Sunday, July 30, 2007
Location: My House in the Twin Cities
Mood: calm
What I'm Reading Now: Anything that will help me study for the GRE.
Hello, faithful readers! Once again, I have to apologize for taking so long to update. Technology is the source of my lateness this time around, however. I planned to write about the NEW Leadership Institute as soon as I got back. Unfortunately, I'd been having overheating and slowness issues with my laptop since around April, so I took the thing in to Geek Squad to have it examined. In exchange for $200, they agreed to fix it, a task that took over two months. Its turns out that, despite having installed Mcaffee and Spy Sweeper when I first bought the laptop two years ago, I had accumulated numerous viruses over the past few months for reasons that I won't go into. (I don't speak the Geek Squad language, so I barely understood the circumstances when they explained them to me, let alone repeating them to you.)
Luckily, I didn't lose any files in the process of this massive cleaning and now have it back in my possession, working very well. The moral of this story is: be careful what Web sites you visit (especially the freebie sites like geocities.com) and make sure that you update your virus protection every year.
So now I can move on to the purpose of this entry: NEW Leadership. Honestly, I can't find one word to describe the whole week. It was just amazing, cool, awesome . . . well, you get the idea. Its funny because we participants had things to do and lectures to attend from dawn till dusk. I don't think I got more than five hours of sleep each night, yet I've never had more fun in my life. Most of the week was devoted to, like I said, lectures and presentations about getting involved in the community, public speaking, grant writing, and, in general, becoming more involved in politics.
My favorite task was writing a stump speech, which is basically a speech that announce your candidacy for a political office and explain why you should be elected. I'm not much of a public speaker, but this really let me put my writing skills and creativity to the test. Needless to say, when we had the opportunity to deliver our speeches during lunch time, I was one of the first ladies to step up to the podium.
When we weren't learning about all the topics listed above, we were separated into groups to work on our mock action plan, which was supposed to encompass everything we had learned throughout the week. Each year, there is a different political issue and each group is assigned a different stance on that issue. For example, this year's topic was immigration. Some groups had to sponsor a fake candidate for office, whose main platform would be (1) that the USA should not allow any more immigration (a sort of "America is for Americans" approach), or (2) that the government needs to support incoming immigrants with policies that make citizenship easier to obtain. We had to put together a press packet about our project and, on the last day, present it to the NEW Leadership leaders as well as a few local reporters.
My group was supposed to be made up of small to medium business owners who employ migrants workers and want to make it easier to obtain more workers, give them a fair wage, and assist them in gaining citizenship. We had to put together a lobbying campaign saying just that. Because one of our group members has once owned an organic farm that employed migrant workers, we decided that we would be organic business owners who belonged to the OKRA (organic Kooperatives for Regional Action) organization. We also made up a bill that we would lobby for, and Cheryl, one of the group members, pretended to be a senator sponsoring the bill.
Because of my journalism experience, I was named the press manager for OKRA and was in charge of putting together the press kit. It wasn't that difficult to do, actually, because our group was very organized. From the beginning, we designated who would research what or write up what item for the kit. I consider myself lucky since some other groups were very disorganized and ended up pulling an all-nighter just to get their project done.
Here's a picture of the group.So was NEW Leadership the most fun I've ever had? I don't know about "the most fun ever" since my life isn't over yet, but it was one hell of an experience. I'd really like to go back next year, and I encourage you gals and your female friends to do the same.
In other news, I know that I was going to talk about my visits to some east coast grad schools, which I will still do. However, my parents and I are going to visit University Of Minnesota Duluth a week from Friday, so rather than having two separate entries about the same grad school search, I'll combine them together into one entry sometime on Saturday. Until then, stay cool!