e-Portfolio

Intro:

Thanks for visiting my e-Portfolio! Here you will find a collection of my best writings and projects created during my years as an undergraduate at Penn State University. I am an International Politics major pursuing a Spanish minor and I am also a Paterno Fellows aspirant. The Paterno Fellows program will allow me to graduate with honors and it will provide me with several advantages during my academic career. Upon graduating, I will have completed an honors capstone project. I hope to study the effects of universities primarily employing liberal professors in political science and international relations departments, focusing on how this affects students and their future careers.
In addition to my schoolwork, I am a member of Alpha Sigma Alpha. I'm very involved in my sorority, which instills the values of "aspire, seek, attain" in all of its members. We pride ourselves on our involvement in community service, especially Penn State's THON. ASA placed third in Greek Life Organizations in THON 2011 with a total of over $182,000.
I am further involved in Greek life with my position as a staff writer for The Odyssey, a newspaper catered to collegiate members of Greek organizations. My writing position at The Odyssey provides me with an outlet to connect to my immediate community at Penn State, and also Greek communities throughout the country. Articles are published weekly both online and in print format on campus. Though I consider writing one of my hobbies, I also enjoy horseback riding and singing. Feel free to browse through my selected work, and if you would like to contact me, I would love to hear from you!



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A Smile a Day...From a Disney Princess!

Sorry, I had to. My life this past week has been partly consumed by the Disney Princess franchise. Even the projects are over, I just can't let go. Since the Disney Princess movies were sadly never a part of my childhood, I was never exposed to their beauty or their romances with perfect princes.

One of the things we realized in our project, though, and one of the most respectable realizations, is that the princesses, no matter what dire situation they're in, see the best in it, and often smile. This almost permanent smile gives viewers (or children) an attitude of optimism that they take around with them after viewing the movie. Maybe this is why I was such an unhappy child compared to my Disney-Princess-Watching friends. Or not. Though I was never exposed to any Disney movie besides Dumbo, The Lion King, and 101 Dalmatians (Yes, I wasn't even allowed to watch Lady and the Tramp), my childhood didn't take a hit from my lack of knowledge of the Disney Princess fairytales. I may have been jealous of my friends at the time, but I found a more realistic happiness in other ways, never expecting a happy ending or that "all of my dreams" would come true. Though the Disney princess isn't the only way to make little children smile, it is probably one of the most common.

Sure, the children may be more excited about witnessing the happily-ever-afters in all the movies, but the positive attitudes of the main characters subconsciously contribute to the optimism the children feel after watching the movies. Perhaps we have identified a brighter side of Disney's portrayal of sexism toward women.

Enough Smiling... It's Snowing!

Before the dawn of April, in which we would usually expect short-tastic weather, Mother Nature decided to give us the gift of a final snowfall-- not a gift many Penn State students appreciated. Well, let's hope that was the last one. I'm ready for my April SHOWERS. My umbrella has never been more ready. Though many of us may be more than sick of this cold and unpredictable, not to mention hostile, mountain weather, we need to smile because we have beautiful weather coming! Maybe just not as soon as we had hoped.

Perhaps Mother Nature is trying to teach us patience, or maybe she is punishing us for not working as hard as we should be. On a sunny spring day when we can just smell spring in the air, we feel happy, almost rewarded. Maybe Mother Nature was telling us with that last snow that we have nothing to be rewarded for-- yet. When that day finally comes, when we can smell spring in the air and feel so intoxicatingly happy that we just can't wipe that ridiculous smile off of our faces, we will feel the ultimate reward and know that we deserve it. Mother Nature smiles on us when she changes our mood. This season, she will smile on us by giving us sunshine, spring showers, and warmer days. But next fall, we're going to be longing for our first snowfall. She will smile on us, then, too. Mother Nature's smile is the ultimate reward. Does this signal successful use of rhetoric? I leave it up to you.

A Smile..Even on a Sick Day

Yes, the time is finally here once again for me to be chained to my bed for a week full of complete misery. This time of year, no matter how hard I try, I always catch some serious sickness or another: this year, I am the lucky host to some flu germs (even though I got my flu shot?) that have caught me at the worst possible time. I've now missed countless assignments, an exam, and almost a week of classes. I am the type of person that gets stressed out if I'm 2 minutes late to class, so hopefully we can understand the amount of stress and worry I'm experiencing right now. Luckily my teachers have all been understanding.
This morning, I decided I would fight those silly flu germs and drag myself out of bed to try to start my day. Bad idea. I was too weak to walk across the hallway and had to cancel my make-up exam and stay in bed the rest of the day after going to the health center, where, in the deepest most darkest depths of my misery, the nurse's smile and simple "feel better soon" made my WEEK. The fact that this comes from a stranger makes it all the more meaningful. A stranger, who has no idea who I am and knows nothing about me, actually cared about me enough to hope for my health.
I will probably always remember how that lady's simple comment and smile made my week more optimistic, and it proves how powerful body language and simple human sympathy are in affecting others positively.

