Beyond Tutoring

Our beyond tutoring team has been experiencing some unexpected hurdles with our project this month. Most of us have been going to the Wednesday night tutoring session to meet the kids and introduce ourselves to everyone.  After talking to the Reverend of the church facility we hope to use we realized how much more complicated our project was than simply inviting some kids to have fun with us on a Saturday morning.  We first had to check to see if it was alright to use the church as a gathering place.  The Reverend said we could as long as we had all the kids and their parents sign liability forms.  He also wanted us to send in a detailed plan so that he could talk to the kids’ parents, and have them be comfortable allowing the kids come join our project.  We have spent the last month coming up with plans for each Saturday.  We also prepared the liability forms and a flyer for the Reverend to give out directly to the parents.

We decided on having a theme for our project with the kids “Globe Trekkers”. Every meeting we will introduce a country or region of the world and have interesting facts as well as an activity that relates to the country or region.  We also plan on providing the kids with a passport booklet for them to keep and update throughout the year.  They can tape or draw in pictures, write interesting facts, and keep a memento of what all we have discovered about each place. They can also earn stickers by winning games to add to their journal. After accumulating so many stickers, they can receive a prize. 

We got the Reverend’s approval for using the church as a meeting place, and we are now waiting for all the liability forms to be returned to us before we can have our first Saturday meeting with the kids. We are scheduled to have our first session on October 23, and we will be learning all about the country of South Africa! 

From You Guys to Y'all - September!

           Hey y’all!  This is Lexi Zarecky presenting our first expedition with country music!  Because Nashville is country music central, we decided to start our project by exploring the downtown area and the effects that music has had on it.  A couple weeks ago, we drove downtown and walked down Broadway – even at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon the Honky Tonks are full of people and bands.  We started out by walking through the Charlie Daniels museum, which had memorabilia from his past shows and his life.  For those of you who don’t know who Charlie Daniels is (as many of us did not), he is a famous fiddle player who sings “The Devil Went down to Georgia”.  It was interesting for me to see this museum because I had previously seen him live at the Grand Ole Opry before the flood.  After the museum, we went into a couple of stores that sold cowboy boots, and talked to one of the shopkeepers.  They mentioned how country music tends to bring people together, and Nashville is such a friendly city that it seemed fitting that country music is centralized there.

            Finally, we went to a Honky Tonk that had a live band playing.  It was really crowded, but we got to listen to some classic country tunes (such as those by Tim McGraw and the Zac Brown Band), and witness everyone enjoying themselves and the country music surrounding them.  It truly seems that country music is a defining factor of Nashville at any time of the day, and that everyone embraces it.  I believe that country music presents stories that many people face everyday, and is emotional and truthful.  I believe that these characteristics also represent Nashville, and that the combination of the city and country music makes Nashville a truly unique and wonderful place.

            Oh, and a great majority of us went to the Nights of Sun Concert!  It was wonderful to see how country music singers are willing to put on a benefit concert in the middle of frat row!   Especially Love and Theft, which, though many don’t realize it, is a pretty famous country band!

That's all for now!

Lexi Zarecky, Sara Perez, Evyn Cosgrove, Liesel Burks, Abi Hardaway, and Alex Manthey

International Om Nom

        Hey guys! This month, In the Mood for Food has been busy exploring the corners of the world in honor of our international food theme. For the most part, we focused on finding international cuisine settings for our weekly meals together and planning our monthly event of cooking together. These past four weeks we explored food from sushi at Zumi's and ginger noodle salads at PM, to yummy tiki masala chicken at Bombay Palace. We were able to learn a lot about different countries and the foods they celebrate through our weekly dinners together this month.

       On another note, we were able to fit in our monthly do-it-yourself dinner this weekend with much success! Since this was our first time executing the dinner, we decided to pair off and create a total of five dishes. By the end of our cooking frenzy, we had made hummus (interesting side story, since the recipe called for a food processor and we had none, we resorted to shoving chickpeas into a ziplock bag and stomping on them with our feet..not pretty, but admittedly effective. If anyone is interested, here is the recipe: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Hummus-101577), a lovely greek salad, tomato and fresh mozzarella linguine pasta with grilled chicken (did you know that raw meat can be cooked in a microwave..?), a Chinese egg and tomato dish(note the unplanned theme of tomatoes..), and to finish off our meal, African banana fritters topped with powdered sugar (yumm!).
With content bellies, I think we rounded out our International month quite successfully!
We'll keep you all posted as we tackle Vegetarian month next!

Love from In the Mood!

Rough Month

Dear fellow VIP-ers,

Hello, Matt and Emily here. Last time when Andrew talked to you he discussed the love-hate relationship that crew tends to involve for all of us. Never has this felt truer than in this past month. Several of the varsity rowers got so fed up with rowing that they decided to quit, including one of our VIP members.

What to say about that? The team is basically our family, so when someone leaves, it hurts. We understand their reasons, so we’re accepting them and moving on with what’s left of the team. However, we now have exactly eight varsity men and nine varsity women, with no coxswains. As coxswains steer the boats and tell us what to do, they’re kind of important. Fortunately, we have a plethora of awesome novice coxswains and rowers, who are all ready to step it up and lend a hand to our struggling varsity side. We're really grateful for all of them.

Essentially, what all the anger, frustration, and sadness boils down to is a new question for our research this year. On one side, we’d like to ask why people row. On the other…why do people stop rowing? This question will be included in our documentary, featuring the VIP member who is no longer a rower.

In better news, we’re looking to get some fantastic footage this Saturday, at 6 am (yikes), of our first race of the season. We’re having a scrimmage against the Auburn and Georgia teams. This will be the novice’s first ever competition, which is super exciting in and of itself. We’re also looking forward to it, because they just started rowing by all eights this week. It’s going to be a crazy day, and we hope to be telling you about our success next month. Until then, VIP-ers!

CCC Event

Last night started out fantastic with a great showing of VIP participants for the CCC (Cheesecake, Collage, and Comedy) Event in the Vanderbilt / Barnard Lobby. The students began the night by presenting their collages to their peers; each group definitely highlighted their collages, which looked amazing, and some were even able to tell other students about their ongoing projects. After hearing about the different groups' events, field trips, and ideas, I felt thrilled to see how the students had taken their initial projects and transformed them into tangible ideas.

         

Also, after the presentation of the collages, we all enjoyed cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory in three flavors voted on by the participants at the VIP Workshop. However, the night did not end there; it continue when "Tongue and Cheek," Vandy's improv group, entertain us the rest of the night with funny games, hilarious improv scenes, and audience participation. Mostly, this was a great event to let the students see already what they had accomplished and reward them with some relaxation and entertainment. I believe that the collage project was the perfect way for students to begin thinking about their project in terms of the overall purpose and detailed events.

Building an Ethical Identity

It's the beginning of the school year, and while all of us have ample work to do for classes, we are very excited for the year to come and what this means for our VIP group. Of course, at this juncture, we are still in preliminary stages. However, in regards to this, we have made good progress. So far, we've compiled a list of authorities with backgrounds in philosophy, medicine, and specifically bioethics to hopefully interview and contribute to our "archive." We've moved forward with this and contacted the majority of them. At the moment, we are figuring out a comprehensive schedule for the year, regarding what we want to accomplish and when we want it done. Accordingly, we're working out specific dates to schedule interviews with these contacts. A specific direction we want to take this is inviting some of these authorities to speak to students on campus.

On another note, as we've progressed this fall in our respective fields, whether it be philosophy, medicine or whatever, the group consensus is that we've increasingly realized the need for a sense of ethics in medicine, and with the sort of walls that technological development has been breaking down, this need is becoming more and more imperative. We are very excited to educate ourselves on the issues as well as to make our findings available.

- Building an Ethical Identity

Sustainability Through Food

Hi Everyone!

I am posting for the Sustainability: Self, Community, and Environment group. Our project is centered around the idea of becoming more self-sufficient as you progress through college, not only by learning to live on a college campus on your own but learning to take care of yourself and the community in the best way possible once you get into the real world. The way that we want to do this is by first learning to cook, then, learning to cook in a way that is environmentally responsible. Lastly, we plan to share our findings with the greater Vanderbilt and Nashville communities.

Our first project is based off of the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. In the book, Pollan makes three meals. The first is comprised entirely of food from a fast food restaurant. The second meal is comprised entirely of organic food purchased from farmer’s markets and Whole Foods. The third meal is made of food he found, hunted or grew himself. Taking the second and third meals for inspiration, we began to think of ideas we could do here in our dorm rooms. I have planted basil seeds in a pot that I keep on a windowsill in my room.  We plan on using this basil, once it is big enough, in dishes that we make throughout the year. The one that we are most looking forward to is a Caprese salad, made using the basil from my room, tomatoes that we purchase at the Vanderbilt Farmer’s Market and mozzarella cheese that we will learn to make from our friend that makes cheese at home. Sounds pretty yummy, right?

Green Girls - Month 1

Hey everyone! so this week we didn’t have a lot of time to focus on our project since it was so hectic with move-in and classes but we did get to focus on a few personal things that we could do to be greener. So… when we all finally got to school we all made sure to buy re-usable water bottles and put our recycling bins in an easily accessible place in out room.  Aimee and Liz noticed that there was no recycling bin outside of our dorm so one of our goals for this year is to make Vandy-Barard recycling-friendly. A side note… us Green Girls have been avid customers at Nectar because we think that having an organic, eco-friendly market right downstairs is a great perk of living in here and its part of our project too! As for the rest of this month, we are going to continue to set goals and analyze our “greenness” so that we can improve throughout the year!

Be Green,

Leah

Into the New World

What would The Departed look like without Martin Scorsese magic touch and Leonardo DiCaprio aging face? At least 60 more people at Vanderbilt have the answer to this question as they walk out of the Commons multipurpose room at 2am after watching Infernal Affair, a Hong Kong film that was turned Hollywood, on Sunday. 

Global Discovery Project attempts to bring international culture to Vanderbilt. Simultaneously, we also want to connect international student to American culture and lifestyle. In other words, we want to help everyone in the community to enter a new world where cultural barriers are completely broken down. 

Next month, we will be taking another group of student into the world of horror. This time, in association with the Commons and the International Lens Series, we will be continuing our before Hollywood Series at the Commons with Ringu, a Japanese horror movie that was turn into The Ring. Mark it on your calender! JOIN US on midnight of September 25th! 

Dear Vanderbilt,

It is only the second week of school, and people are already stressed out here at Vandy! From keeping up with friends, picking out a perfect schedule, and getting to Rand to beat the lunch rush, Vanderbilt students have a lot to worry about. So what can we do about all this stress? Wait for the weekend? Count the days till summer 2010? No, there must be a better way!

Our project, DEAR Vanderbilt, is testing the levels of stress in Vanderbilt students and finding was to cope with stress effectively. We are really excited about this project because we believe this is a very relevant topic in the lives of all students, on varying degrees of course.

Our first step is to take a poll of the Vanderbilt community. This includes students, teachers, and administration. How stressed are students? What are students stressed about? How do students cope with stress?

By examining the results of the survey, we hope to seek out ways to pair stress management strategies with the specific needs of the students that will be our big goal for September.

Every so often just remember, Drop Everything And RELAX Vanderbilt!

Stay classy vandy,

Marwah Shahid

DEAR Vanderbilt

P.S. Whenever you need a study break, just pretend you are in the Maldives on the beach!

Ready, Set, Build! Bridging the Gap

My name is Annie Ameha, and I am a part of the AWESOME group, Bridging the Gap. Since we have returned to school, we have designated roles to each individual in greater detail. However, we recognize that while one person may be assigned a role, all of us will help accomplish the task as needed. And what is that task? Well ask any one of us and you’re liable to get a myriad of responses. “We’re studying how students segregate themselves.” “Our group is studying the ways in which students separate themselves and also interact between groups.” “Wait, no I thought we were studying how students within groups interact too!”


Our goal in the next few weeks is to nail down a very detailed mission statement that will help us explain our project to anyone who might ask. Moreover, all of us will be on the same page with the common goal that we’re working towards. Other things that we have done include designating Saturday afternoons as our weekly meeting time and making a PHENOMENAL collage that you can only see if you come to CC+C next Tuesday!

More to come from Bridging the Gap, so stay tuned!

From You Guys To Y'all....Here We Go!

Hey Y'all! (Sorry, I had to do it.)

This is Liesel Burks from the VIP Group "From You Guys To Y'all," and I can definitely say that my group and I are so excited to get the ball rolling and get started! These past two weeks have been full of class schedules, bookstore runs, other preparations, etc....we are finally ready to start exploring Nashville! :)

This month, we are going to start putting a lot of our efforts into creating a general schedule for the semester and year. There are so many things that we want to do, so we want to make sure that we have the time to do it all! As a group, our goal is to not only expore the history and role of country music in Nashville, but to also see how Nashville's identity has been somewhat shaped by country music. Concerts, line dancing, you name it- we will be doing it!

We cannot wait for this year to get started! By next month's blog, we will have some cool experiences under our belt! :)

-Liesel, Evyn, Alex, Abby, Sara, and Lexi

Busted Open: The Beginning

What does every student, administrator, professor, and janitor at Vanderbilt University have in common? We all share the same 330 acres of Nashville. The campus, history, myths, and legends of our institution are a basic bond uniting us all. So as members of Bust A Myth, we hope everyone is as excited as we are to learn more about the hidden side of Vanderbilt, the tunnels, the monkey labs, the runaway bulls. We've chosen our leaders, gathered a list of myths that we plan to research, and have begun contacting people in the know. Our plans are being finalized: we'll turn each myth into a short video segment that we'll post on our own YouTube channel, and then we'll unite them all into a full length video which will have a public showing. We're excited and ready to get started! BAM!

P.S. Heard any urban legends or Vanderbilt myths lately? We’d love to hear from you and get working on it.

Daniel Eubanks, Bust A Myth