Rollins College Home

R-Journals Home
Apply Now! Meet Aditya Meet Brittany Meet Daniel Meet Jenn Meet Omar
Meet Shannon
Admission R-Journals Feedback Campus Web Cam

R-Journals

Back to R-Journals home

Can’t wait to get back to Winter Park

September 18, 2008

I can’t wait to get back to Winter Park

My summer started out with an invitation from the Office of Multicultural Affairs to attend the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE 2008) at the end of May. A group of around 10 students and Chase hall staff represented Rollins at Disney’s Coronado Suites, the conference venue. After a week of brain-squeezing final exams, this convention was just what I needed to stretch my mind. With more than 2,000 attendees, there were students and professionals from colleges all over the U.S. and even some international institutions from Europe and Latin America.

The conference allowed a place where conversation about racism, affirmative action, discrimination in the workforce, and public perceptions could take place. We know these are issues that affect us all, but most of the time we keep quiet. It’s like that big elephant in the living room nobody wants to talk about, but it’s still there. There were nights were we would just sit outside our rooms and debate whether affirmative action is a sustainable solution until two in the morning. After spending a week together, I got to see another side of people I already knew and this was what was most rewarding about this conference.

At the end of the conference I was leaving for Venezuela, I was going to finally get to go home for a good two-month vacation. I was nervous at first. I hadn’t truly been home for a year because I only spent a couple of weeks home in December. So much has changed for me, but when I’m in Valencia it feels as if I never left.

I call up my friends and when we go out, it’s as if we had gone out the week before as well. I hadn’t been home for a week and I was already at the beach. We go to this small beach town an hour north of Valencia where you don’t get internet connection, cell phone service is poor, and you take a small boat to head out to the keys offshore. I went to the beach for long weekends around three more times throughout the summer—up until the last weekend before my 6 a.m. Monday flight.

There are three things on my mind as I start my journey back to Winter Park. These three things I’ve been looking forward to all summer are the Arabic 101 course, being a peer mentor for the Environmental Political Activism RCC course, and being in charge of the Book Network on campus—all happening this fall. First, I grew up speaking the Moroccan dialect of Arabic but I never got to learn how to read and write classical Arabic. Second, ever since my RCC, I have wanted to be a peer mentor. The three of us peer mentoring for Dr. Gunter could not have been more devoted, all three of us wanted to peer mentor for Dr. Gunter only, no one else. Lastly, I have been working with the Book Network Project since last May and the founder has just graduated from Rollins. I’ll be coordinating on campus book drives and hopefully help this project to expand.

It’s been a year since I was an eager freshman, but I must admit that I’m more excited now to get back to Rollins than I was a year ago. I’m upgrading from Ward to Sutton, which means that I move out from the cozy triple in Ward to an expansive apartment in Sutton. I have made similar upgrades in major choices. After being so sure as a high school senior that I wanted to major in Economics and minor in Political Science, I have opted for International Business and International Relations. This comes after a year of taking classes from Anthropology to Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and from French language to studying the Hidden Civil Rights movement. I couldn’t have made a better decision about taking courses in so many different departments

R-Journals is a program sponsored by the Offices of Admissions and Public Relations & Communications. Your feedback is greatly appreciated. Click here to send your comments.

Omar's R-Journal archives: