Writing for Digital Media

            Every time I clean my room, I have to come face to face with the reality that I am a pack rat. I tend to attach sentimental value to objects and keep them for years and years. I keep ticket stubs from concerts, movies, and sports events, museum guide pamphlets, paper wristbands, receipts and any other scrap of paper I receive at an event. I still have all my cross country sneakers from high school because I ran over 400 miles on each pair and can’t bring myself to throw them away. Their worn out bottoms with no tread, frayed laces, and mud stains are a symbol of every mile ran and how much hard work it took. I also have all my birthday cards going back at least five years, letters from my high school boyfriend, napkin notes my mom packed in my lunch box, and notes written on scraps of paper from my friends in high school. All of this stuff is kept in shoe boxes under my bed, in my closet, or posted all over my bedroom walls. I hoard all of thes...

          “Eavesdrop on a Conversation,” that is the prompt for this week. Other classes throughout my college career have also given me the same task, which made me think about the educational value in eavesdropping on a stranger’s conversation. Is there something I can learn from knowing a stranger “would go to the gym, but all the laundry is a pain” or overhearing the inner politics behind Greek life on campus? Maybe this is supposed to an exercise in paying attention and focusing on something outside of myself. Is it meant to get you to notice something you would otherwise over look?             Almost everybody has eavesdropped on people they know out of curiosity or by accident. When I was in elementary school, I won a prize for selling a certain amount of cookie dough. The prize was a little blue box no bigger than a match book that could amplify sound, so you could hear conversations from further ...

           Ever since I was a freshman in college, I had wanted to study abroad. However, there was two major challenges to achieving this goal. Firstly, I am afraid of plane rides. There is something unnatural about being that high up in the air. I can never get comfortable with the idea that I am above the clouds and zooming across the sky at hundreds of miles an hour. Secondly, I can only fluently speak English. Speaking only English limited the number of programs I could qualify for and the number of places around the world I could go.             This all changed the fall semester of my junior year when I was approached by my Spanish professor about summer study abroad program in Paris that lasted a month. The program was for literature and writing and the classes were taught in English. Even though I would still need to know French to get around the city, I decided to apply of the program. A few months after I sent in ...