Spring 2009

Getting on the train was a bit of an ordeal. 

I’m not doing anything definite this summer, so I’ll have some time.

Reading (1)

I have already read The Plague.  It’s now my favorite book.  I’ll probably reread it in a bit. 

Sophomore College (1)

Stanford has a program called Sophomore College.  Fall term starts towards the end of September, and SoCo goes from the beginning of September until the start of fall term.  In  SoCo, you only take one class, and it meets every day of the week.  To do a SoCo, you have to apply – each SoCo has enrollment capped at 16ish, and there are only 10 or 20 of them, so there are always more people who want to do a SoCo than spots available. 

In May, last year’s QSA leadership approached me and recommended that I apply to be part of next year’s QSA leadership.  I applied, and now I’m co-chair and financial manager.

In the past few years, it has mostly been a social organization.  Last year, they organized the work on the No On Prop 8 campaign, but not a whole lot of other political action.  There is a lot of potential in the organization, though, and I hope to make it a lot more political.  One thing that we’ll want to do is organize an Ally Week to try to get more people to identify as allies to LGBTQ people. 

This past year, I was an executive fellow on the ASSU (Associated Students of Stanford University – Student Government) web team.  Starting this spring, I became a deputy chair of technology.

Because of Gobaud’s CS experience and public service attitude, there are a lot of cool projects underway.  There are some general student-life applications (ie, online room reservations for the student union), but, for instance, we’ll also be creating a service database where anyone can post their experiences with the many public service organizations on or near campus.

Last year’s student body president, a few years ago, started Dance Marathon.  It’s an annual 24 hour fundraiser for FACE AIDS / Partners in Health that was was started as a response to reading Paul Farmer’s book, Mountains Beyond Mountains. 

There aren’t very many debate tournaments in the spring term, so nothing much to report there.  There were elections on the debate team, and I’m now the Captain of NDT-style debate (policy debate, as opposed to parliamentary debate) and the webmaster for the debate team.

Speaking of applied classes in the school of education…

Ed193a is a class that trains students to be peer counselors at The Bridge, Stanford’s 24-hour, free, anonymous peer counseling service.  I didn’t come in to it thinking that I would want to be a peer counselor.  I actually just got an email, before picking my classes, entitled: “Ed193a – Be a Better RA, Friend, and Leader!”  I thought that the class would teach me some good listening skills, and I knew a friend who had a positive experience in the class last term, so I decided to take it.

Overall, Soc22 was interesting at times, but fairly basic.  It went over the sociological study of social movements – basically, reaffirming intuition about social movements and using a lot of jargon to do so – and applied that to different social movements. 

Overall, I liked SLE a lot more this term than in previous terms.  The readings were more contemporary, so I could relate to them, gain from them, and write meaningful papers, and I meshed well with Greg Watkins, my section leader this term.  Because I’ve been so busy this quarter, I didn’t quite do 100% of the readings, but I made an effort to get through the ones that I found to be interesting.  And I sort of got the gist of the rest.