Hi UHPers! My name is Avani. I’m a senior in the Elliott School majoring in International Affairs with a concentration in Conflict Resolution. I’m from Rutherford, NJ but also love calling DC my second home. The Honors Program has been an integral component of my undergraduate experience. It has helped me take advantage of amazing courses and is where I made my best friends at GW. In my free time I love traveling, attempting to cook and playing piano.
SPAcialties: International Affairs majors questions; internship/internship funding questions; volunteer programs; housing; roommate conflicts/difficult situations; organization; stress management
Category: Uncategorized
[SPA 2014-2015] Nicole DiSarno
Hey everyone! My name is Nicole DiSarno and I am a senior in the UHP majoring in Philosophy and minoring in History. I joined the UHP as a sophomore admit and cannot imagine my college experience without it — it has transformed my time at GW completely for the better. I love running on the national mall, browsing independent book stores, going to concerts at U Street Music Hall and the 9:30 Club, and cooking or exploring new restaurants and cool parts of DC. Throughout my GW career I have been involved in the Student Association, Research Assistantships, and a variety of jobs, internships, and volunteer opportunities, amongst other things. My SPAcialties: Jobs and internships! I have held a number of different jobs and internships throughout college, sometimes simultaneously, including two summer internships with Goldman Sachs and Federal Work Study jobs. I know how to showcase a liberal arts education (because sometimes your major really doesn’t matter, so do what you love). I also know about changing majors (I have…4 times) and still being able to graduate early; I mastered the art of fulfilling requirements.
SPA Bios: Rose Lieberman
Hi guys! My name is Rose Lieberman, a sophomore from Seattle, Washington, majoring in Biology and minoring in Political Science. My favorite thing to do in DC is a run from Arlington to the Capitol Building. I ran the Nike Women’s Half Marathon- a great way to see what the city has to offer and stave off the freshmen 15! The best part of the Honors Program is the community that comes with it. Whether you live in honors housing, or on the Foggy Bottom Campus, you’ll have friends that know not to disturb you while you’re in the zone, trying to finish that essay. Lastly, I’m great at pumpkin carving and four year planning. I’d love to help you win the annual pumpkin carving contest or transform that crazy mess of requirements into an organized plan.
SPAcialties: Pumpkin art, scheduling, four-year plans
[SPA 2014-2015] Thom Josephson
Friends, UHPers, Countrymen, lend me your eyes!
My name is Thom Josephson and I am an Economics/PoliSci major out of Ipswich, MA. I am an athletic intellectual who, outside of the usual activities like reading, watching too much TV, and snark, enjoys running, swimming, and playing squash. I am president of Club Swim and have done more research than is natural. I am an occasional poet and frequent curmudgeon. I thoroughly enjoy the academic and intellectual rigor of the UHP and relish the amount I have learned and the arguments I’ve had. It is a wonderful thing we have here. I can’t wait to meet and greet you all.
SPAcialties: Scheduling; Research; Transitions; Staring thoughtfully out windows; Essay writing.
#HonorsProblems – Making the Honors Program a Home
Today’s #HonorsProblems post is written by graduating senior Eleanor Klibanoff.
My name is Eleanor, but you might know me as the girl at the front desk. (Or maybe as the future champion of the ultimate Crab Rangoon Showdown of 2014.) I’m a senior, working part-time and socializing full-time at the Honors townhouse on Foggy Bottom. It might surprise you to know that I haven’t always been so involved with the UHP.
I didn’t live in Honors housing freshman year, and didn’t hang out around the townhouse. I worked my hours and attended some events, but in general, I felt a little intimidated. Everyone seemed like they already had their honors friends from their dorm or classes, and I had kind of missed that boat. That was fine—I joined other groups and met other people. The UHP was a work-study job and a place to take classes. That was all they promised, after all.
My freshman year was fun and easy, something not everyone can say. That’s why my sophomore slump came as such a surprise. Classes were harder than ever, and I started to fall behind. I was living with different people and felt like I was losing touch with old friends. I spent more time in bed watching Netflix, and less time having the massive amounts of fun that I imagined occupied everyone else on this campus.
