The Desire Community and Dinner with Dr. Cherry

So I'm still swamped with so much work, but I decided to take a little time out to take a study break and write about this great opportunity that I had last night. I had the privilege of eating dinner at Dr. Cynthia Cherrey's home with members from the Tulane and Desire community.

First, who is Dr. Cynthia Cherrey, you may ask? Dr. Cherrey is the Vice-President for Student Affairs here at Tulane and Dean of Students (you can click on the link for a fuller bio) which means that she works closely with the students and student life here at Tulane. Since I am a community service scholar, I was invited to her beautiful home yesterday evening for a delicious dinner catered by Tulane's own Olive Blue (GWA uses them to cater as well!) to bring together members from the Tulane and the Desire community which included students, Tulane faculty and staff, and members of the Desire neighborhood.

Second, what is the Desire neighborhood? The Desire neighborhood is one of the housing projects in New Orleans located in the upper Ninth ward which I had the opportunity to spend a day at last semester on a Spotlight tour conducted by Tulane to show students different areas of New Orleans. We actually got to play with the children of the neighborhood that day as the community members put on a community yard sale to raise money for the community center that they are trying to build. Below are a couple pictures of some of us playing with the kids at Desire

There were two very moving points in the evening last night. One was when Luke, one of the Tulane students at the dinner who is part of the Roosevelt Institute, spoke about how what people who do community service fail to realize sometimes is that they think they are knights on a white horse coming to rescue the people they are trying to help when in fact most of the time what the people need is a friend with a helping hand. And what we're coming as are friends with helping hands.

The second point was when Miss Julie, one of the community leaders from Desire, spoke about how she know that the Desire neighborhood needed help, and how historically, their neighborhood has been overlooked and "was nothing to everybody." She was moved to tears by the fact that an institution as big as Tulane would help out people that everyone else overlooked. She was truly so grateful that Tulane was helping Desire raise money to build a community center. I was glad I was able to witness such a beautiful moment.

Anyways, that was what I had to share for today. Only one more week of Destination Tulane! Hope to see you there! I've met so many great prospective students already, and I want to see all of you in the fall! I'll be an OC in Monroe!

Speakers

Hello! I hope everyone had a nice Easter or Passover!

I have a ton of work to do before finals (which are in two weeks) including an organic chemistry test next week, a public health presentation on ebola due next week, physics lab due tomorrow, and various club responsibilities, so this entry is going to be a little short and all about the various speakers I have heard speak at Tulane. I have heard a lot of speakers here, but I'll mention my favorite three here.

President Barack Obama was definitely very, very inspiring to hear speak at Fogelman Arena. We waited in line at 7:30 am for his 10:00 am speech last year when he was still a presidential hopeful. His speech was very moving, and it was touching to hear him speak about the problems facing New Orleans and hearing his proposals about protecting the wetlands and providing more for the public schools.

from http://my.barackobama.com/

Sir Salman Rushdie, the famous author (Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses), was also another one of my favorite speakers. When he came to speak to us last year, he was very funny and eloquent, and I left feeling just a little bit more enlightened. I told my friend Maeve who went with me that I wish I could be his grand-daughter so I could listen to him speak all the time.

from www.tulane.edu/

Anderson Cooper, the news anchor and journalist who I have had a big crush on forever, came to speak last year as well, and I can still say I have a big crush on him. He spoke about the importance of rebuilding New Orleans and about his unique experience as a journalist.

from www.tulane.edu/

Anyways, that's all from me. Wish me luck with all my work! And I still wish all the college-bound kids luck with their decisions! Hope to see you at Tulane!

Crawfest 2009

Yesterday was of my favorite days of the year - Crawfest!

What is Crawfest you might ask? Well, it's an annual music festival that the Associated Student Body puts on that has tons of crawfish, booths with local arts and crafts vendors, and two stages with great musical acts going on throughout the entire day! And admission was free with a Tulane ID! Bands like Funk.Soul.Family, the Revivalists, and RJD2 as the headliner. It was pretty much the best day ever. What more could you want than delicious crawfish, great music, beautiful weather, and the best company?

Anyways, below are some pictures from the day of. Enjoy!

The very large Crawfest banner

Seth and his new little crawfish friend

Sam and Arielle digging in to their crawfish.

Oscar holding up a bacon brownie that he bought. Yes. That's right. A bacon brownie. He said it tasted like a regular brownie with just the slight aftertaste of grease.

Regen showing off the crawfish she's about to eat.

Arielle, me, and Amanda after a long day in the sun.

Newcomb

Hey all! Sorry it's been a little while since I last posted, but it's been a little hectic with midterms and then spring break (nothing noteworthy to speak of, though, since I went home to just relax for the week).

