Tag Archives: #rcl1213

THOUGHTS.

The This I Believe speech seems like an awesome assignment that will help me not only communicate what I believe but help me figure out a little bit of what I believe. I am thinking I might do something with believing in the importance of language and communication and provide an ancedote of when I was younger in kindergarden and didn’t know English. I didn’t know enough English to ask where the bathroom was and communicate I had to go, so I had to go in my pants. Casual. I am also thinking about taking another route and making my essay focus on the Da Vinci quote “Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication”. Although, I do not always live by it, that quote really resonates with me and I think I could write an effective essay explaining why. I think if I used this approach my essay would focus on the time I bought my first car (an 800 piece of junk) and how I immediately fell in love with it. These are just two ideas though.

I definitely think I am going to write about either the environment or education for my civic issues blog. I am very interested in both of these topics. All my major related classes have to do with the environment because I am majoring in Energy Engineering, and even though I’m not too much of a current events person I always find myself interested in the news when the topic is something like Hydraulic Fracturing (which I bullied my group into researching last semester for the history of a public controversy project). For my paradigm shift paper last semester I chose to talk about the overusage of ADHD drugs to make up for sub-par education in urban areas, such as Washington D.C. Topics such as these really intrigue me and later in my life I want to become a high school teacher so I am very interested in learning about the constant changes and adjustments going on in the education world.  

I am REALLY confused as to what to write about for my passion blog.  I really do want to be passionate about what I write about. Last semester my blog didn’t really have a category, but I think (hope) a lot of my peers found it to be relatively entertaining. I guess my blog last semester was just an honest reflection of my day to day life last year. I could blog about photography and try to replicate some photography that I like and throw in some pictures I’ve taken and take new ones for the blog but I feel like it’s annoying to write about photography when everyone can just see it. Overall, I’m lost.

Dr.Turgay Ertekein

My freshman seminar teacher, Dr.Turgay Ertekein, is the epitome of the word boss. He literally runs shit. If you want to take a casual look at his 52 page resume  here’s the link: http://www.eme.psu.edu/sites/default/files/ertekin-cv.pdf. Here’s what a student on rate my professors had to say about Dr. Ertekein: “Dr. Ertekin is absolutely brilliant. While he is challenging, he is helpful and accessible. He can be very grandfather-ish, and I find his demeanor very charming and welcoming. Dr. Ertekin is worldly and full of information – so triple check any facts you use in papers or presentations! All in all he is genuine, intelligent, helpful, and funny!”.

I think this commentary is definitely very reflective of Dr.Ertekein. He knows everything there is to know about alternative energy sources and even more on natural gas and petroleum engineering (considering he is the head of PNG). But he is also so sweet and grandfatherly. He uses his words wisely and speaks really slowly. He appeals to everyone because he looks like a turkish santa claus and on top of that he’s brilliant. Casual, no? Sorry, I am kind of obsessed with this guy.

 

he’s a little bit younger in this picture

obstacles to the project.

I think our group will work really well together and that everyone will contribute a fair amount, however I feel as if we are all really flustered with all the work we have right now so we’re not focusing on the project as of now. Of course this will have to change very soon. I think our biggest struggle will be to find a good meeting time that’ll work for all of us hopefully after class will be the best option. I know I personally have not worked hard on the project yet. I am hoping to find a lot of time this weekend to put aside to work on the project and hopefully talk to some professors and I’m sure my group will be doing the same. I am hoping to start the beginning of the video this weekend I think it will be difficult to synthesize our iMovie but it’ll happen. We will all have to meet for a large portion of time, but it is convenient that I have used iMovie before and that I have a MacBook.

The Boy Who Cried Warming

The Boy Who Cried Warming is a documentary with the purpose of exposing global warming as a fraudulent claim made by governments to make money from us citizens. Although I really don’t agree with anything the movie is saying it uses very adept techniques to promote its agenda. It reinforces everything we know and then calls it all into question . And then makes several claims that are shocking, but validated by professionals on the subject. This makes for an eye-opening effect. The trailer itself does a nice job of setting itself up for some sort of scandal just by the music itself. I hope that we’re able to use a similar method by setting up our documentary with a sort of frantic tone talking about the energy crisis and then dive into our issue.

introduction of history of a public controversy

I think for the beginning of our video it would be best to start with something like talking about the energy criss and how seriously it actually is, how our reserves are depleting and we’re running out of resources to tap into (using statistics and graphs to build ethos of course). And then we can talk about the discovery of the marcellus shale and what it could mean. Talk about all the positives of and how this could be a short term solution to our impending energy doom. But then introduce the catch: HYDRAULIC FRACTURING. This is where I would like to insert a professor (probably my seminar professor) talking about what hydraulic fracturing actually is and what it could mean. This will be an effective intro to lead into the heart of our topic: the controversy over it and the very differing opinions of experts on the practice which will (hopefully) be shown through a round table discussion of these professors.

AWKWARD.

Just yesterday I was reading an onward state blog (..yeah people actually blog even though they don’t have to for english class..crazy right?!) titled “Awkward Things You Do to Awkwardly Avoid Awkward Situations”. It was absolutely hilarious, I totally recommend it:http://onwardstate.com/2012/11/27/awkward-things-you-do-to-awkwardly-avoid-awkward-scenarios/. And I felt like I could relate to absolutely every scenario they touched on, whether it be tripping down Forum building’s steps, going for a drink that isn’t mine at starbucks, or even being in the shower when a girl comes in the shower next to me with her boyfriend for some “personal time”.

The amount of times the word awkward is used just in the title alone and the rise of the new TV show “AWKWARD.” and also the fact that my blog in high school was titled “Awkward moments. All day. Every day.”, is leading me to question is our generation just more awkward in general or do we just make a bigger deal out of mishaps and consider even the littlest things to be gaffes? May be all this texting/ avoiding social interaction is really getting to us.

