the beginning of the end.

4 times out of 5, when someone asks me where I am during the school day, I would say "work", on my way to work, or i just got off from work. I truly spend most of my time when I am on campus, at work.

My role as the Stay-Over Program Coordinator is almost coming to a close. Today marks the last day of hosting for the 2008-2009 school year and it was quite a bittersweet moment. While I was glad the stress of processing applications and finding hosts was pretty much over, I knew I only had one more month left. All thats left to do is create a manual for next year and create statistics and demographics to see our accomplishments this year.

If you don't know what the Stay-Over Program, it is basically a shadow program where prospective high school students get to follow around a current student (usually a freshman) and get to experience the day in a life of an anteater. It's their opportunity to not only see what college life is like, but more importantly, to see what college life is like at UC Irvine. The hosts take them to classes, clubs, organizations, the ARC, take them to commons, introduce them to dorm friends, have them spend the night in their dorm room, and really have the opportunity to share their experience and knowledge. All in hopes to hopefully get them excited not only to go to college and more importantly, UCI. (sounds familiar, huh? Just need to add one more P to that acronym)

While I didn't get to do the hosting myself, which I would have like to do, it was still another experience coordinating it all. This job, different from my other positions I have had, really gave me the opportunity to be a little more personable with my role It was my little project in which my partner and I had to create a theme, order T-shirts and gifts, get paper work ready, and foster the program from beginning to end. While that gave me satisfaction, what gave me more satisfaction was when guests checked out and watching them interact with their hosts. Hearing in the halls "I had so much fun, I can't wait to go here" or "Thank you so much, I want to go to UCI now" has to be some of the most rewarding experiences.

It was also amazing to work with a partner who I clicked with from the beginning at our group job interview. It seemed like we were always on the same frequency which made the job easier. It was fun to able to share stories with one another about our favorite guests or host, as well as having a partner that supported and understood you when the job got to be a little too much.


I really feel this is a viable part of UC Irvine, because it puts UC Irvine in such a good light and is a very unique program to UCI. Not many schools offer such a program and thats what makes it so special. I leave this year really proud of what I have accomplished. While there were bumps, it seems like we did a really good job, and dealt with the increased amount of guests who wanted to participate in the program well.

and....the shirts and the bags were sick.

What would you do?

A couple nights ago, I managed to find some time to snag a TV show that I was kind of interested in watching when I saw commercials. It has different scenarios, similar to Boiling Point, but rather than testing how long someone takes to get ticked off, it instead examines human reaction in different social scenarios.

One particular example that i was very intrigued with was this particular scenario where a stranger comes up to you and ask you for not for some money, but rather, for some gas. At a time when our economy is a mess and when gas prices had climbed to almost five dollars a gallon, how would one react to such a scenario and what would you do in this position.

While this is not a scientific study, there were some interesting observation made about this experiment:
- when a male was the subject asking strangers for gas, he didn't have the greatest success rate
- however, when a female was the subject and asked strangers for gas, she had about a 75% success rate, no matter what kind of car she was driving. (they experimented to see the difference if the woman had a cheap car or a nice car.
-when a thick accented immigrant male asked strangers for a gas, there was an interesting finding. He had a very high success rate when he asked males for gas, but was rejected from every female he asked.

A thing to note about the immigrant was that he was one of the males that offered assistance to the female subject that was in the experiment earlier. He was an immigrant that had just come to the United States a year before and was someone who commuted thirty miles each way to work in a resturant. Someone like that doesn't have much money himself, but he was willing to not only give up some of his gas to help the women, but he came over to her car to help her put the gas in a tank...in the rain. When asked why he did what he did, his response was...
"Because she needed help."

Something simple as that. No strings attached. Just because someone needed help, he performed a simple act of kindness. Living in such a competitive world where everyone tries to get to the top, its easy to forget that we also live in world where other people exist . We also forget that we really can't make it in this world alone and there are so many things that aren't possible if we didn't get a helping hand from someone else.

Simple acts of kindness are underestimated. To me, if someone shows such acts of kindness, it means a lot to me.

Like the saying goes, "A little goes a long way"

Take the time out of your day to just help that other person make it through the day a little easier, and you will see how the rewards will benefit you more.