A Smile a Day... Can Sometimes Send the WRONG Rhetorical Message

Most of the girls in my pledge class, including myself, ventured to sunny Miami over spring break to bask a few days in the sun, taking a break from the cold and hostile State College. Of course, like all girls who have fresh new tans and lightened hair colors to show off, we staged an impromptu photoshoot while waiting for our table at the restaurant. We were smiling and looking like we were having the time of our lives, spreading that feeling to everyone around us. We took maybe one hundred pictures and were about to go inside the restaurant when a native onlooker asked my friend Courtney to take a picture of him. She gladly grabbed his camera, prepared to take a shot of him and his supposed friend in front of the palm trees. We quickly figured out that he was alone, but he didn't want a picture alone. He grabbed my friend Rachel, and everything happened so fast that we didn't even know what to do. She drug me into the shot so she didn't have to do it alone, and we even snapped a copy of the photo with her camera so we could remember our encounter with the world's certifiably most creepy man. After the picture, he sniffed her hair and tried to linger a little longer, but we ran away. Of course the situation could have turned out to be much worse, and we were grateful that he didn't follow us. We knew that we would have to be more careful around strangers for the rest of the vacation-- and I learned that sometimes smiling, and all body language, can send the wrong signal to someone who's watching that you don't expect to be.

Anyway, now the picture has turned into a funny memory (although we hope this won't happen again):

A Smile a Day... Even on State Patty's?

Of course! Everyone smiles on State Patty's with the drunken camaraderie you're supposed to experience walking around fratland or through downtown. On the contrary, my friends and I got sick of the obnoxious non-Penn State students and headed back to the dorms in the early afternoon. But first, we needed to eat. What better day to avoid the hustle and bustle of downtown with all the visitors than to spend some meal points at Redifer? Salad, sandwiches, cookies, chips, Chinese, or Mexican? Being the indecisive person that I am, I couldn't choose between the latter two and treated myself to both- it's a holiday, right?
In the line to order my naked burrito, the lady making it initially thought I was the most hilarious person in the world by verbalizing the word "naked", so I decided to go along with it, continue the jokes, and make her day (which I did, by the way). My friend and I smiled and laughed while asking her to put everything on the burrito, even all the types of cheese and all the types of beans and sauces, saying things like "You got it girl! Put some more of that nacho sauce on there yeah!". We asked her what she recommended, and if it was the best naked burrito she had ever made-- she said yes, and the whole time looked like she was going to pee her pants from laughing so hard. Even when we were paying for our naked burritos, we looked back and she was still beaming with joy while serving her next few customers. I like to think that she looked like that for the rest of the day! Since that Saturday, I've seen her around Redifer commons a few times and she laughs and says hello. I'm glad I could be such a memorable customer.

A Smile a Day... Rather, for a Consistent 46 Hours....

This past weekend, I attended my first THON. My sorority had made LionShrine the previous year, meaning we had earned enough money to have 5 girl dancers and 5 boy dancers on the floor this year. I'll have to admit that I didn't know the dancers (seniors) very well, nor did I have any idea what THON would really be like, though I had spent hours upon hours soliciting funds in various ways. The whole weekend, I got 8 hours of sleep, ate 8 subway sandwiches, an entire pizza, 4 soft pretzels, and too many large dippin' dots to count (yeah, I don't really have any meal points left) and lost my voice from so much excited screaming. Sounds like a bad weekend? Not at all. One of the best of my life. I'm not going to go into detail about what I learned at THON or what it is about. I'm just going to tell you how my screaming radiant positivity kept the dancers going, or so they say.

One of our dancers, when I went down to the floor, told me that every time she looked up, I had the biggest smile on my face and was dancing like an idiot in the stands, and that it kept her going even when she was about to stop. She told me to keep it up, it would really make a difference in how our dancers survived. I did. I really honestly don't think I wiped that smile off my face, even amidst my delirium and slowly approaching laringitis. It's crazy that a smiling, dancing supporter can keep someone awake and on their feet for 46 hours so that they can help kids fight cancer. My smile helped keep our dancers going with an energy derived from all of the positive support. Keep smiling, and you might help pull someone through the roughest, and longest, of hours.

In case you're fancying a visual of my overwhelming positivity: