"Momma, I need my black leggings. I think I left them on the bed. No? Check the drawer. No, the third one down. Moom. Listen to me. Third drawer. Oh my lanta."
Click.
My old roommate is a different person on the phone with her Momma. Actually, that's not completely true—her personality is just as strong, and her vocal decibels are just as loud. The main difference is the pull on the ends of her words, dragging out the vowels to prove she's really from out in the boonies. She is a living example of the nurture side of the nature versus nurture debate. When I go home with her, we both come back with accents. But she's more than just a country girl.
As soon as you hit the top of the second escalator out of Stadium-Armory, you are accosted by vendors hawking fake D.C. United merchandise. Unless you want an official jersey, you can save about $105 by buying a rip-off t-shirt to show your fanhood. One of the girls I was with bought her sports-minded brother a t-shirt. Another bought one, saying, "I'm cheap, and it's only five dollars, so I have to buy it!" (logic that may fall apart at some point). Since it was my first time at a D.C. game, I decided to start small.
I made a newbie mistake, though: I bought a t-shirt from one of the vendors who did not promise "front-and-back." Mine has a lonely screen-printed D.C. United emblem on the front, while the back is a large white blank. The hasty exchange taught me to take my time in the future; fortunately, a five-dollar mistake is not grave and by the time we passed a folding table covered with Costco packs of chips and candy for sale, I had forgotten about the t-shirt purchase and eagerly scoped the landscape for the swayed outline of RFK Stadium.
Mason students prepare to impact incoming freshmen
By REBECCA DELL
Published April 15, 2011
Whitney Hammond will peer advise
this fall during her last semester at
Mason before she graduates.
Rebecca Dell
FAIRFAX, Va. – When Whitney Hammond came to George Mason University as a transfer student in the fall of 2009, she decided to get involved. Right now that means that she is training to be a peer advisor for University 100, a college transition class for freshman, before she goes on to graduate in December.
A key component of the training is experiential learning, or learning by doing. A recent weekend retreat at Camp Horizons in Harrisonburg, Va., gave peer advisors the chance to get to know one another and develop leadership skills through hands-on experiences such as a high ropes course.
Elizabeth Bernard, the director of Mason's Transition Resource Center—home base for University 100—believes that experiential learning is increasingly popular at universities around the globe because it helps students apply what they have learned in ways that will be useful post-graduation. Through situational, team-based activities, students learn to communicate and resolve conflict, according to Bernard.
Coupling experiential learning with a faculty and student co-teaching team is a focal point of University 100. Peer advisors like Hammond can offer first-hand advice and instruction based on their own recent experiences.
"[Peer advisors] are really a role model and a friend to new students in helping them get through all the things, both good and bad, that they have to face in those first few months on campus," said Bernard.
After working as a Patriot Leader at Mason orientations last summer, Hammond is looking forward to providing hands-on leadership where she gets to connect with the same students for their crucial first semester at college.
"People come and they go, but with University 100 you're going to be able to really, you know, impact these students and really be able to just be that supportive shoulder for them for a whole semester," she said.
New and returning peer advisors play Ultimate Rock Paper
Scissors—where losing competitors join with the person
who beat them until two final teams go head-to-head—as
they get to know each other at Camp Horizons.
Rebecca Dell
Freshman Harriet Flynn crosses one of the high ropes
challenges at Camp Horizons. Rebecca Dell
New peer advisors Deqa Abdillahi, Jazmine Butts
and Ji Hye Kim participate in a peer-led icebreaker
Ok, normally I'm not a big events person, but this year I'm participating in Relay for Life, which is an American Cancer Society fundraiser where teams commit to having at least one team member walking/running all through the night to raise awareness and funds for cancer research. This cause is close to my heart because of all the people I've known who have battled and are battling cancer. I know most people today can relate, too: whenever the topic of cancer comes up, almost everyone says they know someone affected by the killer disease.
Although death and disease will be a reality for us until heaven and God uses cancer and other hardships in our lives to bring us closer to Him (click here to read John Piper's article on not wasting your cancer), God has also gifted us with the capacity for compassion. He has mercifully given us the ability to research and discover new medicines and treatments (here's another article by Piper about our response to disease). God is always in control and He is always good. I'm relaying for my family and friends, but I'm also relaying for the glory of the One who gives and takes away with perfect wisdom and goodness. Blessed be His name.
write about a place that I know well, and about which I have a decided opinion
The first things you notice in the city are the bars, and this house is no different. Every window and door is covered with iron grids. The sliding garage doors, leaving criss-cross shadows on the cool twelve-inch floor tiles, have to be opened with a key and a remote control (as the owner jokingly refers to his teenage son when they pull up in front of their house). There are bars outside of the sliding door that leads from the dining room to the narrow walkway around the house (even though the walkway is already protected by a solid wall interrupted only by more bars). The upstairs veranda houses a little row of green pepper plants, reaching their little heads towards the sun, and prevented from escape by curved iron bars.
