Drifting

As a Cardoner Leadership student, I have the privilege to attend seminars that share valuable information that applys to both my academic and career goals. The goals, however big or small, have received much help from these educational seminars. The past two seminars, share this same insight. 

Last week we had a small group discussion where we discussed the different view of an employee who wanted to have floating absent days. She was an employee who came to work in the South from up North. In addition to this fact, she was also Jewish. Since I am from the south, it was evident to me what her problem was automatically. The south is an absolutely wonderful place to live, dont get me wrong, I cant imagine living anywhere else, however, the nick name "bible belt" wasn't coined out of thin air. In a place where conservative christianity is the norm and even Catholics are hard to come by, the fact that this women was Jewish was requesting Jewish holidays off was about a joke and a half when I began to read the discussion essay. To say that the south is stuck in tradition would be a true statement. So, her suggestion of approaching the boss with a new plan of action for the company was a lost cause, although it was the appropriate plan of action. 

This week, we  had a speaker come to us from a PR firm in New Orleans. His advice was very enlightening. Since he was a Loyola alumni I felt that he was very relatable and was very equip to answer the many of the questions that we had about what him and his firm did throughout the city. He mainly shared with us his experiences with Hurricane Katrina and how his firm was effected. His experience with the natural disaster really pushed the limits of their company but ultimately fixed the firm into a more equipped PR firm. He shared with us many of the stories of his experience with the hurricane. I knew that hurricane Katrina was a storm that devastated millions of people but I had, had no idea how the situation was back in New Orleans when they where trying to broadcast to the world that they were okay. 

PR really played a big part in keeping the reputation of New Orleans during the storm. Living in Florida, hurricanes actually have their own season, so we know a thing or two about tropical storms. However, I had not recollected on the factor of PR.

In conclusion, both of these experiences led me to great insight about how community interactions are a great way to show leadership skills. Since Cardoner is a community-service based program, I feel that these lessons are very practical. 

PO BOX PostSecret

This week I attended an event put on by the Univeristy Planning Board that immediatly impacted my life. The event was called "Postsecert." This was not the first time I had heard of this title. When I was a sophomore in high school, I warked at an art shop named "The Zoo Gallery." We carried book titled "Postsecret." In the evening when the shop was empty for hours on end, the other employees and I would read this book. It was a book filled with poeples secrets, artistically displayed on a postcard. It was our favorite book to read because of the diversity of these secrets. After this, occassionally I would see the book in a bookstore and scan through it but in recent years I had totally forgotten my experience with the book until I saw the posters around school advertising that the author would be visiting campus. I was very excited to hear the knews because this book played an important role in my personal liberation.

The day of the speaker, I was in a car with a bunch of my friends and mentioned the seminar later that day. None of my friends had heard of the book which was a total shock to me! I encouraged them all to attend the speaker that night so they could learn for themselves about what a great movement "Postsecret" had begun. They agreed to attend. We arrived promptly to find a huge line wrapped around Nunemaker auditorium. The crowd was very diverse. There were boys, girls, thugs, hipsters, sorostitutes, frat daddys, teachers, nerds, athletes, and average joes. It was very rare that one would ever encountor this diversity aside from maybe the OR line. The line atrted to move slowly and anticaption began t build. It took the speaker a long time to finally come out on stage but when he did the diverse crowd let out a loud, welcoming applause.

The man looked very average and was not your typical seminar speaker. He had a table and chair on stage with a display of the "Postsecert" books. He didnt run around the stage and try to engage the crowd in obnoxious excercises. He took a seat in one of the chairs and introduced himself as Frank Warren, the mind behind the postsecret movement. He used a slide show to show us the stages of his idea from the original stacks of postcards that he received to the roomful of postcards he now obtains, full of strangers secrets. He has expanded his enterprise to a website and an application that can be accessed from a cell phone.

But more then to raise book sales, he came to educate us on the reality of teen suicide. Many students were able to relate to his stories and eventually opened up and shared their very own secrets. However, theres were not annyonmously written on a postcard, but revealed to the whole auditorium via microphones.

The seminar ended on a note of acceptance and liberation that truly embodied the expericence.

Cardoner (kar-dun-air)

As a member of the Cardoner Leadership Program (CLP), I feel that my transition to the University of Loyola New Orleans has differed greatly compared to that of my peers. The program affected many aspects of my freshman year which greatly influenced my experience as a first-year college student.

From the beginning I was very intrigued by the living-learning aspect that the cardoner program offered to its participants. Since it was the first time that I would be living on my own, I felt that living in a communal environment would give off the coziness of a "home away from home" which I found appealing. As anticipated, the living situation certainly lived up to the communal title. We ate meals together, did homework in the hallways, hours listening to music in each others rooms and spent plenty of time in the infamous "10a lounge." It seemed that we worked well as a community. The next obvious aspect of the living-learning community was the learning element.

By the time we had our first class we had already been living together for almost 2 weeks. The class that we were taking was called "Rebuilding New Orleans" which seemed appropriate considering that our living-learning seemed to be based out of service. Our class instructor was Peter Burns who was rumored to be one of the top professors at the university by the previous Cardoner class. The class revolved first around a book called Zeitoun which gave a true-life account a man who stayed behind in Katrina and became a hero through his acts of bravery. Next, the class was divided into groups and given a current policy project in the city in New Orleans.

In addition to the class and the living community, we attended programs put on buy the university such as 'Movies that make you go hmmm", jesuit speaker series and various seminars. Many times the Cardoners were the only ones present at these events.

As one can see, those involved in the freshman Cardoner experience were active in a lot of aspects of campus life. As sophomores returning to Cardoner many questions have been raised regarding the purpose of our participation in these different activities. The purpose of the program on campus is not clear. This year, hopefully we can greater serve the Loyola community by designating a clear purpose of the program.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlsBObg-1BQ&feature=fvwp&NR=1