Diversity Event - Norman Borlaug Lecture with Guests David Beckmann and Jo Luck

I attended the Norman Borlaug Lecture on October 11, in which David Beckmann and Jo Luck were the guest lecturers.  David Beckmann and Jo Luck are co-recipients of the 2010 World Food Price, and discussed the role of organizations in combating hunger and poverty around the world.  Beckmann is president of Bread for the World, which is an organization that seeks to influence leaders in Washington to end hunger at home and abroad.  Luck is president of Heifer International, an organization that teaches the world’s resource-poor and hungry how to become self-sustaining.

Beckmann argued during his presentation that the US should provide more monetary aid to less fortunate countries, rather than provide food.  He also asserted that we shouldn’t only focus on countries that have unfortunate events such as enormous natural disasters with a surge of assistance following immediately afterwards, but always extending a helping hand whether they’ve had a sudden natural disaster or not.

Luck and her organization is more in support of teaching resource-poor countries and the hungry how to become self-sustaining.  She contended that giving these extremely poor families food and income-producing animals would lead towards better community development, and in return improved human nutrition and management of animal and natural resources with training in business development, leadership, gender equity, and environmental conservation practices. 

It was a mutual agreement and conclusion between the two that the US is in a great position to extend a helping hand to countries that are less fortunate, even if we are in a down economy.  They both encouraged giving whatever your lifestyle could afford, whether that is a monetary or time donation.  I found Luck to be more convincing than Beckmann, as I believe in private individuals supporting those in need, rather than having government just out right say they are going to spend “the People’s” money to support foreign countries.  Also, Luck was in support asset donations, while Beckmann was specific in monetary donations to those in need.  Although Beckmann had his reasons for strictly monetary donations, it’s wary as a donator to know that your full donation is going towards what you intended it to, while an individual can feel safer with the stance of Luck and her organization on the topic.

My Twitter Experience

What were my thoughts about Twitter before I had even started using it?  Well I had mixed thoughts about it to be quite honest.  I didn’t think it could be very hard to use, nor that bad of an online place to socialize since I knew Senator Chuck Grassley uses it.  However, at the same time, I wondered how many online profiles does a person really need?  Isn’t a everyday social network such as Facebook and a professional network such as LinkedIn enough?  I also wondered how much security could be offered from a site such as Twitter.  I knew with Facebook you could pretty much set how much security you wanted (anywhere from looking like you don’t have an account, to showing the whole world where you currently live and pictures of you on vacation).

After about the first five minutes of it, I could see how fun such an online place of socializing could be fun.  You could follow your most favorite groups as well as people that you’d like to know more about.  So of course knowing that Chuck Grassely was on Twitter, he was of course one of the first people I “followed” (sounds like a stalker! – well I guess you pretty much are with Twitter).  Then I had feeds come up from various Iowa State University related activities, and I thought this could be very useful!  However that’s where it all stopped.  Next thing I knew, I had a prostitute from Florida following my tweets!  Of all people that could and needed to follow me, I had a PROSTITUTE!  YUCK!  Needless to say, I started watch what I put on there from there on out.  I don’t see any reason why the whole world wide web needs to know you are going to Hickory Park in five minutes.  I’ve learned after this activity, that Facebook is a more secure (from the start) atmosphere and random people can’t see everything about you right from the get go.  Also, I like Facebook because I won’t crowd your News Feed with just the most recent status updates, but it will actually update it to the ones that more than likely fit your interests and the more popular threads amongst your friends.  I find this a lot nicer, that way my news feed isn’t filled by people that are constantly on Twitter every three minutes like they don’t have anything better to do than announce to the whole world what, when, where, and why they have done, currently doing, or will be doing.

Twitter is obviously made for a certain type of crowd, and I’m not in the crowd that wants to blast stuff in people’s faces.

A Time I Was At My Best - The Summer of 2009

As humans, we naturally have our highs and lows, but hopefully we have more good times than bad.  This is evident all the way back to biblical times.  I like to think I’ve had my share of good times, but hope that many more are still to come in my following years.

I’d have to say I was at “my best” during the summer of 2009.  This was the summer of excitement; it was the summer I had the pleasure of milking pigs at dawn and dusk (can you hear the sarcasm???).  This doesn’t sound like much excitement at all, but the meaning behind it and how it was performed was the first of it’s kind in the world – thus exciting from this standpoint.

During the spring of 2009, my father and I successfully created a procedure in which we could induce lactation in non-pregnant porcine.  After a couple of trails during the winter, we had finally come to creating the procedure that made milk

Once we had the procedure perfected, we finally administrated it to a transgenic pig.  This was where the real excitement was – finally what East Coast colleges couldn’t succeed in after 9 years of work, took us literally no time to have successful results.  I wish I could publish more about this exciting time of my life, but as of right now the research firm is finishing the project up so that they can go public with the product and until then I can’t say too many specifics.

Doing something that no one else has ever completed successfully is quite the feeling, especially when you know it’s eventually going to make a huge positive difference in global healthcare (and no, I’m not referring to Obama Care :P).  I plan on using this along with my future ambitions to do well in college.

Reflection on the "Beloit College Mindset List"

The Beloit College “Mindset List for the Class of 2014” seems to do a very well job on summarizing what we as the Class of 2014 have seen, not seen, and will see.  Yet in my opinion the writer tends to overlook some aspects too much and over generalize our class.

One item that really struck out to me was that our class doesn’t know how to write  in cursive.  Personally I know I was taught cursive back in my elementary years, and I’m sure many of my other classmates across this bountiful nation did the same.  Although we may not write with it everyday, and it might be a rusty skill to recall, it can still be done.  In fact everyone that takes the ACT test has to write a whole paragraph in cursive.

Another point that stood out to me was the fact that we were raised with technology.  Although technology has been around and developing for all of our lives, it didn’t really take off until about eight years ago.  Up to that point, technology was around us occasionally at school, but not in a practical and everyday application like it is today.  No doubt though this statement will be true for the class of 2020, as their parents now let technology baby sit their children versus a live human being.

A statement that really struck me was that we as a class aren’t afraid of immigration.  Now I can’t speak for my class as a whole, but many have become quite frightened with the fact of the matter that the current President is supposedly thinking about granting illegal aliens amnesty in a rather short amount of time.

A startling fact that the writer brings up is the fact that a majority of my class never knew Russia aimed nukes at the United States.  Once this generation is put into positions of high power, and these key aspects of history are overlooked, who knows what could happen.  Hopefully Russia and other countries have had the thoughts of previous generations go down with the falling of their ancestors, but one can’t assume that upon them as what little we know about their countries is that their traditions never die – let’s hope this isn’t the case.

Overall, I agree with a large part of the “Mindset List for the Class of 2014,” yet I do believe some aspects tend to over generalize the class or have doubt in what we know and have gone through.