I was feeling pretty low a lot of the time, but like most 19-year-olds, I didn’t want to ask for help. What would I do? Wander into a therapist’s office and say I’d been feeling ‘meh’ for a while? That’s not something a therapist could help with, I thought. (Honors kids can be dumb too, apparently.) I was just—off.
But eventually, I did see someone at the University Counseling Center who told me to get out bed and go out more. Be social, she said. Participate in your own life!
That seemed like the most obvious (and secretly scary) advice in the world. Go out more? Be social? Participate? By this point, I was more inclined to get back under the covers and stay there than to participate. But I knew I had to try. And the first step of that effort took me to the front door of the Honors townhouse.
I didn’t know many people in the program personally. They weren’t my best friends; at most, I recognized some of them from class. But they were there—all the time. There’s a student staffing the front desk every day. Jared is willing to talk so much you can’t hear your own thoughts. Professors swing by to talk about their classes, SPA hang up signs for events and club room events spill into the front office.
Spend enough time there and you simply become part of the community. Before long, Eydie took notice if I was having a bad day and we’d talk. Or she’d offer a cookie, which can sometimes be enough. Catherine would stop by and offer advice, which felt far less intimidating than making a whole appointment. Upperclassmen told me their own stories of sophomore slumps, and then told me how much better it gets. I stood at the big map with a senior and picked a place to run away for the summer. And then we talked about places everyone had traveled, how they funded it, and what it would be like to just…go.
There, at 714 21st St., the Honors Program put me back together, a slow process that took a village. We all need people to talk to, people to put us back together. I highly recommend starting at the townhouse.
Make an appointment with Catherine and Mark, the trained professionals. But when you do, come early and stay after. And make sure to take advantage of study hours. Come hang out. Eat cookies. Drink coffee. Do homework. Bring friends.
We’ll talk about study abroad, and homework problems, and post-grad life, and argue about whether Game of Thrones or House of Cards has more applicable lessons of political maneuvering in the modern world. We’ll talk about your feelings, or we won’t. We’ll talk about cookies and One Direction. We’ll talk about fixing your sophomore slump, and I’ll tell you how much better it gets. We’ll stand at the map and pick places to go.
There are some problems the townhouse can’t fix, I know. But if you feel yourself going into a dark place, or a dimly lit place, or a slightly less sunny place, just remember: you can always, always come home.
The Sotomayor Style [Good Article]
Prof. David Fontana , University Honors Program Faculty Fellow for 2013-2014, says that Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s stirring dissent in the recent case involving affirmative action shows why she’s a national treasure. From the New Republic article:
Sotomayor’s dissent suggests that she can uniquely communicate with the regular public via her written opinions as well. Let’s call this the “Sotomayor Style,” and for liberals it could be strategically significant.
Click through for the full article!
#HonorsProblems-Going Home for the Summer
Today’s #HonorsProblems post is written by Kayleigh Ryherd, a senior and SPA majoring in psychology!
Summer plans got you down? Dreading returning to a dinky hometown with fewer traffic lights than Dunkins’? I, Kayleigh Ryherd, SPA Extraordinaire, have the blog post for you! However, everyone has different goals for the summer, so I’ll try to cover a few of them.
GOAL 1: I want to make a lot of money. As a college student who can only hold full-time employment for the short summer months, you may feel discouraged when applying for jobs. Lucky for you, though, with the warming weather comes a multitude of seasonal jobs. Apply for something outside – through the local Parks Department (bonus: pretend you know Leslie Knope) or at a summer camp. Often, jobs like that do a lot of cross-training, so if someone from a different but related department calls in sick, you might be able to pick up their hours.
GOAL 2: I want to do something in my major.
Email a professor. Really. I’m serious. Just because you don’t see any job listings for openings in a lab doesn’t mean that there aren’t any, especially if you’re willing to work as a volunteer. The summer after my sophomore year, I picked a random professor whose research interested me off of the UIUC website and asked to work in her lab, and it worked! And you can do this by reaching out to any professor who’s research interests you, in any field. This can help you get preliminary experience for when you are aiming for goal 3…
GOAL 3: I want to make a lot of money AND do something in my major.
Apply for an NSF REU. These programs stick you with a mentor who does research that interests you while helping you out significantly financially, across all sorts of fields of study. My REU paid for travel, room and board, GRE prep materials, and three course credits in addition to a sizable stipend. This is all because they want to invest in the promising undergraduate students – and who better than UHPers?
In short, there are always way more summer opportunities than there seem to be; a lot of the time all it takes is just to ask for them.
H.A.G.S!
#HonorsProblems–Registering for Classes Without Privileged Registration
Today’s #Honorsproblems post is written by Kate Kozak, a junior majoring in psychology!
As a junior who did FOFAC (Focus on Fall Abroad Community) last semester, I’m definitely getting a little anxious about my first time not having privileged registration. Getting to register before nearly everyone else on campus had two main advantages: first, getting into courses that tend to fill up really quickly, or that are near-impossible to get into as a freshman or even as a sophomore; and second, getting into the Honors Department classes I wanted before the juniors and seniors had a chance to register (excepting, of course, those upperclassmen who have privileged registration for other reasons).
While I was coming up with my potential schedules for next fall, I realized that not having priority registration really isn’t that big of a deal. Here’s what I’ve figured out that makes losing privileged registration less of an #HonorsProblem and more of an #HonorsInconvenience.
Registering on the “normal” day isn’t a problem for other students, it’s just how things work. I talked to several friends across majors and departments who said that they have literally never had a problem registering for classes. One friend even missed her initial registration day, getting into all her courses when open registration began weeks later.
Past Me was smarter than I thought, and I planned ahead pretty well. Perhaps by mistake, I set myself up pretty well for my last few semesters of undergrad at GW. The requirements I have left include a few GPAC courses and a few upper-level major credits—in other words, I’ll be competing mostly with freshmen. And let’s face it, I’m still registering days before them, so it isn’t even a competition. To any freshmen or sophomores, I don’t recommend loading up on tough classes just because you can. Nevertheless, I do think it’s a good idea to get in those UHP requirements while you have the upper-hand in registration.
Things generally work out in the end, even if you have to watch Banweb for an open spot in a class. There’s a whole army of help in the UHP between Catherine, Mark, and the SPA, so there’s always someone to bounce ideas off of or to help weigh the pros and cons of rearranging your schedule in a particular way. And my biggest pro-tip would be to wait before giving up on a high-demand class, because someone is bound to drop their spot eventually. I’ve gotten into classes that were previously full simply by checking periodically and pouncing as soon as an opening came up.
Scheduling can be scary when we have requirements to fulfill, or when we’re generally anxious about having to make compromises because of what classes we can get into. Not having an opportunity to register early certainly makes it feel like we’ve lost a little bit of control. But we all know that things work out in the end, despite these nerve-wracking few weeks of hoping beyond hope that Registration Day is as easy as punching in the courses we’ve painstakingly chosen and going back to bed.
2014 Strasser Winners Announced!
Congratulations to the winners of this year’s Strasser Writing Prize competition! We have one first place winner, and two runners-up!
1st Place:
Frankee Lyons
Sophomore
“On the Outside Looking In: Charlie Chaplin’s Cinematic Conscience”
Written for Origins with Aviv
Runners Up:
Fatema Ghasletwala
Sophomore
“When Marcuse Met Freud: Why Platonic Friendships Are Possible”
Written for Origins with Winstead
Nicole DiSarno
Junior
“Meursault the non-Dasein: A Heideggarian Critique of Albert Camus’ The Stranger”
Written for Ralkowski’s Existentialism class
The winners can retrieve their gift cards ($100 for first place, $50 for each runner up) from the UHP office starting Wednesday, March 20th, 2014!
#Honorsproblems – Summer Internships: Who, What , When, Where, Why, How?
The first #Honorsproblems post of the semester is written by Kevin Frey, a senior in CCAS and SMPA majoring in journalism and mass communication.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year … okay, not really, but it is the fun time when you have the opportunity to fill out and submit internship applications.
The process itself can be, admittedly, rather overwhelming. Questions arise such as:
- When do I apply?
- Where should I apply?
- How do I write a cover letter or résumé?
- Can I afford to take an internship without pay?
- If I’m lucky enough to get numerous offers, which one should I accept?
This pot will try to shed some light on these more difficult questions. I’ll break down the process into the 5 W’s (and H) to help make it a little easier.
