Well, it’s been a while since my last post, and quite a lot has happened. One of the really fun things that has been going in is a drastic increase in the going’s on in the Office of Admission. That means a lot of stuff has ben going on for me as both a Tour Guide and an Ambassador Coordinator. Recently we did a live-chat with prospective and accepted students. It was really fun, and they were all really excited at the prospect of coming to Wheaton. The size of the tours has increased dramatically as well. Unfortunately I am just boundcing back from a bad cold, so having to yell over a crowd of thirty people was a bit rough, but big tours are still a lot of fun.

This past Friday we held our annual Relay for Life in Haz Athletic Center. It was a blast. I was on a team with my fellow Wheaton Democrats, and we had such a great time. Lots of things go on during the event, such as preformances by the Wheaton dance troupes and acapella groups, as well as a “Wheaton Idol” competition. The only bad thing about the event is that now all our leftover snacks are now sitting in my house and providing an awful temptation.

Classes have been going very well. I just had an exam in both Great Works II and Egypt in the Greco-Roman World last week, and I am very glad to have them done with. In Graphic Design we have been working on tolerance posters. It was a really great project, because it made us do research on a lot of diversity issues out there, and programs in place to combat them.

I am still trying to figure out how I am going to use my stipend this coming summer. Unfortunately an animation internship in Toronto I was persuing fell through, but I still have a bit of time to find something else. I may look into some Graphic Design apprenticeships as well.

We only have about a month left of school, and people seem to be torn between anticipation and dread. I am not quite sure where I stand on that boundary just yet, but either way the end of the school year is coming fast. Until next time!

Well, another Spring Break has come and gone, and sadly, I did nothing special for it. There were some really cool programs going on though, including building houses in the Caribbean. Midterm season is over as well, though I have to say, I am not quite as sad to see that go.

I only had three midterms however, which was lucky. We had our critique on our clocks in Graphic Design, as well as handing in our midterm portfolio. For the clock, we also had design proper packaging that worked with the theme of our clock. SO with my pirate clock I created a treasure chest box to go with. It was a fun project, albeit a very challenging one.

We have also handed in our midterm portfolios in Drawing, and are moving on to studying plants and still-life subjects. In addition to our portfolio, we handed in our giant self-portraits, which is one of the most fun projects we’ve had. It was so cool to work at such a large scale, even if it was on my own face. The composition I chose was me snoozing, and was supposed to be comical, but ended up being very serene and relaxing.

In Great Works we have moved out of the Rococo period and into Neo-classicism and the Romanticism period. We have been looking at artists like William Turner and John Constable with examples such as “Raft of the Medusa” and “The Haywain”. I have to say that I am not particularly drawn to Romanticized paintings, though I can still appreciet them as master works.

In the Democrats we are still trying to get our crane project hung. We have run into a few snags in regards to that, but we are hoping that it will happen this Wednesday. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

The other Ambassador Coordinators and I are preparing for the big Junior and Senior open houses coming up, when there will be the big overnight events. Right now we are trying to make sure we have hosts for all the students who are coming.

My birthday is coming up this week, and my friends and I had a minor celebration this past week. It was a lot of fun. We went to the loft and listened to the band that was playing, ate free pizza, and danced a bit (me not so much).

Well, I imagine things will be picking up again pretty soon. We only have a little more than a month left of school, which is just slightly terrifying. After this year, I am going to be a senior, and have actual responsibility. God forbid.

As always, things have been busy the past week or two. The big highlight was the Oxfam International Hunger Banquet that we of the Hunger House, in conjunction with the Office of Service, Spirituality, and Social Responsibility, held last Thursday. It was a hunger awareness event, and ended up being very successful. We had a great turnout. When people showed up, they were given an identity card, and that identity had a “class” depending on their socioeconomic status. They were divided into upper, middle and lower classes. Then there was a dramatization in which a person might loose all their crops, for instance, and move down a class. Then the meal would be served, which depended entirely on their class. The upper class was served several courses with a salad, pasta, lemonade and iced tea. The middle class had a buffet setup with rice, beans, and water, while the lower class had only rice and water. There were a number of things I found interesting, one of which was watching the lower class. Several people took it upon themselves to make sure everything got distributed equally, and went around serving the rest of them. Though it was only a dramatization, it was quite touching. Another thing that shocked me was how my perception of upper class changed. Before, I would have put myself in middle class, but the American view of middle class and the world view of middle class is very different. I think it’s safe to say that anyone attending Wheaton would be in the upper class. After all, many people don’t even have running water. It was great, and it made me rethink a great deal I take for granted.

Classes are going well, though it is approaching midterms. We have a really fun project that we are working on in Graphic Design. We had to pick a vocation, any one we could think of, and then design a clack to somehow represent that vocation. I chose to do a pirate, and I am designing my cock to look like a frayed treasure map. It’s so much fun! I stained the paper with tea and coffee, then seared the edges of it with a lighter. It looks great. After we complete the clock, we even have to design packaging for it. It’s a really great project.

In the Dems, we just started folding cranes for our Iraq War Memorial Project. Right now they’re all hanging up in my house, to the slight consternation of my housemates. Though they are very pretty. The anniversary of the war is on the 19th, so we will be hanging them up the week following Spring Break.

Speaking of which, Spring Break is just around the corner. Don’t have much planned, but I am still looking forward to relaxing and folding more cranes. There is something very zen about it. And after you fold five hundred or so, you can practically do it in your sleep. Well, that’s about it. Until next time!

A lot has been going on in the past week or so. In our house, we started attending the handouts at the Cupboard of Kindness again. They said they were very pleased to have us back. Things have been busy on the political front as well. We have been planning a number of things, including a panel of speakers on Health Care, in which we hope to collaborate with the Office of Service, Spirituality, and Social Responsibility and the College Conservatives on. We have been following the primary election results and the other night we held a meeting to do some campaigning and phone banking for Obama. We are also planning our Iraq War Memorial project, which will be hung in the Atrium again this year. Last year we folded somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,100 cranes, one for every American soldier killed in Iraq. This year we will have some 3,960 cranes to hang.

Classes are going well. In Graphic Design, we just finished a monogram project, in which we had to create a logo from our initials, and then create our own ID package using it. What was great about this project is that we can actually use our monogram and ID package if and when we need to advertise ourselves.

This past week in Drawing we drew from a nude figure. We had a female model this week and will have a male model this coming week. It’s always slightly awkward for me, but I really do enjoy it and I feel as it is one of my stronger suits.

This weekend is the Big Event, an alcohol free weekend with tons of events going on. There was a comedian last night which I could not make it too, unfortunately, but I heard he was very funny. They also had a late-night breakfast last night, and an Open-mike to go along with it. Tonight there will be a huge carnival in Beard Field House in Haas. It is always tons of fun. They have things like giant inflatable slides, wrestling sumo suits, toilet seat go-carts, bucking bull rides, and a really cool one where you try to stick yourself to a wall of Velcro. They also had a laser tag arena last year. There is also free food. It’s always tons of fun!

Well, that’s just about ti for now. Next time I’ll tell you all how it goes!

Well, things are certainly getting exciting on the political front. This coming Tuesday, February 5th, will be the election days for upwards of 20 states this year. Though it wont be officailly over, the race will pretty much be decided then. The Wheaton Democrats are collaborating with the College Conservatives to hold a bipartisan Poll Party to watch the results come in. It will be very exciting, and hopefully stay friendly. We also had two minor events over the past week. We got together to watch the State of the Union Adress, and we also held a little party last night to watch the Democratic Debate. I unfortunately had to miss the debate, but heard was fantastic.

Things in the house are going well. We haven’t been over to the Cupboard of Kindness just yet, but hopefully we’ll get over there this Monday. As I mentioned in my last post I believe, we are planning, in conjunction with the Office of Service, Spirituality, and Social Responsability, a Hunger Banquet on the 28th of February. It will hopefully raise a good amount of money to be donated, and inspire a lot of students to get active in the combat of hunger issues.

Some friends and I went to the loft last night, and they had a really excellent band playing. I cant remember the name, which is shameful because I bought thei CD, but it was somehting like Lightwings or Lightwave. They did some great covers like Sweet Caroline, Baby Got Back (which was both surprising and funny), as well as a few others. It was awesome.

Classes are going well, though I am always surprised at how bust things get so quickly. But it really is better than being bored, and when I go to bed at night, I know that I haven’t wasted my time at college.

Hey everyone! It’s good to be back from winter break, though I will miss relaxing a bit. It was pretty fun, my dad, my sister and I all went down to the Florida everglades. It was great. It was nice and warm, and we saw upwards of 70 alligators! It was so cool. Anyway, this semester is shaping up well.

Continuing with a number of classes I had last semester, I will be taking Graphic Design II, Great Works II, Drawing II, and a classics course called Egypt in the Greco-Roman world. I am very excited about Graphic Design, for I have heard that we will be using the computers and different kinds of software on the projects in this semester. It should be a lot of fun. And I am looking forward to the advanced Drawing and Great works courses too. I loved the first semester of. We learned some really interesting history that took us up to the late Gothic period, and will be continuing on with that this coming semester. The classics course seems like it will be very interesting as well. I love classical mythology, and studying Egypt from a classical point of view should be fascinating. Hopefully I will continue some animation in my free time, and I plan to do an Independent Study in animation next year.

There will be a lot going on outside of class as well. I am returning to my positions in the Library and the Office of Admission as a Public Service Assistant and Tour Guide, respectively. Hopefully next year I will be an Admissions Intern. That would be so much fun.

My friends and I are still living in the Hunger House, so we will be working with the Cupboard of Kindness every first and third Monday of the month. We will be doing another food drive this semester, as well as a social class dinner. People will pay to come, and then they are assigned a social status, and the meal you eat depends on that status. It should provide people with a good look at the gaps in the social structure.

We also plan to have a lot of Rock the Vote events this semester in the Democrats. With the 2008 election coming up one of our main goals is to get as many students registered and informed as possible. We just want to get people involved, regardless of how they vote.

Well, that’s about it for now. I’ll let you all know how classes are going, as well as everything else. Until then!

Well, things have certainly been very busy for the past few weeks in preparation for finals and for holiday break. As can be expected, we have all been working on final projects and papers, and studying for our final exams.

In my animation class we have been working on our final project, which was to be a self-portrait. We were free to use any style we had already covered, or come up with something entirely new. Our only real requirement was that it be 15 to 30 seconds long. I tried to show myself growing through different phases in my life. All in all, I was not entirely pleased with my result. I felt that I could have done much better. Oh well. It did get a better response than I anticipated though.

In Graphic Design our final project was create a gestalt out of image and text. That is, we were to use both imagery and typography to create a unified whole. We had to choose a tool, and it could be something like a hammer or an airbrush, and abstract it somehow. Then we had to arrange our composition with the tools name. It may sound simple, but trying to arrange type and image into a pleasing composition can be very difficult. I chose to depict an umbrella, and it actually got a pretty positive response from people. Makes me all warm inside.

We finished up 3-dimensional design with a project that was a proposal for an actual sculpture piece that might be built here at Wheaton. It was cool to think of a sculpture that might actually be created, but to still have fun and be creative with it. There were some great results including a giant silver peacock on the edge of Peacock Pond, a number of creative benches for various locations around campus, and a tree frog climbing up the side of Mars Arts and Humanities. That one was mine. I don’t think they’ll actually choose it though.

At our last democrats meeting we just thought of some ideas for speakers next semester. We also plan to do a Rock-the-Vote event to get people to vote when the election comes around.

