10V The Guide to Success; Creativity

Creativity - the use of the imagination or original ideas, esp. in the production of an artistic work.

Before this week I believed that creativity referred to being good in the arts, such as painting or playing an instrument, but I was incredibly wrong. Creativity is more than just being artistic or having musical abilities. Being creative is stepping out of the box and taking risks. In college especially just having a degree in a specific major isn’t going to get you a job. So many people are graduating that same year with that same degree and are going to be going after the same job you are going after. So what makes you stand out? Creativity is what makes a person stand out from a crowd who all share the same characteristics. Being creative in this situation is taking risks and proving that you have more skills and potential that those who simply just have a degree. By volunteering is the first step to standing out. Once you have volunteered for a while, move up into a leader position. This is what jobs are looking for, they want leaders who have the necessary skills to do the job right. Creativity is a huge part of becoming successful. You need both motivation and creativity in order to reach success and get the job you want after college.

Two words I have learned this week are benign and malevolence. Benign refers to a mild type of character that does not threaten health or life; harmless. Malevolence refers to having, showing, or arising from intense, often vicious ill will, spite, or hatred. These are words I have looked up on a college vocabulary dictionary I found. I have not been learning new vocabulary words in my classes because of midterms; my professors are just reviewing the material we have learned the first couple weeks of the semester!

10I Spooky Decorating

Since this is the week of Halloween, Chase Hall (the hall I live in) decided to have a floor contest. The contest was a halloween decorating competition! The floor that created the best and spookiest decoration of their common area won a social of their choice. On tuesday night almost everyone on the 5th floor of chase met in the common room and began decorating the lobby. The RA’s on the floor, Daniel and Cheryl went out and bought us different types of halloween decorations to make our floor prepared for halloween and the contest. After about an hour and a half, our common room was totally transformed. We put streamers, fake blood, hands coming out of the ground and many more scary and spooky things all over the common area. It was a little creepy walking through there at night sometimes!


On wednesday during Hall Council it was announced that the 6th floor had one the contest. Even though my floor didn’t win the social, I still had fun decorating the floor and meeting more people who lives on the floor who I had not met yet. I hope chase has another decorating contest for another holiday soon!  

10B Dreaming of the Future

I have so many ideas and dreams for the future. Sometimes throughout the day I daydream and think about what my future would look like. I picture myself waking up every morning and driving to a school and teaching a group of 4-5 year olds the basics of reading, writing and imagination in a preschool environment. This is one of my biggest dream. Ever since my junior year I fell in love with teaching children in this age group. I was given the opportunity to teach for one day in a preschool like classroom though my child development class. I walked into the classroom about fifteen minutes before the parents would begin dropping their children off for the morning, I was both excited and nervous. As I played and taught my lesson plan to the class I fell more and more in love with this age group. Their eagerness, excitement and attention throughout the morning was amazing. I had never seen a group of children so happy to learn something new. As I left the classroom at the end of the day I knew this was something I wanted to do with the rest of my life. My biggest dream of mine is to have my own classroom in a school system and teach and develop the minds of those children who would be enrolled in my class. I think this career wouldn’t feel like work to me. I would be able to create fun and exciting lesson plans not only for the children to enjoy but also for my to have some fun too. Becoming a teacher is a dream I would love to achieve and could see myself doing for the rest of my life.

Senior cheerleading team I coached last season 

Another dream of mine is to become a cheerleading coach/choreographer. I discovered this is something I enjoyed my freshmen year of high school. My town has a youth cheerleading league that cheers for the youth football team. My coach would select a few girls from every grade and assign them a team to help out with and help improve their skills. I was selected to coach the senior cheerleading team which consists of 7th and 8th graders. This opportunity opened my eyes to how much I could help and improve those girl’s skills. I could also relate to them a lot because many of them who were in 8th grade, wanted to try out for the high school team, and I was in their position the year before. Coaching was probably one of my favorite things I did throughout high school. Many of my teammates and fellow coaches always talked about how we would love to coach our own teams some day or open a cheerleading gym and focus more on the competitive aspect of cheerleading. Opening up a gym or just coaching a high school or middle school level team in the future is another important dream of mine. Cheerleading has been apart of my life since I was in middle school and I have loved every single moment of it. It has opened my eyes to so many different experiences and opportunities I would have never been able to witness without being a part of a cheerleading team.  

These dreams of mine are very realistic and achievable. Right now I am just beginning my path to becoming a teacher and still cheerleading. I am just merely four to five years away to achieve my dream of becoming a preschool teacher. This year I am taking a year off from coaching since I am at school and don’t have a car on campus. I am hoping that next year I can start coaching the team I have been with for the past couple years again. The future as I dream it would be perfect. I would be doing the two things I have fallen in love with throughout high school which is teaching and coaching cheerleading.

10A Midterm Review

At first the thought of creating a video about a certain aspect of the Southern community worried me. I had no idea how I was going to create a 5-7 minute video about Southern. After I sat down and brainstormed some ideas I quickly narrowed down topic ideas to Southern Cheerleading. I felt better after I choose a topic that I have a personal connection to but I was still worried about hitting the 5-7 minute mark on the video. As I began to videotape practices and games, the time limit became the least of my worry. I focused more on the content of the video rather than the length and how I was going to connect Southern Cheerleading to the university. When I submitted my draft, I was shocked that I was halfway done with my project, having been so worried with the time limit before.