But enough exposition, let’s get started with the easiest of these questions …
Who?
You, a member of the UHP, sooooo …
What?
Apply for a summer internship
When?
As of this posting, a few application deadlines have already passed. That said, there are still plenty of organizations that have deadlines in January, February, and even as late as March. So, start looking!
Why?
There are seemingly limitless reasons why you should intern:
- Build your résumé
- Gain experience that cannot be taught in a classroom
- Network and meet people in your field
- Get early job offers
- Learn more about yourself, including what work environment best suits you
- Discover whether you like the field you are studying (better to learn now than after you graduate!!)
Okay, so those were the easier ones. Now it is time for the harder questions:
How?
– So you know you know you want to intern … How do you go about applying?
Finding intern opportunities:
- GWork – This GW website is for more than just work-study jobs. They post intern listings as well.
- Your school’s website – Many of GW’s schools and colleges list internship opportunities on their websites and in emails. For instance, the School of Media and Public Affairs has an entire section of their website devoted to internships specifically for SMPA students.
- Google – Simply search for the organization you are hoping to work for and look around on their website.
- Email – Email leaders at the organization, inquiring whether they have internship opportunities. Remember to use email etiquette and fully explain who you are.
Pro-Tip: Make sure to apply to many different internships, particularly in the summer when the pool of applicants is very large. Better safe than sorry!
Preparing your application:
The GW Career Center student website features a variety of tools and guides for preparing your application. For instance, they have PDFs that describe how to create a cover letter and résumé.
Pro-Tip: Create your cover letter and résumé before paying a visit to the Career Center (found in Colonial Crossroads on the fifth floor of the Marvin Center). If you write them beforehand, they can take a look at your writing samples and give suggestions of how to improve them, including what to cut out from your résumé.
Getting recommendations:
Many internships require recommendations from both professors and workplace professionals. Often these recommendations are particularly meaningful – they provide more insight than a transcript ever can.
So, who to ask? It is best to pick a professor who knows you well (it helps if you did well in their class). The more they know about you, the more in depth the recommendation will be.
When should you start asking your former professors and bosses to write you a recommendation? The answer is now – NOT later. It is best if you can ask your recommender in person, though if you must use email, be sure to be both kind and professional.
Once you have determined who is going to recommend you, send them information about each of your applications. What would you do at the internship? What skills are required for the internship? Do a little research. This will allow your recommender to write a more personalized recommendation that emphasizes what the internship is looking for. Specialized recommendations are so much more meaningful than generic clichés like, “He is hardworking.”
Pro-Tip #1: Be sure to give your recommender a deadline a week or so before the actual application due date, that way if they get behind, it will not put your application in jeopardy.
Pro-Tip #2: Be sure to check in with your recommender from time to time to see if they need additional information. (This is a subtle way of reminding them that the deadline is fast approaching.)
Where?
Okay, so you know how to apply. So where are you going to intern? How do you sort through all of the opportunities?
For starters, consider what opportunities you will have at each organization.
- Will your tasks be related to the field you hope to one day pursue?
- How hands on will the internship be?
- Will you simply be fetching coffee and completing secretarial duties or will you have a chance to participate in activities related to your ideal line of work?
Look at blogs and internship reviews. Talk to other UHP members and peers in your major. They may have an idea of whether the organization is ideal for you.
Aside from the organization itself, also consider where you want to live. This is both an economical and emotional question.
After nine months at GW, do you miss your family and hometown? Would you prefer to spend the summer at home and find an internship there? (Sometimes, particularly at hometown organizations with small staffs, you may have more opportunities to do hands-on work – they need all the help they can get!)
Or, do you cherish your independence and thus would rather live in a different city for the summer? Maybe you even want to avoid mom and dad by staying in DC? Of course, the question then becomes, can you find housing and can you afford it?
Which brings up another topic to think about … money!
Interns very often are unpaid. Can you afford to work 40 hours a week at an internship without pay? Should you allocate time for a part-time job?
Wrap-Up
There are so many opportunities out there – as a friend of mine once said, you have a “crisis of opportunity.” So just start looking!
Find something that interests you , then get cracking on those applications!
Best of luck and have fun!
