“My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations” -John Green
    I cannot deal with conflict. The objective part of me knows conflict can be and often is a healthy and productive thing, that points of contention provide perfect opportunities for new ideas and worthwhile compromises that leave all involved better off, that confrontation (in a healthy manner, of course) can give rise to greater understanding–but the rest of me, and arguably the more dominate part of me, simply cannot take all the negativity that arises when a conflict breaks the surface. I shy away from arguments, from the difficult conversations that hurt to hold, from things that isolate or single out or do anything to disrupt the comfortable feeling of community and collective understanding–and this, I suppose, is why I was caught so flat-footed in that final collective discussion when someone stated that we as a class had not made progress because we had not had those points of conflict. I know we as a class had talked about brokering difficult conversations between diverse groups and maybe we failed to accomplish that piece of our work, but I do not see how that translates into ultimate failure.

This semester has been an amazing experience. In our 360, I feel like I’ve been given the space and the guidance to learn as a whole person, without boundaries, more porously. I have grown a lot since our first day in Camden, and I attribute that to the community that we created for ourselves.

Like many others, I feel like there are many things that I could have or should have said. Now that our 360 is over, I am very aware of this. If we could meet just once more, maybe we would form so many new connections. Maybe not, but there is something I wanted to share that I never really said or thanked anyone for. I figured I would do (a little of) this now.

Eco-Literacy Reflection

I’ve had little experience with art. All through out school, it wasn’t incorporated into my education. I was never taught of its significance in my personal or academic growth. The type of environment that I was raised in had a hostile perspective of art. It was always something for the privileged, for those who had the time to spend “playing” around. And I unfortunately was not “privileged” to spend some time doodling when I could be doing some work around the house or homework.

I really appreciated our fieldtrips, because for me, they did allow me to step out the Bryn Mawr bubble and allow my mind to roam. At Bryn Mawr, everything is moving at the speed of light. I get out of class and off I am to a meeting, work, or other activity never having time to deal with my thoughts or a self-reflection of my until I’m in bed setting my alarm for the next day. Our adventures were each a different location and a different experience for me; I walked out of each one with a new idea, a different song in my mind, and a new dream.

            In retrospect, it seems kind of funny that I ever signed up for a 360 called “Eco-Literacy”, because I’ve never considered myself much of an environmental person.  In fact, if the posters hadn’t emphasized how the 360 would focus on the connections between environmental and social justice, piquing my interest as a sociology major primarily concerned with human-centric issues of inequality, I likely wouldn’t have even considered applying for the cluster.  Ultimately it was the connections to my sociology interests addressed by the advertising for the 360, as well as my interest in 360s and general and the good things I’d heard about the professors, that led me to join this community. 

This 360 stands out to me as the most academically invested I’ve ever been in a class during my time at Bryn Mawr. This is in part due to the fact that it followed directly after the semester during which I wrote my senior thesis, an incredibly difficult experience that helped me grow in so many ways. I was not very well supported, academically, and this was particularly hard given the gravity and intensity of the project. However, because I got a lot of emotional support from friends and family, I was really able to interrogate the feelings that were coming up and that have always come up for me around school work, feelings of isolation and incompetence that have historically led me to try less hard and put more time into extracurricular activities rather than readings, papers, or assignments. I had learned a while back that I wasn’t very good at school, but through the emotional work I did while writing my thesis, I discovered that that’s just not true, that I have as much potential to excel academically as anyone else.