Standing Up

We're now more than halfway done with our time here at Brown. As we're nearing our last day here in Providence, time goes by way faster. 

To start off our second week of Women and Leadership, we had Bystander Training, which was presented by Alana and Molly. They both are involved in programs here at Brown such as SHARE and SAPE to raise awareness about interpersonal violence and ways it can be interrupted. We covered issues with sexual assault, sexual and gender-based harassment, dating/domestic violence, relational abuse and stalking. As distressing as it is, statistics reveal that many Americans are affected negatively by violence. Little things from objectifying women to rape jokes are overlooked in our society. Some ways we learned to become good bystanders and intervene is to provide assistance and support survivors of violence. I think learning about this was really helpful because it makes us want to step up for the positive good and bring back our knowledge at home and everywhere we go. 

After our morning class, I went to get lunch with Krystal and Christine to have our meeting about our action plans. Krystal and I are both thinking about starting a group to raise awareness about community violence to explore what its effects are and why it's significant. Christine was very helpful with asking us questions to think more and giving us recommendations on what we should present in our action plans. She also told us some of her personal experiences being low-income from San Francisco and succeeding in going to college at Brown despite adversities. It gives us hope that we too can make it in the world after high school.

For our afternoon class, we went around in groups discussing questions posted on the walls about our bystander lesson earlier. There were questions such as "How can we recruit allies?" It was fun going around the classroom and coming up with ideas with different people in our class. I feel like we've all been in class together for a year. It doesn't even feel like it's only been a week. After these discussion questions, the rest of the class presented their Leadership Life Maps. They all had cute and creative presentations expressed through posters, art and videos.

True Colors and Love Languages

At 3:30 PM, I had a True Colors and Love Languages workshop. I wasn't sure what it was because it was assigned to me randomly but it sounded fun. It was in the Kasper Auditorium in the Faunce Hall. Once everyone settled in, we all sat in a big circle and introduced ourselves saying our name, hometown, program and an answer to a question based on a starburst color we got. I was one of the only two people in the Women and Leadership class. A lot of people were in Global Engagement. Once we got that done, we were passed out a personality quiz to find out what personality color we are. My results were blue and I was grouped with all the other blue people. Apparently, we are sympathetic, enthusiastic and creative people who see the importance with emotions. I felt that I related a lot with the traits described for the blue people. We then went back as a big group to discuss some struggles and feelings faced through being blue, green, orange or gold. After that part of our workshop, we filled out a worksheet quiz about love languages. My top result was Words of Affirmation, meaning I love hearing compliments. I was grouped with two other ladies, Chloe and Bella from Indonesia and China, and we basically talked about how compliments and affirmation makes us feel better about ourselves. We all went together as a big group again to debrief the conversations of each group.

This squirrel is a proud Brown student

It's been a productive and satisfying day so far. I just found out that I got a 5 on my AP US History test and a 4 on my AP Literature test. Junior year was a long year and I'm proud of what I've done. Now, I must work on my Action Plan. It's going to be a long night.