Erin’s Blog

I am graduating college in one month.  After 15 and a half years, 6 schools and numerous teachers I have no more school to attend.  While I am thrilled to see my life change, I am terrified of what I will encounter, what I will be doing and where I might end up.

I will finally leave my home, Auburn, for the first time since the first grade.  While I have visited other places of course, I haven’t lived anywhere else since I was 5 years old.  What will I encounter?  Where will I live?  Am I ready for all that independence?

While I know that I have been taught what I need to know to succeed, am I ready to leave the guidance that my teachers have given me for so long?  Am I ready to leave all the help and support that my parents have given me?  I know that they will all still be there when I need them, but it will no longer be the same.

I know that I am ready.  I know that I have the skills I need to succeed.  I know that I will one day be a great employee for a company.  I just feel a bit scared about it all.

Is it normal for a 21 year old to be afraid of what is to come?  Is it normal for me to be sad to be leaving my university?  Is it normal for me to wish I had just one more semester?

While I know it is silly, I know that all of those concerns are on the minds of all of the graduating seniors.  We all know that when we walk that stage in 33 days, we are walking into our new lives.  We will be starting fresh yet again.

I feel like I have only been in college a short time.  It feels like yesterday that I took my first college class.  And yet, as fast as it began, it all comes to an end.

I want to be sad, knowing I am leaving behind a lot of friends and a lot of fun.  But while I am leaving behind those things, I am taking fond memories away with me.  I am taking all the lessons learned and using those to shape my life.  I want to be sad, but I know that this is only the start to a great future.  A future full of new challenges, new obstacles, new celebrations and new opportunities.

While my college days may be over, my journey had just begun.  I will find a great job, I will help a great company do wonderful things.

On December 19, I will not be sad, I will be proud.  I will look into the faces of my mother and father and know that I have done something great.  I will know that I am ready and I will be just fine.

Facebook, a word, a site, that everyone seems to recognize.  From junior high students to establish professional, you can find almost anyone on facebook.  MySpace, another networking site, one that attracts different people yet still has great diversity.    While I am one of the many students you can find on one of these sites (facebook), I have recently found myself questioning these social sites.

I know that networking is so important, but this kind of networking is different.  These sites allow you to network with people that you see on a daily basis.  While most people are “facebook friends” with people in other schools, the vast majority of “friends” are in your specific school or workplace.  While it is great to have an informal way to talk to friends, it can also be a danger.

I often times log onto facebook to find status updates that give me a specific location and time to find someone.  I can sign on at any time and see at least one friend saying something like “David is at Wal-Mart.”  While it may be nice to know where people are sometimes, it can also be a danger.  A lot of facebook and MySpace users have not set their profiles to a safe privacy level.  There are some accounts that anyone can look at and be updated on.  While a status may be fun to update, it is also a great way to let a stranger know your location.

Maybe I am just one of those people who are extremely cautious.  I don’t travel alone, especially at night, I keep doors locked, I don’t update my status to let people know where I am and I definitely have my facebook account set so only specific people can see.  I have done this all for some time now.

After the whole incident with Lauren Burk last spring, I thought that Auburn students would be more careful.  I thought that girls especially would be smart about how and when they do certain things, but sadly it didn’t seem to faze some.  I drive at night sometimes and see girls running alone down dark streets.  I get on facebook and find all sorts of information that could be viewed by anyone.

I don’t doubt that everyone remembers what happened that day to Lauren, and I doubt that they are trying to be so unsafe, but it’s the little things that people forget.  Facebook is a popular website.  Everyone seems to be on it.  Private information like residence and cell number are often times posted.  This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if only your “facebook friends” could see it, but that is often times not the case.

Sites like facebook are meant to be fun.  They are meant to help people keep contact with friends and classmates that they don’t see all the time.  It was meant to be a way to share information and updates about life.  It was not supposed to endanger those who use them.  I just wish that everyone paid a little more attention to the things they put out on the World Wide Web.  I wish that they would protect themselves by increasing the privacy function on their page.  There are a lot of bad people out in the world, prowling on those who let them.  It’s a dangerous world, but we can try to make it safer by first protecting ourselves.

Dear Auburn University Board of Trustees,

I find that as a part of the student body, I need to state my opinion on one of your recent decisions to drop the name of James E. Foy on the new student union building.

I find that your decision to ask for a donor to donate $25 million dollars to the university in order to have their name on the building is absurd.  The mere request is an embarrassment to our university.  We are a university built on tradition.  We stand beside those who love Auburn and work hard for the betterment of those at Auburn.  Dean Foy was that man.  He worked hard for the students and was one of the most influential men at Auburn during his time.

I feel that by refusing to put his name on the student center, you have disrespected all of the work that he did to better this university.  It is even more heinous that the old student union will be torn down.  Should that building be torn down, and the new building not hold Dean Foy’s name, then how will he be honored.

When I was a freshman I remember asking why Foy Student Union was named Foy Student Union.  When my camp counselor gave me the answer, I was in awe of his work for Auburn and for what that building stands for.  And now, you are going to keep future students from hearing his good work and honoring him daily by using his building as a hangout, a study place, a place to meet or anything else.

I feel that you have just slapped every student, parent and alumni that gave money to this university straight across the face by ignoring our hopes to see OUR student building become OUR Foy student union.  There have been numerous alumni from decades ago that are pleading with you to keep Dean Foy’s name alive.  By ignoring their requests, you have possibly shrunken the amount of donors you may have in the future.

