This past weekend I went to Southern Oregon University for the PACURH 2010 Regional Conference. In case you didn’t know what it was, PACURH, which stands for the Pacific Affiliate of College and University Residence Halls hosts a conference inviting schools from the Pacific region of the United States to come learn about programming: it includes Alaska, California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Yukon, and Australia…. 1 of the 8 regions of the NACURH conference (National Affiliate of College and University Residence Halls), which I attended this summer when it was hosted by UCSD. You really have to attend it personally to know the gist of what it is ultimately about.
PACURH was relatively fun, but in the end I thought NACURH in the summer was so much better.
Pros of the Conference: Free Food (Which was decent), Met lots of spirited people from other schools, learned lots of things to carry back to ICRA (Mostly lessons learned from the Tortoise and the Hare) & Wonderful Icebreakers!, Programming Sessions was fun, Roll Call was fun (GO UCLA – Partners), and Closing Ceremonies were decently done (Although Bijan kept saying Inception in the middle of it which made me miss key parts of what the speaker was trying to say. In the end he said something about not using one’s SCOTOMA anymore. (and if you don’t know what that is you should personally look it up on Wikipedia). Hospitality rooms were great, still having a ton of food in them. The rain was another good thing, because “Rain makes Corn. Corn makes Whiskey. Whiskey makes my baby feel a little frisky.” Also, my first 4 time being physically and mentally present on an airplane! (I was too young to remember being on a plane when I was a kid). Decorating shirts too was also fun, so was the night of putting “X’s” on T-shirts for the Invisible Children. For Philanthropy, we went to a session where we watched the movie “Go” which made me tear quite a bit over the plague of child soldiers occurring in Uganda, and high school students from all over the United States coming to help them. The trees were also pretty colors.
Cons of the Conference: I felt like our school lacked spirit, and that is one area we should all still work on. Opening ceremonies were also a little dull, the keynote speaker going off on random tangents, and the national anthem being sang in ONE. EXTREMELY. HIGH. NOTE. Christopher Nguyen was not there. Everyone was busy with homework and stuff to be social with other persons from other conferences. During NACURH, I remember us going to everything and not having to worry about “school”, and thus having a better time cause we met a ton of people. Subsequently, because of the overwhelming midterms, and people’s lack of sleep from the night before – the spirit was lower, and people just wanted to “get things over with”. Among other things that were bad. In the end, this all came together encompassing in my mind and making NACURH > PACURH.
The first sessions I went to and learned things in were:
It’s All in the Screen Name (Western Oregon University): I learned some things I already knew about advertising, but it was all reiterating very important information I will carry back to ICRA.
Lessons Learned from the Tortoise and the Hare (USC): I learned lots of lessons from the Tortoise and the Hare, among ways each side can improve to better themselves in competition and spirit. I probably will try to present this for the Leadership Sessions for ICRA.
Random Acts of Kindness Week (Gonzaga University): Pretty cool stuff. Although “UCSD Cares” Week might be pretty similar, I feel like in implementing this in ICRA might be a little difficult and impractical due to the fact that it is a very huge campus. Although, if we were to do it in PAW, it might work. In the end, I want to use the knowledge I learned in some programming organization, regardless of what it is.
Donkeys, Elephants, and Contemporary Issues, Oh My! (USC): I learned about politics, mostly stuff I already knew. We first had some sample questions from the US Citizenship test, which I got all right. And got some free candy corn for doing so :). Then we discussed the Tea Party, where some pretty offensive and stupid things were said, “that they were all racist”. More like they’re a Libertarian and Populist grassroots movement, according to Wikipedia. Then we made distinctions between Republicans and Democrats – I think the best way we saw the two were that Democrats were idealistic, while Republics were realistic. Then we discussed Prop 19, and took a vote on how we would vote on it. Yes: 12, No: 10, Abstain: 3. It’s a good thing most young voters don’t vote in that case.
Find your School’s Missing School Spirit: I forgot which school presented this, but they basically told a history lesson of how they used a story of a 1990 player who died during a basketball game, “because he had a heart of a lion” to boost school spirit. Also, finding interesting facts and urban legends would help to increase school spirit too, which I plan to do for UCSD.
The Newly Roomie Game (San Jose State University). Me and Amul played, and lost, even though we cheated. He basically told me information during the game that helped us get some points. On how many kids do you want, he said to pick my favorite number. And what was my nickname, he said what do I want to be called. All in all, if I were an R.A. I would love to do this game with my residents. Too bad I’m not 🙂
Skating on Ice (San Francisco State University): Icebreakers. Fun stuff. Including fruitbasket, where we all ran around switching seats. It got pretty competitive really quickly. And a game with lots of Hugging. Geetha was lucky. And a game about pirates, and getting into groups. I liked kicking people out of my groups, it was fun :). Hehe.
In the end, I feel like I learned quite a big amount to carry back to ICRA and to try to enhance my leadership skills subsequently.
