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Showing posts with the label American university life

Musings for Saturday, February 27, 2016: That which doesn't kill me only makes me stronger

Hi there, Constant Reader. It’s 2:45 p.m. EST in Miami, and the current temperature is 70 degrees Fahrenheit under sunny skies. With humidity at 30% and the wind blowing at 9 mph from the northwest, the feels-like temperature is 74 degrees Fahrenheit. All in all, it’s a beautiful late winter day in South Florida. I am to a slow start today with my writing. To be honest, I don’t really feel like writing much; I have not thought about any topics for an Examiner article, not even a movie or book review. And yet, I know in my heart that I must write something. It doesn’t have to be anything spectacular, mind you. It can be something sublime, profane, or even mundane. The writing gods are not as picky as your garden-variety English composition teacher. The literary deities are as content with a well-written article as they are with a relatively insignificant blog entry.  They don’t care what I write about. It could be my shopping list for Winn Dixie – as long as I write. As I s...

Things I Remember: Seville (Sevilla), Spain 1988

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My Apartment in Sevilla It wasn't exactly my apartment per se because I had to share Apartamento 2E at No. 1 Virgen de Robledo with two Spanish roommates.  When I arrived in Spain on September 21, 1988 I had it all to myself for about a week and a half; Juan Carlos, who was 18 and hailed from Jerez de los Caballeros in Extremadura, was the first to arrive; Demetrio, 31, was from  Madrid and he rented a room in that apartment every fall. Apartamento 2E was owned by a middle-aged couple and was one of the many such lodgings used by the College Consortium for International Studies  to house American participants in its Semester in Spain program.  In my group, most of us lived in these residencias or in private homes with host families.  If memory serves, a few students opted to rent their own places without having to deal with Spanish roommates or host families; these, however, were a tiny subgroup in our 42-member CCIS Fall Term class. Even though you...

Not necessarily "breaking" news: High school doesn't prepare students for college

When I was the managing editor of my college campus' student newspaper back in the late 1980s, we ran a story about how many incoming freshmen - most of them recent graduates from local high schools - were having to take remedial classes in such courses as writing, reading and basic math skills. Most of us on the staff - myself included - either knew someone who had been a "great" student in elementary, junior high (what we used to school middle school back then) and high school but had failed at least one part of the Basic Skills Test required of all credit-course student applicants.  (Full disclosure: I passed the basic math part - by a miracle - but found Algebra 1 so intimidating that I tried to take remedial math...twice...and failed.) I no longer have the 1989-era issue, so I can't quote from it, but this recent article published in the Miami Herald this week covers the same topic. 13th grade: Many freshmen unprepared at community and state colleges As th...

More Advice to Prospective College Students: Finding Balance

Finding Balance: How to Juggle Academic Responsibilities with a Healthy Social Life in College For millions of American high school juniors and seniors, going to an institution of higher learning is the first big step forward in their post-graduation future.  After all, not only is a college degree necessary to start a career in many professions, but going to a college or university – often an out-of-state one – is a cultural and emotional transition from the dependency of adolescence to independent adulthood. If you are a high school upperclassman this year and plan to attend a post-secondary academic institution, perhaps you are looking forward to the freedom (and challenges) of living away from home for the first time.  Perhaps you are anticipating the new opportunities to make new friends and enjoy the college party scene.  Some of you may also be worried about how tough your professors may be or how to juggle your class schedule with off-campus responsibilitie...

Positive Attitude is Key to College Success

The future belongs to those who prepare for it today. – Malcolm X If you are a high school student in your junior or senior year and are seriously considering going to a college or university after graduation, you should start thinking about preparing yourself for the challenges of college life now instead of waiting till your first day on campus as an incoming freshman. In addition to taking the SAT and a plethora of pre-entrance exams, choosing a major, registering for classes, applying for scholarships or financial aid and improving your study habits, you should also adopt a positive “I-want-to-be-here-and-learn” attitude about going to classes and completing your coursework.  The expression “A positive attitude determines success in all things” sounds like a cliché or one of those aphorisms that we find in Chinese fortune cookies, but there’s a lot of truth behind it (otherwise it would not be a cliché). If you don’t believe me, next time you happen to be in one ...

Some Advice for New College Journalism Students

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When I started taking journalism courses at a local college in the mid-1980s, I was under the impression that I was well-prepared to be a college-level writer for the campus’ student newspaper.  I had studied the basics of news writing, reporting, editing, and page makeup for two years in high school, and I had been a section editor during my sophomore and senior years.  I even earned A’s consistently in my journalism courses. So imagine my surprise, two years after I had graduated from high school, when I stepped into my JOU 1100 classroom for the first time and felt as though I had actually studied just enough to get by in class but had much more to learn. It’s possible that I felt that way because I had added Prof. Townsend’s class two days into the Fall term (my Pell Grant had just been approved and I needed to become a full-time student, so I added Basic Reporting and Introduction to Radio and Television to my schedule) and was nervous.  Perhaps I was keenly...

Dispatches From Spain: Going Home and Reflections on Seville

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When I was a 25-year-old college sophomore and majoring in Journalism/Mass Communications, I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take part in an overseas-study program co-sponsored by Miami-Dade Community College’s Foreign Language Department and the College Consortium for International Studies. At the time, I had just about taken most of the required courses for my Associate in Arts degree except math (my bete noir) and three credits’ worth of the foreign language pre-requisite. I had also, or so I thought, done everything I had set out to do as a reporter/editor at the campus student newspaper, so I was feeling a bit unmoored and restless without a plan for what I figured would be my final year on the staff. Looking back on it now, I’m not sure what, exactly, prompted me to sign up for the Semester in Spain program. Part of it, I’m sure, was a sense that this would be my best chance to go to Europe for a significant amount of time. Maybe it was my journalist’s instinctive...

Dispatches From Spain: In Spain, soccer is a wild, no-holds barred contest

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In Spain, soccer is a wild, no-holds barred contest January 26, 1989 Alex Diaz-Granados Columnist SEVILLE, Spain (CCIS Program) When one is in Spain, one must do as the Spaniards do, or so we've been told by the College Consortium for International Studies Center staff when we ask about how to enjoy our free time here. This applies to everything -- from eating lunch at 2 p.m. and dinner between 9 and 10 p.m. to drinking tall glasses of "cerveza Cruzcampo" (the Spanish Budweiser) with tapas at one of the billions of bars in the city. And for those of us with a desire to be athletic (even if it's once during a 12-week term), it applies to playing sports. Because soccer is the national sport here, it was only natural that we, too, would want to catch a little "futbol fever." Most of the time we watched soccer games on Spanish television, although quite a few of us went to see the Spain-Argentina exhibition game or the Spain-Ireland game,...

Dispatches From Spain: Study abroad is more than educational: it’s an experience

Study abroad is more than educational: it’s an experience Alex Diaz-Granados Columnist (Originally published in the December 1, 1988 issue of Catalyst ) SEVILLE, Spain (CCIS Program) Over the past six weeks of my stay here in Seville as a participant in the College Consortium for International Studies’ Semester in Spain program, I have come to understand how challenging studying abroad really is. Several other students from this campus are also taking part in this program. In many respects, studying abroad is no different from studying at our home college or university. We have our schedule set up much like we do in the U.S. with lectures and reading assignments. We have midterms and finals, of course, although in some classes final exams are given at the director’s discretion. Unlike studying in the U.S., we’re learning about a different country’s history, culture, government and economic system, not by reading about these in a textbook, but by living in it. “It’s be...