Sadly tours having been slowing down a fair amount recently. It’s natural though. By now a great majority of students have submitted their applications and don’t feel the need to visit schools at the moment. It also might be due to the chillier weather. Either way, I haven’t had a tour in almost three weeks. It’s very sad. But there’s always next semester.

Well, after all the work that has been crammed into the past few weeks, I am very much looking forward to Holiday Break. Only one more final to go, and I am free! I hope you all have fun and safe Holidays everyone!

Things have certainly been busy in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving break.

We just finished our countdown video in Animation. It was a two-week project and we had to create a ten second countdown video, going from 9 to 0. Initially I had chosen to work with pictures of natural elements like fire, water, clouds, and leaves. The Wednesday night before it was due however, I was so disappointed with my work that I decided to switch topics. Instead I chose to animate a forest at night with a beam of light moving around, illuminating the woods and revealing each of the numbers. Though I had to pull an all-nighter Thursday night to get it done, I was very pleased with how it turned out.

In Graphic Design we had a project that was about a hierarchy of information. We were to write directions from our home to school, and then arrange it on a poster to create that hierarchy. It was a very fun project, and we got to work in the Graphics lab a great deal for it.

In 3-D Design we were able to get our clay sculptures out of the kiln, and fortunately most of my pieces escaped unharmed. Only my tree was missing a few of its limbs. We also started a new project, a wax-dripping project. We created a rough skeleton out of wire and other materials, and then dripped a hard red wax over it, building the form as we went. I chose to do a very fat, Buddha-ish character. Overall it was a very fun project, but it ended up looking much more like my grandfather than a Buddha. Oh well.

A week or so ago a fellow Democrats member and I went to campaign for a local mayoral candidate, Jass Stewart. The two of us walked from door to door of known Jass supporters and made sure that they had gotten out to vote that day. It was a bit cold, walking around Brockton after dark, but it was fun and it felt good to get out and canvas for a candidate. We also finally got our movie series kicked off with “War Room.” Though I could not actually go, it seemed to be a success.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my house kicked of its Holiday Food Drive on campus, and it has been an enormous success! We have gotten tons of donations in just a very short amount of time. It was incredible, and the Cupboard of Kindness was very grateful to receive all the donations. We also went in the Sunday before Thanksgiving break to help them unload turkeys for their Thanksgiving handouts. The people were so nice; they gave us a huge box full of candy. I think it is more candy than I have ever seen in one place. We are still trying to give it away to friends and parents.

Well, we have a mere two weeks before final exams. To be honest, my finals week is going to be very relaxed. I will only have one final on Friday, the rest being final portfolios and projects that will all be due the week before. So that pre-final week will actually be the one where I tear out all my hair. I may get a few grays anyway. Well, that’s about it. Until next time!

Well, it has been an extremely busy past week or so. It seems as though everything in all my classes and extra-curricular collided. It was a bit overwhelming. Oh well, better than being bored.

In the Dems I have been working together with the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to arrange for students to go up to New Hampshire and canvas for a Saturday. As of right now, we have plans to go up on the 17th of November with other colleges in the area. We will be taking a bus system that will be meeting at Stonehill College. It should be a great deal of fun. We also hosted Jass Stewart, a mayoral candidate for the city of Brockton. He came in on Thursday and talked to us about his campaign and what he stood for. A great deal of people showed up, and many of them volunteered to help him on election day. We will be going on Tuesday to do things like call people to remind them to vote, as well as monitoring the polls.

In my themed house we have been pretty busy as well. November 5th marks the kick off of our food drive, so we have been organizing donation box locations with various offices around campus, as well as generating a lot of publicity. We also went trick-or-treating for canned goods on Wednesday. For costumes we dressed up as a box of crayons. we all bought colored shirts and birthday hats, and I painted and airbrushed them the proper color and the crayola logo on each shirt. It was a little awkward, but people were very friendly and willing to donate, which was fantastic. We plan on bringing everything to the Cupboard of Kindness this coming Monday.

