Thursday, July 3, 2014

When the World Comes Together

Every day just seems to be getting better and better. Actually, a little correction to my previous claim -- everything except the weather. The sun was no where seen today; it was just grey clouds, roaring thunder, and heavy rain. I've heard that Ithaca is known for sudden rain, but I certainly wasn't expecting anything like what I saw today.
You've got to see it to believe it. 
Setting the weather aside, every other thing about today was simply great.  As per class, Professor Kramnick gave us two lectures: one in the morning as usual and one after the guest presentation. The first lecture was on feminism and the second was about how everyone is in fact "Lockean." (People who have ideas based off the philosopher Locke)  Surprisingly, my energy only happened to increase even though class was extended for an extra hour due to the lack of class on July Fourth. Perhaps this was because I'm starting to know my class a lot better. Since my class only has about 33 people in total, there's lots of interaction and I'm starting to engage in conversations with people from all parts of the world who have such diverse views.

 It's almost as if I travel to a different location whenever I meet someone new. Today's stop was Turkey. Because the rest of the F+J members -- Kevin, Carla, and Natalie -- all were clumped together for Professor's Kramnick's lunch-in, I was able to reach out to new people and one of these fantastic people was Ekin, who is Turkish. Our conversation started off with the magnificent Hagia Sofia Cathedral which is located in Turkey and ended with Hillary Clinton. I have no idea how we where able to cover so much ground, but it was so interesting. Not only is Cornell diverse in terms of ethnicity, but in terms of views as well. I've learnt to listen to others and to respect everyone's views because each person is different and everyone comes with a story that is worth learning about.

Since today was Thursday, it was guest lecture day and our guest lecturer was Alan Mittman, an Ithaca attorney. He primarily talked to us about intellectual property and patents. He brought up a case of whether it was fair for a client to use a less commonly known image and tweak it in order to call it his own work. Generally, I'm often intimidated to raise my hand in a guest lecture because I'm scared of giving a "wrong" answer. I'm an avid participant in discussion sections, but I always felt scared to open my mouth during presentations. But today, I decided to overcome this fear. I raised my hand while my heart was beating really fast and explained my opinion about the case, Rogers vs. Koons. I said that since the basic idea was stolen from the original, the transformed picture would still be plagiarized since the idea of the picture is the same. In my response, I also paralleled this by saying that even if you paraphrase a quote by an author, you would still have to cite it as the ideas of the author are still the same. Therefore, it is wrong to recreate an author's original work even though it's message is humorous. Also, the original creator must be credited.
The images that got me thinking
Honestly, I felt great after saying my response. The only thing that would've gone "wrong" was if I stayed silent and kept my response hidden inside me. I voiced my opinion on a great platform and if I didn't speak up then, I would've definitely missed out on a major chunk of my Cornell experience.

During the time management lecture
Because I wanted to make proper use of the resources granted to me, I decided to attend the presentation on time management with a friend of mine from the Freedom and Justice class, Lisa. The professor who gave us the wonderful presentation was John Belina. I loved the way Belina brought in neuroscience to explain that if we don't develop patterns within our system, it will not be committed to our memory. Therefore, it is important to set up schedules to properly balance out our time and make the most use of it. And the most crucial tip I received was to always overestimate when writing schedules. This is a major problem for me because even though I try to prioritize, I generally allocate less time than needed on any task. But if I were to overestimate the time I needed on any chore from now on, that problem would be solved. 
Some notes I took during the lecture.
In total, today was just a fabulous day. There was nothing too extravagant, but it still made me feel special. I'm meeting new people and it's as if making friends has become my new favorite obsession. There is always something new to do, different people to meet, and plenty of opportunities to see myself
grow as a person. 

No comments:

Post a Comment