Overall I thought I did well on my video midterm project. My topic was spot on with going along with the theme of Southern spirit since cheerleading is all about showing school pride and spirit. My video opened with a video taken at the homecoming pep rally. Instead of showing the whole performance, I decided to take clips from the video and put music in the background. I thought that this was a very good way to start the video, I was able to grab and attract an audience. After my opening, I started by showing pictures and videos of Southern Cheerleading at various events and games. I then placed slides that discussed what Southern Cheerleading was all about, videos and pictures followed to prove my points.  I would also put in interviews from girls on the team in these sections to then again provide support for my slides. Though I did have four people interviewed for my project, I wish I was able to incorporate an upperclassmen interview, but the video I took for it didn’t work when I imported it into iMovie. The interviews I included though, were very good. They answered the question perfectly and helped make my video more exciting.

Technology wise, I have very little issues with using iMovie. It was a little tricky at first figuring out how to place videos and pictures into the program, but with the help of some friends and classmates who had experience with iMovie I was able to successful make my video and submit it on time. The only issue I had with sound during the project was the last interview with the cheerleading coaches. I took the interview after the game and there was a lot of background noise that made it difficult to focus on what Alyssa and Emily were saying. I played around with the sound settings and boosted the volume and tried to reduce the background noise. The video is still kinda hard to hear, but it was the best I could do. Another issue I had was with my upperclassman interview. For some reason when I recorded the video on my phone, it wouldn’t allow me to import it into iMovie. It was very frustrating and I tried everything I could to resolve the issue but was unsuccessful.

If I was given more time to work on this assignment I would have wanted to incorporate the competitive aspect of cheerleading. Not only do we cheer at home football and basketball games but Southern Cheerleading performs an intense two and a half minute routine that they perfect until nationals. Including this in my video would have shown that cheerleading has evolved into a competitive sport that also still keeps in mind the traditional cheerleading.

Overall I think I deserve an A on this project. I worked hard and continuously to provide a quality

finished video. I started with a clear beginning that grabbed the audience’s attention, then listed the qualities that Southern cheerleading has and then tied it into why cheerleading is important to the university. I enjoyed working on this project over the course of the past couple weeks!

INQ Midterm SCSU Cheerleading Final

9I Sonia Sotomayor's Exciting Visit to Southern

On Monday night I was able to experience a once in a lifetime opportunity to see the Supreme Court Justice of the United States Sonia Sotomayor in the Lyman Center. Sonia was asked to speak to first year students this year because Southern choose her book My Beloved World as the common read for incoming freshmen. Students in Inquiry classes were asked to write down some questions for Sonia to answer during the interview and some few lucky student’s questions were chosen for Sonia to answer.

Before the interview started, many students submitted their six word memoir to the school and many creative memoirs were chosen and shown on the projector as students were finding their seats. Sonia appreciated everyone’s six word memoirs and admired many of them. As Sonia answered questions, she gave advice that was specifically for first year students who were the majority who attended her visit. One thing she told us to do is take all different types of classes. She encourages all students to explore courses we may not be comfortable with. She said that this will help expand our knowledge and make us all smarter individuals.

Sonia Sotomayor’s visit to Southern’s campus will be one I will never forget. She talked and gave out so much useful advice for all first year students to think about and incorporate into their lives. Her visit to Southern was very important and exciting!

9B Striving for Good Grades

I was extremely proud when I pulled up my grades on banner web this past week. When school first started I told myself that I needed to work hard and do very well in all my classes if I wanted to gain admission to the education and psychology department which requires your GPA to be above a 2.7. Also for cheerleading, I am required to keep my grades above a C- or I will not be able to practice, cheer at games or perform at events. My coaches always tell us that the reason why we are at Southern is to receive an education, so our grades always come before cheerleading. With these two motivational forces in place, I need to stay on top of my school work in order to pursue admissions into those departments and continue cheerleading at Southern.

I am happy to say that my lowest grade at this point is a B+ and my highest is an A. So far this semester I have been very successful in my classes. I am taking the necessary time to study, complete homework and assignments on time and handing in quality work. I am finding that the classes I am taking right now are at the perfect level for me. I am being challenged yet I am able to understand the course work and still receiving good grades.

For the rest of the semester I am going to keep up the same momentum I have been putting into my school work so far. The way I have been studying and dividing my time to do homework has been working perfectly to my advantage. A goal I want to achieve is not have any of my grade fall below a B-. As the semester comes closer to a close, more of my professors are going to begin throwing more assignments and exams at students, but I believe I can continue to do well as the semester closes and some of my classes begin to get harder. Another goal I have is to study and do extremely well on final exams. I always struggle with Final exams, so this year I am going to pursue more time into studying for my finals than I had ever done in high school.

So far I have had a very successful first semester. I am going to continue to do well in my courses through the rest of the semester and do well on my finals. I am very happy with my midterm grades!