Classes have been very fun. We recently finished a self-portrait project in Graphic Design. We had to draw a rough portrait of ourselves, and then use tracing paper to re-create our portrait using only letter forms. We could do quotes, words, song lyrics, or just words themselves. It was incredibly fun, and the results of everyone’s work were great.

In Animation, we finished our pixelization project and moved on to rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is when you take a video of something, then break the video down into a series of images. Then you alter the images in some way, but keep the motion evident. I took a video of myself doing a cartwheel, then printed out the images, and traced a drawing mannequin over each of my poses. I then set up the scene so it looked like a workspace, with my drawing actually moving. It ended up looking like a mannequin doing a cartwheel. It was very cool, and my classmates videos were excellent as well.

In Great Works we have moved on from Classical Greek and Roman art to Early Christian and Byzantine Art. On Friday we looked at the Hagia Sophia, church in Turkey, which absolutely took my breath away. It was stunning. Beams of light shine in from nearly every direction, and the architecture was incredible as well.

Finally, in 3-D design, we are doing a series of clay sculptures. Our first had to be a transformation from one thing to another. I chose to do a bird changing into a fish. There was just something that attracted me to the idea of feathers changing to scales. The next on was a figure done in geometric shapes rather than organic ones. I chose to do a sculpture that is modeled after the Greek Doryphoros, or the Roman Augustus Prima Porta. I liked the idea of using a classical pose, but reinventing it in geometric forms.

Well, that’s just about it. This is a pretty exciting upcoming week, with lots of fun stuff that will be happening. Until next time!

I apologize for the long delay since the last time I posted. But on the plus side, I have a good deal to say. It has been a very busy past couple weeks.

In my Great Works class, we had our midterm exam on Monday. It actually was not nearly as bad as I had been expecting. We had 18 great works to memorize and a comparative and thematic essay to write. It’s always a big load off when you finish a big test like that.

In 3-D Design we held our critique for our assemblage project on Tuesday. I took an ordinary, boring desk chair and created facial features to stick to it, giving it a weird, wacky personality. We also received our next assignment on Thursday, which involves clay sculptures. We have to create a morph between two objects in at least 3 stages. I chose to do a fish morphing into a bird. There is something about the idea of scales changing to feathers that I really like.

In Graphic Design, we have started a self-portrait project. We draw a portrait of ourselves, then using tracing paper, we substitute characters of type for the lines and shadows of our face. Then we end up with a portrait of ourselves completely out of type. It’s a lot of fun. In the computer component of the class, we have started using Photoshop, which I am so excited about. It is the best program ever! We have our midterm portfolio due tomorrow as well.

Animation is, as always, tons of fun but tons of work at the same time. We just finished a pixelation project, which is essentially stop motion animation. I tried to tell a story in mine centering around the quote, “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.” Our next project is almost the reverse of that one. Instead of taking a series of shots and putting them together into one fluid motion, we are taking a video of us doing an action, then breaking it down into individual frames. We hen print out those pictures, and basically go nuts coloring, altering, or manipulating them however we want. It should be a lot of fun.

In my house, we’re getting ready for Halloween. Our plan is to go trick or treating for canned goods to support the Cupboard of Kindness, the food pantry we work with. We thought a unified costume theme was a good idea, so we decided on going as a box of crayons. I’m not sure how I feel about the whole situation, but I am also not sure I have a choice in the matter.

In the Dems, we’re trying to get people up to New Hampshire to campaign for several candidates. I contacted several campaign offices and have arranged weekend to do it, and now we just need the car power to get there. We’re also trying to kick off our anti-apathy movie series, just to get people aware of the issues.

Sadly, I haven’t been to a Community service meeting in a while. Things have been so busy I have had to really prioritize, but I will hopefully be able to go and get more involved this coming week.

Well, that’s all I can think of for now. Until next time!