Wartburg College Social Change

          At Wartburg they stress how community engagement and service is extremely helpful to bettering your life for the future. Through direct service and practicing socially responsible behavior everyday I feel that I reach out to my communtiy and get involved. With direct service I am able to build my resume and also earn volunteer hours which are needed to furthur my education. Another valuable gift I receive from volunteering is learning how to interact with the people around you to achieve a common goal. It develops great leadership skills as well as team building and learning how to reach out and care for others.
          Along with working together with other people, I also have learned to bring my responsibility skills to a personal level. Through daily responsible acts, I help keep the living environments in a comforting manner by cleaning up after myself and making sure the public facilities look the same as they did before I used them. Being independent individuals we all need to step up to the plate and make sure that we practice these skills and habits everyday, so they become natural when we enter the real world.

Conference at Luther!!!

         It was the last weekend of my freshman cross country season. Every workout I had ran, and all the miles I'd put in up to this point all came down down to one final race. It was the Conference 8K at Luther College. The course was fairly flat except for one mountainous hill which we had to run up three times throughout the race. We prepared well the previous week, and dialed down our mileage, so we could be in prime condition for the weekend. I was extremely excited and nervous for the race. I had big goals coming into this race that needed to be met by the end of the season. My previous best time was twenty-nine minutes and thirty-four seconds, but my goal was to be in the twenty-eight minute range. This meant a forty second improvement was needed and seeing the incline and length of the hill was making me kind of nervous. I just kept telling myself it was my last race and whenever I felt pain I just needed to push harder.
          Racing time finally came. My blood was rushing and my adrenaline at its peak. There was no holding back this race. The gun went off and I entered the first mile faster than I had all season. I was strolling pretty well and already got the first hill out of the way. Moving up the hill the second time and down to the flat stretch of the race I was feeling pretty smooth, but could tell I was moving faster than usual cause I was starting to fatigue. I just kept my pace and battled through miles two, three, and four. Then for the last time I charged up the reverse side of the hill which completely burned me of everything I had. I thought I was walking, but once I reached the top I just told myself it was all down hill from there and I started my six hundred meter kick. I was completely in the zone, and not feeling or hearing a thing. It was all just a blur as I was flying down the hill into the final turn.
          Two hundred meters left and two kids within passing distance. I looked up at the clock towards the finsh and realized I had a little over twenty eight seconds to complete my goal. I just let it all go and started a full out sprint towards the finish line. With my body completely numb and everything seeming so surreal, that twenty and some odd seconds felt like minutes. In the end however, I passed the two runners and accomplished my goal with a time of twenty-eight minutes and fifty-seven seconds. I was very proud of myself, and it just went to show when you give your absolute best you can accomplish anything.

Casino Royale

The next morning, after the friday night horrors were shook out, are weekend of fun continued. The ten freshmen guys all got up early to go run at nine o clock, so we could get it out of the way. After that we ate breakfast in the Mensa and then began on our three hour journey up to Minnesota. One of my teammates just turned eighteen on the twenty second so we all thought it'd be cool to head up to Mall of America and the Mysitc Lake Casino. None of us have ever been to the mall or a casino so it was a really cool experience. In the mall we were able to still live out the kids in us in Nikelodeon Universe. Where we rode rides in side the theme park. From my view they were right up there with the rides at Adventureland so I'd have to say they were pretty legit. Then once we were done with the rides, we walked around for a little while then headed to the casino. The casino was by far my favorite experience during the whole trip. Though I lost fifteen dollars, it was fun to see one of my friends put in twenty cents and come out with ninety bucks! We also got to experience slot dogs which in my opinion were so disgusting that they were actually good. A casino will be the only place I ever eat those slimy things. All in all this weekend was a great team bonding event and I can't wait to do it again next year!

Paranormal Activity 3

     This weekend I experienced something I've never seen in my life. It was the very first time I watched the Paranormal Activity movies, including the third one which I saw in theaters this weekend. For starters, I am not one for scary movies and spooky things in general just give me the chills. I love to be the one to scare people but when it's the other way around, that's not me. I didn't really know what to expect when I saw the first one, but it wasn't a good sign when I was already terrified of the opening menu because all it had on it was play and everything else was pitch black. I have to say I was on the edge of my seat through the whole film, and the fact that it was shot like a home video scared the, "you know what," out of me. I don't believe in demons or paranormal activity, but they could very well be out there. No one really knows.
     The preparation of seeing the first two friday night really set me up well for what our whole team endured Friday night in the movie theatre. Once again I was the most scared before the movie even started because the trailers for the movies in the previews were absolutely horrifying. I also came in with the rumor i heard from my friends saying the last fifteen minutes of this movie will mess up your life. They almost did. Now I know you probably want to hear about the ending, but by chance if you do go I don't want to ruin it for you. So I will just leave it at that. I will say though, it was one of the coolest movies I ever watched so it is very fun, and I highly recommend going! 

The Moldy Monster

So far my roommate situation has gone very well this year. I have been extremely lucky to receive three extremely cool roommates. One being a cross coutry teammate and the others, two football players. We get along very well, and are fairly orgainzed and respectable of each other. There is just only one big scary problem. When Chase and I went to take out the trash today, we discovered a pizza sauce container completely filled with mold. We were terrified and wondered how long it has been sitting in our one roommate's garbage. They have been significantly slacking on their cleaning and hygene, and clothes and other trash have been rapidly accumulating on the floor. There are now mountains of clothes on their half of the room that are gradually growing to our side and something needs to be done. We just don't know what. Chase and I have decided to go with a passive approach of cleaning our side, so that they may see how nice our side looks and hopefully want to do the same.