What I really wanted to talk about, though, was one of the great assets on campus for women (and men) which is the Newcomb College Institute. For those of y'all who don't know, Tulane University used to be for just men and its complementary women's college was Newcomb College. Even though classes were integrated in the 20s, it wasn't until after Hurricane Katrina that they two undergraduate colleges finally combined to form the Tulane-Newcomb Undergraduate College that it is today. Below is a picture of Newcomb Hall.



The Newcomb College Institute is what remains of the old Newcomb College and tries to keep the old Newcomb traditions alive. Even though the last Newcomb College class is graduating this year, Newcomb has a lot of great programming directed at the young women here on campus such as student groups, speakers, etc.

One of my favorite activities that Newcomb has is called "Friday at Newcomb". They provide a great lunch about three Fridays a month and also have really great speakers come in and speak about interesting topics. The best part? It's all free!

A student group that I am involved in is Women in Science. As a public health major, it's great to have a network of other women in the science field to connect with. We have a lot of professors come in to speak to us about whatever they'd like. They tell us about their research or sometimes just about their own personal experience with being a women in a science field. I've met some great people through Newcomb. Me with Mediha, Pearl, and Sam - three of the other executive board members of Women in Science (I am the Community Outreach Chair).


So that's a bit of Newcomb for you. Also, it's Destination Tulane all this coming month, so hopefully you'll see me around campus if you come to visit (which you should!).

CACTUS Field Day

I know I've talked a lot about CACTUS (the Community Action Council of Tulane University Students) already, but I'm really involved in it and love the community service activities I get to do because I'm involved in it.

Last Friday was CACTUS field day in which about 200 kids from various local elementary schools were invited to come play on Newcomb quad. CACTUS encouraged other student organizations such as Greek life, student government, ROTC, etc to come out and sponsor a table with different events for the kids, and we had kettle corn, snowballs, and even a rock climbing wall!

The boys of Phi Gamma Delta "mummifying" kids with toilet paper.

A member of the juggling club teaches a little girl to juggle.

Mostly, I sat at the Women in Science table. We had cookies and bought frosting and sprinkles that we let the kids decorate. It got a little (okay.. a lot) messy, but it was a lot of fun.

Lindsey helping a kid with some sprinkles

Other than that, I've just been really busy with school. I went to this "Undoing Racism" workshop this weekend that was really interesting and tackled a lot of issues surrounding race in New Orleans. I also had an Orientation Coordinator meeting on Sunday for next fall and I'm so excited to get to meet all the incoming freshman and help show them around (I'm going to be in Butler but they might move me to Monroe... so if you're living there next year, you'll probably see me around).

What else? Oh. Next week is spring break, and I'm going back home to California to just chill out for a bit. I am very excited for that.

Anyways, that's it for now! I hope everyone gets the chance to visit Tulane before they have to make their final college decisions!

Tulane Athletics

So I have so much work to do this week, so this is going to be a short post all about Tulane athletics.

If you didn't know, Tulane is a Division I varsity school in Conference USA. Currently, we have 11 sports ranging from men's and women's basketball to baseball to women's golf.

Currently, the big sport season that is upon us is baseball season. Our team plays at Turchin Stadium which is right on campus and had is inaugural season last season. I personally love baseball so going to the games with my friend is a good weekend activity (although since I have been swamped with work, I have done nothing of the sort as of late)

During football season, our games are played at the Superdome, and students are bused there for free. Below is a picture of my roommate, Arielle, and I last year with the school mascot, Riptide at the first home football game of the season. I love Tulane football; I even went to a game for my last birthday!

Anyways, definitely check out Tulane athletics. Our athletes put a lot of hard work and dedication to make our teams great!

Also, we just had prospective honors weekend here, and I hope that all the prospective honors students are having/had a good time!

Mardi Gras 2009

Hey everyone! So Mardi Gras weekend was last weekend, and I think I've finally recovered from all the madness. Mardi Gras was fun as always.

So let's recap. One of my really good friends from grade school, Yana, came to visit me for the weekend. She flew in on Friday night and stayed until Sunday evening. Basically, on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, we went to parades and caught lots of beads. The picture below is of my friends Amanda, Regen, and Meghan (apparently all wind-swept) after a parade on Saturday night. Notice that Meghan caught a feather boa... I was so jealous!

Here is a picture of my friend Ashleigh and me on one of the parade routes:


Here is a picture of one of the floats that we saw on Saturday:

On Sunday, I actually went to the French Quarter during the day to show Yana around, and she absolutely loved the French Market and the performers across from Jackson Square. It was a lot of fun; she's even planning our Mardi Gras costumes for Senior year!

On Tuesday, a few of my friends and I planned to go to the Zulu parade which was at 8 in the morning, but we were so exhausted that instead we just stayed on campus all day and ordered in Chinese food for dinner.

All in all, it was a great Mardi Gras, but I'm glad we're all back to reality now... well, kind of glad because now I have to study for an organic chemistry quiz on Monday and a sociology midterm on Tuesday.