Students’ Views

A week ago, I went to a sitar concert to watch a Southwestern visiting professor play at UT Austin for the Ravi Shankar concert series. My friend Walker went to the show for his World Music class, so I tagged along and listened to two hours of sitar. It’s not the most pleasing instrument, but it was interesting to watch, and not something that most people get to experience. Professors at Southwestern often offer different events such as concerts, film festivals, or lectures as options to learn outside of the classroom through experience.

Speaking of learning outside of the classroom, we just had the Shilling Lecture series, which is an annual campus event in the spring for students to listen to a world leader speak. The Roy and Margaret Shilling Lecture Series was endowed by The Brown Foundation, to honor the 13th President and First Lady of Southwestern University for 19 years of service to Texas’ First University. The intent of the lecture series is to present internationally prominent speakers on topics relating to ethics, public service, and public policy. Past speakers have included Bill Moyers, President Jimmy Carter, Marian Wright Edelman, William Sloane Coffin, John McGuire, Karen Hughes, The Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Benazir Bhutto, and Thomas H. Kean. This year’s speaker was James Baker III. Baker served in senior government positions under three U.S. presidents. His career in public service began in 1975 as under secretary of commerce to President Gerald Ford. He served as White House chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1985, and then served as secretary of the treasury and chairman of the President’s Economic Policy Council from 1985 to 1988. Baker spoke for about an hour to a gym full of students, faculty, and community members. Political science students asked questions to Baker, and he spoke about his ten maxims related to American power.

This past weekend, I decided to take a break from the end of school madness and go to the Austin Reggae Festival at Auditorium Shores Park. This year’s event raised 27,872 pounds of non-perishable food to benefit the Capital Area Food Bank. This total will provide 22,298 meals for hungry families throughout the Central Texas region, and the event was only a $10 entrance fee for an entire day of music. The festival featured musicians such as the Easy Star All-Stars, Morgan Heritage, Mystic Bowie and many others, this lineup provides world music fans two solid days of dancing, drum circles, and being outside in downtown Austin. While at the festival, I ran into several Southwestern students, and spent the day with different groups of friends looking at homemade clothing, eating, and playing Frisbee in the park with the rest of Austin.

After the festival, the party continued on campus with Amanda’s (SU journalists hang out together) birthday party at Korouva. She had a live band play for her 21st, and people danced all night long as we celebrated Amanda.

The last few weeks of school are filled with papers, projects, and tests. I’m getting ready for the summer. This summer, I am going to keep my internship at the Capitol with Representative Strama until the end of the legislative session, and then I am taking a class at Southwestern for June term. I am interviewing for an internship with the Williamson County Sun, and I’m planning on babysitting and possibly getting a job at a restaurant in Georgetown. I’m looking forward to a change of pace, even though I won’t really be slowing down much. I’m excited for days of going to the lake and relaxing instead of reading about nineteenth century marriage law in the United States.

This coming weekend is Kappa Sigma formal, and tonight I’m going to an art exhibit at Korouva where Dr. de Acosta (a professor of Philosophy at Southwestern) will be DJing for the opening. This week, I went to a dinner with my First Year Seminar class and professor (as a reunion) to catch up on all that has happened for each of us over the past two years. We talked about our impressions of Southwestern when we first entered the school, and what has changed now that we are all ending our sophomore year. My FYS professor was Dr. Phil Hopkins, a professor of Philosophy who specializes in ancient philosophy and who is current writing a book on media studies, and it was good to have dinner with him and the other students who I shared my first class at Southwestern with. Seeing Dr. Hopkins again in a personal setting reminded me of why I choose Southwestern to begin with and cemented in my mind the fact that I’ve gained so many important relationships over the past two years with both faculty members and students alike.

As summer approaches, I hope that those of you who are coming to SU in the fall are looking forward to beginning your college career, and as always, feel free to contact any one of the student journalists with questions about life at SU.