everyone is doing well. There are 2 weeks of the semester left now and I only have 7 days of classes remaining. The picture on the left is of the beautiful flowering tree at LC 1 year ago this week. I am not stoked about having to do finals online and not surrounded by my friends and peers. In my art history class we have a big paper due as well as an exam, in my religious studies class we have a short paper due and a final exam, and in my international affairs course we have a final project to do. I miss not being able to spend reading days together with my friends studying and hanging out. There’s always fun events that happen during finals on-campus to help students take their mind off the stress for a little while. On Wednesday the rising juniors all signed up for the rest of their fall classes. I was able to get into all the classes I wanted to, which was nice. I am really looking forward to them. Friday was the annual Festival of Scholars celebration at LC where classes are cancelled for the day and everyone attends panels, presentations, and performances celebrating all the awesome research and things students have done. They were able to move the celebration to an online version and I attended one of the panels where I got to see my friend Emma present her history thesis.
This Thursday, during my Social Justice in the Global Economy class, we all presented our grant proposals that we have been writing for the past two weeks. The grant proposal project was essentially our midterm for the class. Our professor, Elizabeth Bennett, pushed us to write a real evidence-based grant proposal for an initiative of our choice that would bring social justice to the global economy. I really appreciate opportunities to do projects like these that reflect real world skills such as grant writing. We spend lots of time in the class learning about the system and the issues in our world. It is awesome to be able to actually apply that knowledge to a project that is meaningful beyond just the classroom. My group wrote our grant proposal about revitalizing the ILO’s original program for the economic and social empowerment of returned victims of human trafficking. We actually started out with a different topic and proposed funding a transnational slavery intervention task force - but we got a C on our rough draft and decided we really needed to come up with something better, more specific, and concrete. In only 2 pages, all groups had to identify the social injustice, discuss alternative interventions, propose their intervention, justify it and the outcomes, discuss positive and negative externalities, identify indicators of success in 5 and 10 years time, and identify possible challenges or risks of failure. This was definitely not an easy assignment but it is one of the coolest projects I’ve done in college so far. In class on Thursday night, all the groups presented to each other and had to answer questions/defend why their intervention was the one that should be funded. By the end of it all, my group’s project was the one that “won” and we got an A on the final draft which was nice too.
This week I’ve been doing some more cooking and baking. For lunch the other day I made fried rice. I also made a peanut noodle dish and yakisoba this week. I’ve also been making more sourdough bread. Today I dropped off a loaf I made at my friend’s house. On Friday my good friend Veronica dropped off some bubble tea she had made and we also swapped books. I encourage you, if you’re interested and have the means, to create something (food or maybe a craft) and drop it off at a friend or family member’s home (while maintaining proper social distancing measures of course). You can send a little positivity and care to someone else (and you can busy yourself for an hour or two while you make the thing).
Stay safe and stay informed,
Sarah