When the idea of a new student was brought up, and students were asked if they wanted their tuition raised in order to have a new student union, student said yes.  However, they also said they wanted the name of the building to remain the same.  They helped pay for the new student union, so shouldn’t they have a say in the naming of it.  I’m not positive about how much of student’s tuition was designated to the construction of this building, but don’t you think that they gave enough to get a say?

Finally, this university would not be a functioning university without the students.  You need students to come to the school in order to have a university.  You need students to pay tuition in order to have money to work with.  Maybe students should get a little more respect that what you have shown them.

While the building may one day be named something else, please understand that you are shaping the future of Auburn by requesting the money.  You are taking our traditions, or pride and our dedication and turning into strictly financial gain.  It’s not always about the money for everyone, and it shouldn’t be for you either.  Some things are sacred in Auburn, lets not stomp out those things.  Please take that into consideration.

As a student and a local to Auburn, I find myself getting more and more perturbed by the construction that the university and the city have been doing.  Most recently, it’s been the university more so than the city.

The most recent construction done by Auburn started this week.  The concourse, our main walkway to almost every building on campus has officially been closed for a month.  While they did take into consideration, the students, faculty in staff by not closing the entire concourse, they did close a main portion.

There are just a few things I really can’t understand about it all. For starters, why exactly is doing construction on a main walkway when every student is enrolled in classes a good idea?  The university had all summer when most of the Auburn University family was not in attendance to tear up this walkway and redo it.  Doing it this past summer would have put less people out and been less of a nuisance.

Not only could this have been accomplished in the summer, it definitely doesn’t need to be done during football season.  Every home weekend Auburn has 80,000 plus fans in the Auburn area.  The concourse is used during this time.  While the university says that this project will be completed in a month, before the next home football game, how often do those deadlines actually happen?  It’s construction, there are plenty of things that could go wrong and the time is actually only an estimation anyway.

Getting to the bookstore from the concourse is now a maze. Going from Thach to the Quad is now longer.  There are no straight lines between two places; every route is now skewed a little.  Some of us have 10 minutes to get from one side of campus to the next, the concourse made this much easier to accomplish, but now getting from one side to the other is close to impossible.

Not only have they torn up our concourse, they have also displaced my department, The Department of Communication and Journalism.  Our teachers all have tiny offices with no windows in the basement of Haley.  Our classes are randomly placed around Haley Center with no real order.  Tichenor Hall, while getting an awesome and much needed renovation, was our house.  We now have no house, no structure and no order.

I think that the concourse revamp is most disturbing because of our previous displacement from Tichenor.  None of the students asked to be displaced and now we are even more displaced by not being able to enter one of Haley Center’s entrances.  Getting to our classes is more difficult.  Noise levels are annoyingly loud in quadrants one and two making class time less productive and learning much harder.

I fully understand that Auburn does not do all of this construction to be an annoyance to all of their students.  I know that this construction is being done to further beautify Auburn and the campus, but it seems as if they decided to tackle every construction project in a way that would affect the most people.  I wish that maybe once in a while the students would be asked what we think.  Maybe we should have an opinion since we are the people most affected.

I have always been an outgoing person, willing to meet just about anyone.  So often times when I go to a social event or find myself with a lot of people, I automatically start up conversations.  Some are random, but some end up pretty interesting.  I’ve done this forever so I really didn’t think anything of it until this weekend.  I was with some friends and their parents and we were talking about our upcoming graduation and after graduation plans.  The parents were so willing to listen and give us feedback about our plans, some were even willing to help us to find a job or talk to their friends in the related fields.

Networking is something that I have always been a part of, but never really realized it.  For a while I thought it was mostly based on who your parents are and who their friends are.  But, it’s not.  You don’t have to have very social parents to network.   My parents are social, but not overly social.  They have a close-knit group of friends that they stick to and don’t go outside of the box often.  They are comfortable with people who are very similar to them in religious views, work and family life.  While this is very true of a lot of adults, I don’t necessarily agree with it.

You better yourself when you put yourself in situations that you are not used to.  You learn things about handling new situations.  You learn new things about yourself.  I have tried to put myself out there to learn the most about myself and about the way I handle situations.  I have learned to tweak the ways that I act and behave to better socialize.  It’s a fun learning experience that everyone needs to do.

Networking will make or break a person, especially in an economy like we have today.  I’m excited to see what I can accomplish, but know that I will probably need help from those people who have friends in my major.  I think that this will make me work even harder.  If I know that someone put their neck on the line and recommended me for a position, I will want to work hard to make their name as well as my own remain in good standing.

I think it takes a passion for something to really achieve at it so having a large network will not always work.  When I was younger I was very apprehensive about the whole idea of networking.  I didn’t understand how just knowing someone made you a better candidate for the job.  Now I have realized that that is not what networking is.  Networking is a way to get your foot in the door but it will not necessarily make you a successful person.  It may get you the job, but often times it will not keep it.  I have a passion for public relations, I plan to use that to the best of my ability in whatever position that I acquire.  If I do end up getting help from people I have met along the way, then I will be grateful, but I know that it isn’t the only reason I was chosen for an interview of the position.

People need to understand that regardless of the help that someone else gets, it all comes down to your talents.  It all comes down to what you have to offer and not just a recommendation.