Back on Course!

       Waking up at five thirty never felt so good until this last Saturday morning. For the last two weeks I've been fighting adversity, a foot injury, and the fear of whether or not my season was going to be cut short. My first collegiate season was not panning out to what I expected it to be. I had been doing a lot of cross training which included swimming and biking for one whole week, and then the week after I started slowly getting back into running again. My foot wasn't causing any pain and I was feeling pretty refreshed and ready to run once again. It had been three weeks since my last meet, and I was beyond excited when my alarm went off Saturday morning.
        We left campus at six o clock, and headed on a three hour bus ride to Maple Grove Golf Course in West Salem, Wisconsin where UW- LaCrosse hosted their cross country invitational. It was a bitter morning with a temperature in the upper fourties, and a brisk wind that definitely held as a factor. Nevertheless, we got a great warm up in and prepared ourselves for a great race. The gun went off and it was all positives from there on out. I ran the best race of my career and had personal best, cutting off thirty seconds from my previous time! I was very excited and so was coach, who stated to me after the race, "Welcome back, now lets go". That right there got me extremely pumped up, and I'm ready to work even harder these next two weeks in preparation for our conference meet.

Reflection of Schwartz and My College Experience

       Let me start off by saying that I'm not a big reader, and you'd probably never see me sitting down reading a book just for fun. However, let me say that the best advice I heard about college this week came from our very own IS 101 Reader, in the excerpt by Schwartz. In his excerpt, Schwartz identifies two main tactics of learning, mastery learning and performance learning. These two types of learning vary greatly with how content is absorbed and how well it is digested in the individual's mind. He conducted an experiment with his own college class to see if anyone still wanted an education just for the sake of learning without any reward. Surprisingly enough, he discovered that many students were more worried about the grade than the content of the class. This is the definition of performance based learning. I would have to consider myself a performance learner because that was the way I was raised up to be. I had always strived to keep a 4.0 GPA all through high school while managing four sports, and I did but I'd have to admit it was mostly for the scholarship and recognition at the end.
        As a collegiate student now I have found out that being a performance based learner is not the path to be taking. Grades do mean a lot to me, and a lot to my major because I need them to further my education. However,  I need to be more focused on learning the material and applying it to real life situations so I can buil a strong understanding of what I'm being taught. I need to become a mastery learner. I need to develop the skills to apply and memorize the crucial details of my subjects that will make me most successful in the future. With that also comes the enjoyment of just learning to learn, anjoy the challenges of discovering new ideas that will further me in my goals in the medical field. This excerpt was a great eye opener for me, and has definately changed my views on my classes, and why I'm here to get the education that I need to be great.
  

Facebook: How safe is it?

Facebook has been a roaring popularity for college students throughout the country. It has grown to become the largest communitcation network in the world, and has exploded in its various uses and applications. This interlinking program has allowed networks of people from all over the world to communicate with eachother and transfer web media, photos, and messages at the click of a button. However, little do many know that that button is more harmful than what one might assume. When you add friends on facebook it brings me to an analogy that may seem weird but at the same time fairly accurate. The exchanging of friends on facebook is the samething as exchanging sexual partners in real life. The risks and consequences compliment as well. Noticing that having one too many friends could put you at risk for a digital "STD", or virus. Adding one friend on facebook could actually expose you to almost fourteen others that you did not choose to be friends with. Your conversations no longer personal, and your privacy completely exposed. Once you put something on facebook, it is fair game to anyone who can view the subject. This includes all friends, professors, parents, bosses, etc... Pretty much anyone who may lie an impact on your life in the near future. Facebook is very dangerous, and what an individual decides to put on their page needs to be monitered and deeply thought about because before you know it one photo could completely destroy the dreams you've had since high school.

Chemtastrophe and Applebee's

This weekend was one of the most entertaining weekends I've had at Wartburg since I've been on campus. My girlfriend came over for the weekend and hung out with me and my roommates for awhile on Saturday. That night I then called up some of my cross friends, the one's that didn't go home for the weekend, and we decided that we all wanted to go to Applebee's to eat. What was thought to be a pretty expensive outting ended up being one of the greatest bargains I've ever experienced. We were able to snag six appetizers for only nineteen dollars! It was the best deal ever. We have now decided that we are going to alternate the bill and try to have an outting like that once a month with the freshman team. However, what goes up must come down. Chemistry was the downer. It is sunday night as of right now, 10:26 pm, and I have yet to find the answer to the last problem on my chemistry assignment. It has been almost two hours!!! So I must bid farewell now and try to accomplish the beast of a problem. Tootles.

Time to Pick up the Pace

This last week was kind of a rough one to get through, especially with all that was going on. I had a Biology test early in the week that I thought I did well on but got a different result. I had a slight case of strep throat which prevented me from running, and lastly my grades aren't where I wanted them to be at the beginning of the year and I don't really know how to get to that next level. I have really started to realize that high school for me was a breeze, and not having to be pushed, and always knowing what was being taught isn't helping me at all. I have tried different study habits and quiz myself, but I still can't pull the grades I want. The students and friends I've talked to just tell me that it's a step up and to be patient, but I can't afford to start at rock bottom and then hope to work my way up in the future because my major gets harder and harder along the way. This is why I need to pick up the pace in all aspects of my college life because to get to where I want to be as a student athlete I need to work harder.