Just today, I walked into a study lounge without knowing someone else was in there and found myself urged to leave. I couldn’t even sit next to someone I didn’t know for a couple hours to crank out some chem homework. The weird thing is, I consider myself a really social person. Also, today while I was walking with a friend and he stopped to talk to one of his friends who I didn’t know I felt extremely uncomfortable. Are you supposed to join in the conversation and look like a nosy creep? Stand there awkwardly kind of listening? Pretend to text and look like a disengaged brat? or (what I ended up doing) just say “I’ll catch ya later!” and walk away? They all seem like terrible ideas to me. Last awkward moment of today (yes this all happened in one day…I’m just an awkward magnet”): someone in my seminar class said that Africa scares him,  I thought this was preposterous and very rude to say so I screamed back loudly: “You can’t just say you’re afraid of a country!”. The whole class heard. Well, it turns out that Africa is actually a continent. They all proceeded to express their doubts about me actually being in the honors college. It was a good time…for them.

Anyways, so for the lengthiness, I didn’t realize I had this much steam to blow off. I guess the lesson of the day is that Africa is a CONTINENT. xoxo.

utilizing local resources

Because our topic is hydraulic fracturing and we have the top Earths and Mineral Sciences College in the nation finding local resources shouldn’t be too difficult. The professors in that college are a tremendous resource. The two professors I have for my major related classes (energy engineer) are both experts in the field. My one professor, Dr. Turgay Ertekein (head of petroleum and natural gas engineering), actually just went to a conference in Colorado to propose a method of preventing hydraulic fracturing so he clearly knows his stuff. And my Energy and the Environment professor, Dr. Mark Klima (in the department of mining engineering), has brought up the topic many times and seems to know a lot of what he is talking about. Although these professors don’t get into their opinions on the topic too much in class, I’m sure if I interviewed them asking their opinions they would provide extremely valuable input. I think for the part where we’re talking in the presentation we should use places on campus as backdrops. May be we could even use the coveted TED talk room to build ethos. It might be interesting to get a political opinion on the idea of hydraulic fracturing because our leaders and government have large control over the issue through regulations and such. May be we could get some polisci grad students to talk to us about their opinions about how the government will effect fracking’s future. I think the majority of people here I’ve met want you to be successful and would be more than willing to help our group. It’s simply going to be a matter of whether or not we are proactive or not that will determine the outcome of our project.

conversion process

Converting the essay into a TED talk wasn’t quite as easy as I thought it would be. I realized that my essay had an extensive amount of stats and research and name-dropping. I included all of this to establish ethos. But when you’re presenting, if you present well and confidently you already have established a sense of ethos, so it’s not quite as important to have loads and loads of stats. Also, listing a bunch of stats while presenting is pretty boring. In my essay I focused a lot of what my shift was, why it was a significant and recent shift (exigence and kairos), and why the shift was occurring. I did not focus too much on speculation on what this meant for society, which I wish I had done a little bit better in the essay. So, the TED talk was the perfect opportunity for some speculation and to include more personal opinion. It was extremely difficult to get my essay under the time limit because I felt like everything I wrote in my essay was important (just a little bias because it took so long to write), so I struggled to liberally cut chunks here and there but I eventually had to (even then my speech was 5:20). Also, for the TED talk it is a lot more important to focus on the introduction and conclusion than it is for the paper because you have an audience that you want to make a good first impression on and a really good last impression on. But I have to say having the paradigm shift paper as a basis made the TED talk as pain-free as possible.

passionless?

I always thought that college would be the place where I would find myself and my passion. But so far it has anything but that, which has been disappointing to say the least. I couldn’t even come up with a legitimate topic for a passion blog earlier this semester so I chose to go for an umbrella one of “reflections and sarcastic commentary on the life of a freshman”. I was so involved in high school that I never really had a specific passion. I even joined three separate career orientated clubs (Future Teachers of America, Health Careers Club, and Future Business Leaders of America). Clearly I couldn’t go into all of these career paths, and the way it looks right now I won’t be going into any. Yet I still enjoyed all three clubs. Perhaps my passion was looking for a passion or just being involved? It’s harder here. No one knows who you are. You’re not entitled to respect from your teachers because they knew your sisters were hard-workers. And I thought this would be good for me. No outside influences. I would just do what I wanted and feel no outside pressure to be an overachiever or run for senior class president. But I feel like since I got here all I do is schoolwork and in all my free time I simply sleep, eat, watch tv, or on weekends binge….eat. I joined a THON org but I’m not nearly as crazed about it as everyone else. And I don’t want an unfulfilled life, but I can’t find what I need to give it meaning. Hopefully college gets easier as it goes on. That’s what everyone’s been saying. Sorry for the rant, I wasn’t trying to gather pity points. I guess it was just an honest reflection after a tough week but hey there’s always next week.

History of a Public Controversy

1) I thought it would be really interesting to work with same-sex marriage especially with the recent referendums yesterday. It doesn’t even have to be just in America. We could try to use evidence from Europe and so forth. I think a challenge in creating this is that it is such a controversial issue (not so much at the college level though) and my group wasn’t even too interested when I brought it up. They wanted to stay away from it. But I think a positive would be that people would be interested in our project and we could include a lot of personal stories through interviews.

2) Another controversial issue our group was considering was fracking. A challenge would be making the presentation not too scientific and interesting. I don’t an audience is naturally inclined to pay attention to the implications or hydraulic fracturing (besides energy engineer Janki). A positive outcome would be that we could educate our classmates about a very prevalent issue, one that is of special importance to Pennsylvanians.