Extracurriculars
I think what people do with their time says a lot about who they are and what their interests are...so here's a little glimpse into some of my past extra-curriculars
College:
Writers Blog: My senior year of college my friend Kate had this really neat idea. She said, I think we should start a club about blogging, because the two of us were both pretty active bloggers on LiveJournal, which in the pre-facebook days had one of the most-thriving online communication forums for UCSD students. So the two us ran with the idea, recruited our principal members from LiveJournal communities, wrote up a club consitution, and got it officially approved as a student group. And then we started holding regular meetups at Price Center, UCSD's student union. And at these meetings we got to learn all the faces and names behind the screen names and avatars that we'd already been interacting with in online capacities for some time. There was definitely a neat sense of unity to the group, as we all had a shared interest, and would spend much of our meetings discussing how we didn't have any interesting stories to tell, because if we had, we would have already read them on each other's blogs. Needless to say that didn't stop us from holding regular meet ups. As far as the club name, originally we thought about calling it a LiveJournal club, but then we thought Writers Blog sounded a bit more hip--which would reduce the intimidation factor when you're you're walking around the student union trying to distinguish which big group of people sitting around is the "writers blog" group rather than the chemistry study-session or friends who met up after class. In retrospect, maybe it wouldn't have hurt to have made a small sign to identify us...oh well...the next meetup group I start, we'll have to remember that.
Warren Community Development Council: Once my term RDAC ran out, I joined my roommate on the Community Development Council (CDC...yes, what an interesting acronym for a club I know) which actually a club dedicated toward improving the experience of residential life at Warren. The Resident Dean had appointed a student intern to oversee this club. We held occasional study-break activities such as pancake "dinners" or video game nights to get people out of their dorm rooms and meeting their neighbors. We also held a resident of the month award program where people could nominate their friends or roommates for their contributions to the residential life community. It was always a lot of fun to walk to people's dorm rooms to distribute resident of the month awards--people always enjoyed receiving a blue resident of the month plastic cup full of candy along with their certificate of recognition!
Warren Resident Dean Advisory Council: My freshman year, our monthly bulletin from the RA had an annoucement about how we could apply to be part of the Resdent Dean's student advisory council, a group of about 10-20 students that would meet weekly with our college's resident dean to share student viewpoints, give our opinions about the residential life aspects of our college, and propose improvements--basically be the voice of the students for the resident dean who doesn't always have time to get to know everyone. I didn't even really grasp this was a competitive application process to be a part of this group. I just saw the ad and thought it sounded like a lot of fun and something I'd be good at--I love giving my opinion about things! So I jumped on it, and wasn't at all stressed during the interview for the council. I didn't realize the interview was more than simply a "formality" until I'd already been accepted as one of the council members! It was really neat to have the opportunity to know the resident dean better, she was a really nice lady, and discussing the inside scoop about the renovations going on in the apartments and whether the elevator permits were up to date and how to get things added onto the menu at Canyon Vista (our cafeteria).
High School:
Debate Club. Freshman year I joined the debate club. I didn't
really end up getting to involved in the club though because it was brand new
part-way through the year, so by the time they actually got around to starting
to do anything besides eating pizza and talking about what debate means, I
was at a different high school.
Green Club. So then I joined the green club. This was back in the days before being it was trendy to be "green", and what being "green" meant was a really nebulous idea at that point. It was kind
of the outdoorsy club, kind of. Mostly I joined it because it didn't require
feigning interest in something I wasn't interested in (say drama club or band
club or the poetry club). We proposed and planned a number of hikes--more
often than not, it'd start pouring rain right before the appointed time and
it'd be muddy for hiking, so I never quite made it on a hike with the club. We proposed planting
trees in the senior parking lot a couple times, but never did to my knowledge
plant anything as a club. Mostly we just ate lunch together (indoors!) once a week, and
talked about how we should plan another hike--as soon as it stops raining so
much.
One time we actually did get out and have a tie-dye party in someone's
backyard, but I don't think anyone actually came up with a green tie-in for
it. Another time we had a movie party at someone's house. I think there were
some trees in the movie and it might have just had the word green in the title
of the movie or something, and we used green-colored paper napkins to eat
our pizza...see, its a "green party"!
Robotics Club. For some
reason senior year I decided I didn't like eating lunch outside and decided
to start attending more club meetings. In addition to my old standby green
club, I started going with Felicia to Multicultural club and Spanish Club.
I wasn't even taking Spanish! But hey, I like mexican food a lot more than I do German
food (no offense to German club), and they seemed to always be celebrating some
Spanish holiday or fiesta or something, so it wasn't too bad.
But randomly one day I decided
we should check out Robotics club. Turns out the only other senior in the club
was the girl who'd told me a guy wanted to ask me out the year before. Most
of the club was freshman and sophomore guys who were kind of quirky but interesting
characters, including a boy with lime-green hair. Yeah. So they tried to do
a fundraiser selling lollipops and I think they actually lost money on the
fundraiser, when it came down to it. It didn't seem like a club that was going
anywhere.
But then one day they said there was this robotics competition they
wanted to enter, and then one day they said there was going to be a meeting
in the evening about the robotics competition and we should bring our parents.
Uhhh okay. I didn't really understand what we were getting into, but my dad
really likes robotics, so he was more than happy to attend the meeting with
me. I think they showed a video about the competition, and that's when I really
understood this was something big, not just some little robot toy you put together
in an hour and run around the bathroom floor. And it turned out my dad happened
to know the mom of the club president from college. Apparently Jill had been
roommates with a girl my dad had dated or something before he met my mom. So
kind of one of those small-world moments. And as it turned out, this F.I.R.S.T. Robotics
competition was no small thing, it was hundreds of teams competing, required
working with professional engineers (kind of has a mentorship aspect to it
there) and it was a totally awesome experience. Our team even got to take a week off school to travel to Disney World for the national playoffs for the competition.
Junior High:
Volunteering at the Tiburon Salvage Shop (a local thrift sore jointly run by several local churches)
with my Grandma. I thought it was a lot of fun to volunteer there. Mostly we'd man the cash-register and ring up people's purchases. It was kind of fun to work together, and customers seemed to get a kick out of it! Course, there was sometimes straightening, and carrying bags of donations into the back room for sorting, and often opportunities to beg grandma to buy me some fun-lookin toys or games that had come in recently to the thift shop ;-). The most memorable thift shop purchase was either a gigantic bag of legos with all kinds of unusual parts, or the board game Bonkers. Bonkers didn't come with the instruction sheet, so we kind of had to figure out and/or make up the rules on our own. Eventually I wrote to the manufacturer to request a replacement instruction sheet, and it turns out we'd done a pretty good job at preserving the original intent of the game, but I think we decided we liked our house-rules even better than some of the official rules.
Jessica's Webpage -> About Me -> Here
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