Month: September 2022

Global warming is a very important and pressing issue in today’s world, yet we as a society are very divided on the topic. There is a lot of evidence all pointing out that our planet is undergoing severe global warming and climate change, and it is our duty to try and lower the rate. This artifact has no background as it is a free template for climate change posters on Adobe’s website, yet it has no author. This means either someone at Adobe made it to make the issue of climate change more aware or someone made a poster on climate change using Adobe’s software and an employee at Adobe put it up. At first glance, the poster looks like a regular global warming or climate change poster. On the other hand, once you take a deeper look at it, you will find that there are many hidden meanings and messages within the poster. This artifact from Adobe hints possible outcomes if we do not lower the rate of climate change and has a variety of lenses that we can view through.

Speech Outline:

• Address how the artifact looks like a normal climate change poster at first glance but has a lot of hidden meanings and messages within it.
• Talk about how climate change is real and the supporting evidence for it from NASA.
• Look at the artifact through a logos lens and relate it to the climate pledges from Apple and FedEx.
• Look at the artifact through a visual rhetoric lens and see how the Earth is melting, etc.
• Final thoughts and call to action.

In this week’s passions blog, I will be writing about exactly what goes through my head on the golf course and how it has changed the way I think on a daily basis. While there are a lot of physical and swing-structure factors that go into golf, golf is equally if not more a mental game. This is what truly makes golf an actual sport. Just in case any of you don’t know the basics of golf, basically the goal is to get the ball in the hole in as few strokes as possible. Make sure you bring two pairs of pants in case you get a hole in one! (That was one of my puns). The par of each hole is the recommended amount of strokes it should take for a good golfer to get the ball in the hole based on the length of the hole–there are par 3s, 4s, and 5s.

Now that you guys know the basics of golf, I am now going to address how I think throughout my round on the golf course. Similar to how there are multiple approaches to making a par on a hole in golf, I learned that there are many different ways to reach a goal in life. For example, there are many times I approach a hole in golf expecting to have a good tee shot in order to make it an easy hole, but then I mess up from the very beginning and slice my drive into the trees. In my early stages of playing golf, I would think that my hopes of making a par on that hole were over, but slowly I learned that it definitely is possible–and now I am more comfortable trying to make par from the trees. Instead of going for the hero shot, I decide to play it safe and just punch out of the trees, hit a wedge into the green, and sometimes I get lucky and drain that putt for par. Otherwise worse come worse I make a bogey but at least I didn’t risk getting an even worse score by going for the green.

Along with discovering that there are multiple approaches to an end goal similar to the many ways I can make a par in golf, golf taught me that overthinking can lead to unnecessary mistakes. Overthinking, especially before you take a shot, in golf can lead you to getting distracted while making a swing and it overall does not help you. It is much better to have a clear and worry-free mind and you end up shooting a lower score and even have more fun on the course! My rule of thumb is to have nothing but clear and positive thoughts in your mind, and there is no ifs, ands, or putts to it. (That was my other pun). I have adapted this mindset to my thinking on a daily basis and it has helped me a lot with managing my stress and mental health.

Similar to how I mentioned last week that everyone has a hobby, that hobby helps people check out from the world and get in their comfort zone instead of constantly being out of it. For me, when I am on the golf course, I feel as if I am in my home away from home. Especially when coming to Penn State, I felt at peace and reminded myself of home when I went out for a round at the Blue Course the second weekend of college. I had never played the course before, but just being on a golf course in general put my mind at ease after all of the craziness and how busy I was during the first two weeks of college (everyone can relate to what I am talking about). 

Whether I am by myself, with my best friends, or even with complete strangers that I met for the first time, I always enjoy my time on the golf course. There are days where I am playing really well and there are many more days where I am playing poorly and nothing is working out for me, but I still always end up coming back to the golf course. When I play by myself, I usually take time to reflect on what has been happening in my life over the past few days or weeks, I try to focus hard on my swing and game to see how good I can play when nobody is there to judge me, and I tie it all together by listening to some music. When I am with my friends, I am more relaxed and usually smiling the entire time while we crack jokes, make fun of each others’ swings, and overall have a great time while the four hours on the golf course fly by. Unlike most golfers, I also enjoy getting paired up with random strangers and playing a round with them. Over the course of the four hour round, I get to learn about the person’s life stories, learn a swing tip or two, and get a lot of advice both career-wise and socially to use for the rest of my life.

Golf is a sport that one can play for the rest of their life. Since I am planning on heading into the business and investments world, this sport will be a way for me to connect with people and coworkers outside of the general office environment; perhaps I will one day receive a job offer from someone while playing 18 holes with them. I definitely believe that everyone should give the sport a shot, whether it be visiting a topgolf with friends and family, going to a driving range, or even driving around in a golf cart while your buddies are playing. Next week I plan on discussing how golf has changed the way I think on a daily basis.

Someone’s elevator pitch that intrigued me is Gina Seo’s. I was specifically interested in hers from the start since I am interested in the United Nation’s sustainability goal of quality education for all. I remember wanting to write about the quality education goal but I knew that my knowledge about climate change was greater so I switched to that. Gina brought up a lot of valid points about quality education that were related to her artifact. I believe her being a woman talking about how women in third-world countries getting hit the hardest in terms of quality education made it more convincing and persuasive for the story-telling part of her elevator pitch. She hinted to specifics in her artifact such as how more than 11 million girls are at risk of not going back to school. The pandemic not only put them out of school but also put them at an even bigger risk of poverty and violence. Gina’s elevator pitch taught me that the pandemic’s effects are still ongoing, especially in third-world countries. This has led to more gender inequality, where women are getting the worse end of the stick and aren’t even able to go back to school to get a quality education. The only piece of feedback for Gina that I had would be to shorten her speech to about 1-2 minutes and revise it a bit more so she doesn’t have to look down at her paper as much.

I chose this artifact on climate change because it looks quite simple at first glance, yet it conveys a big message once you take a deeper look into it. Clearly it shows that climate change is real and a prevalent issue in our world today. According to NASA, “from global temperature rise to melting ice sheets, the evidence of a warming planet abounds.” If one looks at this situation through a logos lens, they will find how the evidence backs reducing carbon footprints to help save our planet. Large companies like Apple and FedEx have made climate change pledges to become carbon neutral by 2030. In the cartoon drawing the artifact shows the Earth with a drop underneath it. Looking at it through a visual rhetoric lens, I believe the blobbiness, the globe tilted on its axis, and the land and water not being in the correct spots are hinting that the Earth is melting from all of the global warming and even turning disoriented because of it. This artifact does not have much background information as it is one of the free climate change poster templates on Adobe’s website, so perhaps someone at Adobe themselves created it to advocate about stopping climate change and global warming. I also agree with the civic artifact that climate change is real and a topic that we as a country should not be divided about. We, as a community of everyone on Earth, need to work together to start making more environmentally friendly decisions in order to lower the rate of global warming and climate change so that we can continue to happily live on this planet. 

Links used: https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

https://www.iberdrola.com/sustainability/climate-change-endangered-species

https://www.adobe.com/express/create/poster/climate-change

I believe that everyone needs a hobby in life. Perhaps people spend time on a hobby and realize it’s their hobby. Others may spend a lot of time and enjoyment on something but haven’t realized it’s their hobby. In my situation, I spent a lot of time playing video games as they served as a way to connect and socialize with my friends. I never played video games alone, but I always played with my friends for the social aspect of it, especially during the pandemic when we weren’t able to see each other as often. That served as the case until I got introduced to my true hobby: golf. I remember that my dad played golf on the weekends with his friends, bringing me to the driving range every so often, but I genuinely started to enjoy playing golf once I got my swing figured out. 

I attended a golf summer camp the summer heading into my freshman year of high school, and my summer camp golf coach (who ended up becoming my swing instructor to this day) told me he heard good things about the golf program at my high school (St. Joseph’s Prep) and that I should try out. I worked more on my swing for the rest of the summer and played my first two rounds of golf the weekend before tryouts. Those two rounds built up some confidence in me, but that all went away after I missed the ball in front of everyone on the first tee and then proceeded to top the ball. Everything turned into shambles that day and I shot a 144 (the highest score possible, given the rules).

Devastated by my poor performance and not making the team, my dad motivated me by saying I will only go up from this point. I worked hard on my game (practicing for over two hours a week and playing both days on the weekends) and eventually made the JV team my sophomore year. During that season, I discovered that golf served as my true hobby because I not only enjoyed my time playing the sport but also experienced the social aspect of playing with my close friends instead of always playing with my dad. 

Since then, I played varsity golf for my junior and senior years and look forward to playing club golf at Penn State. Now my entire friend group plays golf, so we go out and play every weekend (we played almost every day over the summer). At this point in my life, golf acts as both a hobby and a part of my personality and everyday life. In my future passion blogs, I hope to write about what exactly happens on the golf course and why my friends and I find it so enjoyable.

My first idea for my passion blog topic is golf. I have been playing golf for the past 5 years and I truly believe being a golfer helps define who I am as a person today. I knew I could only go up the ladder after shooting a 140 (the max score possible) during my freshman year tryouts and did so by making the J.V. team sophomore year and varsity for both my junior and senior years. During the pandemic, golf was one of the only things I was able to do and playing the sport almost every day allowed me to keep my mental health in check through 2020. I have a lot of experience with the game that helped me both mentally and socially so I believe I can write a lot about it in my passion blog.

My other idea that I could write my passion blog about is cars. From a very young age I have been a big fan of cars and remember steering the car through the neighborhood while sitting in my dad’s lap. I keep up with what’s going on in the car world on a day-to-day basis and am always fascinated when new features come out or when records are broken. Currently, my top two car brands that I am a fan of are Porsche and Tesla. I am always the person that picks my family’s next car because of how much I know about them and I have pretty good taste. I could go on and on about cars as well and even diversify what I talk about so that could also be a good topic for me. 

The Sustainable Development Goal I chose is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. In this case, a quality education is the commonplace that is deployed in the civic event; everything ends up coming back to it and it is a core basis of everyone’s lives.. According to the United Nation’s website, 147 Million Children missed over half of in-person instruction due to the pandemic. To this day, there are still millions of children without access to a proper education. As the United Nations puts it “education is a lifeline for children in crisis.” A proper education can help children get out of poverty or whatever type of situation they are in. Education gives children access to opportunities they could have never imagined before. Similar to how athletes from poorer areas are able to get a full scholarship to a university and some eventually are able to play in the professional leagues, geniuses from areas of poverty are able to earn a full scholarship to a university where they end up in a successful career and are able to give back to where they started from. In order to do so, these geniuses still need a quality education from the start. It is not fair that people like us in first world countries have the privilege of getting a quality education with a proper curriculum from the start whereas people born in poorer areas of the world aren’t even though they had no control of that. If everyone had access to a proper education from the start, I believe that the top people in the world (CEOs, Billionaires, World Leaders and Politicians) would be a lot more diverse and there would be more perspectives at the top end of the spectrum instead of our current situation today.

Links used: https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal4