First Semester

Now that the first semester of my first year of college is over there are many observations that I made. There is a lot more freedom given to you in terms of the work you have to do. In high school the teachers used to make sure you were doing all the work you had to do, they would hold your hand step by step as you had to do any long sort of research paper. They would check to make sure you wrote note cards, then check to make sure you did an outline, then check to make sure you have a rough draft or two done, then you would hand in your final paper. In high school, at least where I went to school, as long as you showed up for class most of the time and you did some of the work you were basically guaranteed to get a B in the class. At Lehigh you are not guaranteed to get any grade, you have to earn the grade you get. Also, there is a big person between the teachers in high school, and the college professors. A college professor treats you as an adult, they treat you as if you are a fully grown who is capable of making the right decisions for themselves. They do not coddle you, and treat you as if you cannot make the decisions on your own. In classes for example, they talk like how they would talk to your parents, they talk to you like they are your peers instructing you on how to do something. This makes for a much more comfortable learning environment, and it makes me want to go to class more than high school teachers did. If I had to sum up the difference between college and high school there would be one word that I would use, maturity, they treat you as you are, a mature young adult.

Being Home

Went I walked into the door into my house, I felt like this was not the home that I had left when I went to Lehigh in August. First, it was much cleaner than it was when I left. There are no more children left in my home, I am the youngest of two, I have an older sister who is a senior at Syracuse, so when we are home the house tends to become messy. There was no odor of dirty laundry in my room, there typically used to be an assortment of dirty clothes laying around my room and in my bathroom. Also, there was no mess of old eaten food containers, like the wrappings to various sorts of bars or cookies or anything of that sort. I used to eat and watch TV and as I would eat I would just leave the wrappings behind on the coffee desk in front of the TV. When I got home all that was cleaned up. The biggest change to affect me was the fact that there is no food in the house. Since my mom typically eats out and does not eat much at that, she does not need much food in the house. Also, the diet she maintains is much different from the diet that I try to maintain. She eats healthy and tries to maintain a good diet of all types of food, while staying away from candy. Whereas when I was home I used to try and keep the house stocked with all the foods that she would not eat. When I got home and walked in the door, I could immediately tell that the house had changed.

Wall St.

I along with many of my peers want to pursue some sort of career in Wall St. I want to work in the legal side of the business. Right now though, if I were to graduate and be ready to start working I would not be trying to start in this industry. I speak to my father about once a week, and normally the markets come up in some sort of way, as he works as a Municipal Bonds Trader. I can remember ever since I was younger he used to say that by the time I grow up Wall St. and the whole business is going to be completely different. I am starting to understand what he means having been paying attention the what has happened and is still happening to companies. I have noticed that jobs that once took 4 or 5 people to do are now instead being done by 1 or 2 people, the whole industry is shrinking and computers are leading the charge in this shrinkage of Wall St. For example, as trading is starting be done instantly over the computer, companies are starting to lower the amount of people they have on the actual floor of the New York Stock Exchange because its no longer needed. Traders are slowly being able to place their orders for them and their clients online and have them carried out that way. In my fathers industry he has said that the computers are eliminating the need for some of the traders because once agin they are slowly developing programs that can do what the traders do. Eventually you will need 1 or 2 people to run a whole trading floor that deals with thousands of people a day simply because of the creation of new technology that can handle that amount of people. This has made me start to rethink what I want to do, but the prestige of Wall St. is still luring me to go and the history that my family has with working in some sort of Wall St. type industry. My dad is the 3rd generation in his family to work in Municipal Bonds, and my mother when she used to work worked trading Municipal Bonds. It almost seems like its in my blood to pursue that sort of career.

TV

My TV watching habits have drastically changed since I started at Lehigh. Prior to coming to college I used to spend about 3 hours each night watching, as I did not have nearly as much work to do nor was there as much to do around. While in school at home there were very few options as to what I could do on a weeknight. I could hang out with my friends for a few hours, which I would normally do right after school ended. After that I would come home and do the 20 or 30 minutes of homework that normally encompassed the entire days of schools work. After that was done I would normally eat dinner, then I had 3-4 hours before I would go to bed. So I would watch TV, from doing that I became attached to shows that aired on certain nights. On mondays I used to watch CBS for the 2 hours of comedy television that they showed, other than that I would normally flip around watch a movie or see what sports are on. Now that I am in college I find myself having less time to watch TV at the times that the programs air. I typically do my work later now, so I cannot watch the shows that I wanted to watch. What I find myself doing is going online and watching shows. I have started to watch two shows since I came to Lehigh, Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Sons of Anarchy, and I have continued to habitually watch Curb Your Enthusiasm. With Sons and Sunny I watched every episode aired to date online because its hard to watch every episode of a show by just watching them on TV. With Curb I also watch it online because we don't get HBO in the dorms and because I don't have time Sunday nights to watch. Since I have come to college I have noticed my amount of time spent watching TV decrease dramatically, and instead I watch the shows that enjoy online off my computer.

War In Iraq

The War in iraq has been debated and discussed so much over the past 8 years since it has begun. There has been much talk about the fact that we went in for the totally wrong reasons that the reason we did go in was one that was made up by the government. The reason that I feel the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan could be justified is because of the Truman Doctrine. President Truman said that since the "US is the leader of the free world we must support and spread democracy worldwide" at that time it was against the communist regimes that were spreading around the world. At this point a lot of the communist regimes that were once most threatening to us are gone, but some are still threatening the country, such as Cuba and North Korea, but now we have to deal with these totalitarian regimes in countries like Iraq where the people have no say in what happens and instead they are treated like slaves. I understand that it is not the United States role in the world to be a world police invading any country that does not share values like we do, but what was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan should not be happening to people, and that is why I agree with the toppling of the regimes in those two countries. However, I feel at this point in Iraq we should be getting ready to hand the country back over to the people. They should be able to start a democratic regime there. There is one flaw in my point though, and that is the fact that we went into Iraq to stop terrorism and toppling Saddam Hussein was kind of a secondary goal. To me that toppling of Saddam and his family rule should have been priority, clearly Iraq was trying to ensure its protection from Iran by claiming to have nukes or the capacity to build them. I am against war but I am for democracy and peoples rights.

Tiger woods

Since this topic has been so widely talked about on shows ranging from sportscenter to the view, I felt that I should my 2 cents in about the whole issue. To me this is his personal life, he was not put in the public view in any way expect for through golf. Nothing about his personal life, besides for his marriage had really ever been made public before. He is a very private, so for this to come out must have been a huge shock and he must have been fuming. That being said, he is paid millions of dollars every years to represent some of the largest companies in America, he is the face of Nike Golf, the face of Tag Heuer, he was the face of Accenture; he had all these huge companies attaching Tigers face and image to all of their products. This also made kids look up to Tiger as their hero, I'm sure many people worldwide strive to be like Tiger. They want to obtain the perfection he has with golf, but also in his personal life up until now. I remember when I first heard that Tiger had crashed his car at 2:30 in the morning on a random weekday morning/night, my first thought was there is no way that is whole story, only shady business occurs at that hour of the night. Later on in the week all this news began to break about affairs and what not, and I realized what had happened. Then the voice mail came out into the public, and the whole thing exploded in Tigers face. My first personal opinion on this is who cares, I do not really care, he is a great golfer I do not care one bit about what he does in his personal. Then I began to think he is the face of many companies, many people look up to him, I realized then that he needs to keep himself to a higher level of judgement than others because of who he is and his success. It would make me miserable, but its made him a successful man, and his given lots of opportunities so far in his life.

Alex

My dogs name is Alex, just to begin the the story and introduce it so that you know she is a dog. Whenever my sister introduces her she refers to our dog as her sister so she says my sister Alex. That is the cause for great confusion from her friends when they show up at our house expecting a little girl to be running up to them, instead they get a dog running up to them. Many people thought, and some who have not yet come to our house, still think that there are three siblings in my house, 2 girls and 1 boy. They do not realize that my sister, the real one, is just personifying the dog. Although in many respects to us she does feel like a human. Alex will hang out and relax with us, shell follow us around like a little sister would, she even annoys us just like a little sister would. The only problem is that she cannot talk, and she has tons of fur covering her entire body, but none the less I love her as if she were a sister. Whenever I come home from being away at first she treats me like a stranger, she stands 10-15 feet away from me and just barks loudly. Then after about 5 minutes of barking she finally comes close to me and smells me, then she realizes who I am and begins to treat me like she normally does, she licks me for a little bit, then she expects me to rub her in return for the licks. I am the most rough one with the dog, she bites me the most out of anyone in the house because I wrestle with her and play around. So after we go through licking and rubbing we begin to wrestle normally and then my mom comes in because it sounds like the dog is going to actually get mad at me. Instead she will sometimes walk away, sometimes bite me playfully, or sometimes use her paws to move me away. I value this fun time and the relationship that me and my dog have, it is very important to me and I miss it when I am away.