youhadmeatcollo-blog

[youhadmeatcollo-blog]

20 Hours of Something or Another

For my 20 hours, I chose to work on a blog I created last semester called, “Voices of ETSU” where I interview students and tell their stories. I’ve met a lot of very interesting people through my endeavors. 

https://abbigailmleonard.wordpress.com

Many of my older posts from last semester have been made private, as I wasn’t happy with how they turned out. I told all of these students that this was just for a project so they didn’t have to worry about being all over social media or whatever...I think I just told them that because I don’t want people to read what I wrote when I’m not even satisfied with it.

I worked on my blogging skills more than anything with this project. My professors in mass comm tell me blogging is a very important skill to have as a media professional. With the posts I made this semester, I think I definitely improved but I’m still not ecstatic about the way they turned out. I’ll probably end up private-ing all the posts after you’ve gotten the chance to check them out. Each interview took about an hour and composing the articles took about an hour each as well.

Next semester I’m going to work on something more personal, maybe experiment with “vlogging,” since I declared a minor in RTVF this semester. Time will tell, I guess.

[youhadmeatcollo-blog]

Made in East Tennessee

I was really excited to learn about the Made in East Tennessee film festival this semester. Especially as a media & communications major, I was eager to see what members of the RTVF department had been working on. 

All of the films were amazing, it made me want to start working on some creative content. This semester, I added a minor in RTVF and attending this film festival got me inspired. My favorite films were Bibo and Lucky Penny, two very different and super creative films created 100% by students.

The whole experience was super cool.

[youhadmeatcollo-blog]

Community Service Chapter 2: The One with All the Soup

Because I couldn’t think of anything else to do for my community service, I emailed my old SGA advisor at MECC and asked if I could help them stock the food pantry again like I did last semester. He was more than happy to have a volunteer and I even brought along some donations. As there wasn’t as much cleaning/stocking to do this time, it only took about 2 hours. So I then helped organize the Cyber Education Center on campus. The whole experience took about 4 hours. I always enjoy helping out at MECC and it was pretty cool to see all my old friends and professors again.

Here’s a really unappealing snapchat I took of me with some soup. It’s regrettably the only picture I took that day. 

[youhadmeatcollo-blog]

A Surreal Experience

The first event I attended this year was the “Salvador Dali and the Divine Comedy, Part II: Purgatory” exhibit at the Reece Museum here on campus. It was really cool to see such acclaimed works of art on display at our own campus.

I can relate to the whole purgatory thing, as I feel that’s where I am this semester.

[youhadmeatcollo-blog]

Community Service Chapter 1: The One Where a Nurse Filled a Bag with My Blood and Gave Me a Tattoo

In February, I donated blood when the Blood Assurance truck came to campus.

On the truck, the other donors and I started talking about Full House and debating on whether one character’s name was DJ or TJ Tanner. The nurse who was taking my blood just happened to be a die hard Full House fan (weird) and I guess she was appalled that we didn’t know. So she left me a little note on my arm: 

The whole process took about two hours, which was much longer than I expected it to take. My heart rate was too high at first so I had to sit and chill. The cherry on top of the experience was that it took three different nurses to find one of my tiny veins. 

[youhadmeatcollo-blog]

My Personal Mission Statement

I will discover and achieve my goals by becoming my best self. I will remain passionate about the things that are most important to me (i.e. creativity, family, advocacy, compassion). I want those who matter to me to see in me a caring and considerate person and those who don’t know me to see someone they would like to meet. I want to make everyone with whom I come into contact feel important and loved. Most of all, I will remind myself every day to love myself and to never be at war with myself.

[youhadmeatcollo-blog]

I Volunteered as Tribute

After stressing myself out about not having done any volunteer work with the end of the semester rapidly approaching, I was so so so relieved when my former SGA faculty administrator emailed me and other alumni requesting assistance cleaning up and restocking MECC’s food pantry.

At my old community college, I was a student diplomat and vice president of the SGA. As someone who was very active on campus, I became really close with a lot of the faculty members, so I was more than happy to help out. From 11 to 2:30 we worked on that mess of a food pantry (which is more like a full size room) and finally got it cleaned up and we were able to stock all of the shelves with food that students had been donating over the past couple weeks. It was really nice to visit my old campus again and it was fun getting to help out like old times.

[youhadmeatcollo-blog]

O’ beware my professor, of a fangirl post

So I went to ETSU’s production of Othello the other night and, as a theatre geek, I was way too into it. Richard Jackson did SUCH A GOOD JOB as the title character. I mean this is a difficult play to perform, as are most Shakespeare plays just because of the outdated nonsensical language. I think it can be easy to lose the meaning and understanding of lines when an actor is trying to pronounce the awkward phrases, but all the actors in this production clearly understood the script which made it super easy to enjoy.

Overall, 10/10 would Othello again.

[youhadmeatcollo-blog]

Killing Three Birds with One Stone

On the 21st, ETSU hosted a post-election panel discussion in the Culp Auditorium to talk about the aftermath of this years election. I had to attend and write a news story about it for extra credit in one of my classes and I had to create a video story about it in a another one of my classes. So I figured, why not knock it out of the park and use this event for three different grades?

As for a reflection, I thought it was pretty interesting to hear the opinions of a few of the PoliSci professors. I think after a traumatizing election year like 2016, students and faculty really needed an opportunity to make sense of things together.

Below is the video story I made. The quality isn’t great because I was using a camera that was like a foreign device to me and my narration sounds like I haven’t slept in three weeks (because I pretty much hadn’t), but I thought what better way to prove I attended the event than with the video I made about it.

[youhadmeatcollo-blog]

I found myself at the Tipton Gallery yesterday being sucked into the Civil War era…and it was pretty dope. The exhibit by Katie Sheffield was called, “Descendants” and it featured large photographs of people reenacting battles from the American Civil War.

I expected to be somewhat uninterested. I love art galleries, but something about the subject matter made me think it would be a drag and I would just be going there to get a grade. I was pleasantly surprised though because Sheffield’s photography was so unique and the pictures had so much detail. I actually really enjoyed it.

Here’s a picture of one of the pieces. I didn’t take any photos myself, so this was taken by Hannah Swayze of the East Tennessean.

[youhadmeatcollo-blog]

Who the Heck Am I?

Short answer: I’m not sure yet.

Long answer: My name is Abby Leonard and I transferred to ETSU this semester from Mountain Empire Community College in Virginia. I grew up in Gate City, VA which is not very far from Johnson City, TN so I pretty much grew up here too. Now that I live in JC, I’m on my own (well, if you ignore my three apartment-mates, which I do most of the time). In class, we were told to imagine our home was burning down. When I imagined this, I didn’t think about the home I grew up in, I thought about the apartment I have been staying in the past few months. I don’t know what that says about me. Anyway, Hedden asked what we would save if we could save one thing from the fire–aside from family because they’re intelligent beings who can probably get themselves out. So, what is a tangible inanimate object that I would save from my burning apartment? My answer in class was that I’d save a musical porcelain figurine my brother bought me.

I like musicals. Like, a lot. One of my favorites has always been The Man of La Mancha…you know, with Don Quixote and the big windmills he thought were dragons…No? No one? Okay, well it’s really good and you should all check it out. Anyway, my brother and I first saw it live together and afterwards he bought me this little figurine from a thrift store that spins around and plays my favorite song from the play–The Impossible Dream. It sounds really lame, but to me it’s so cool. I think that’s what I would save from a fire if I was calm enough to get sentimental. Realistically, I would probably grab my phone and bolt, but I like to pretend I’d be deep and thoughtful in those minutes before my escape.

I don’t know if this tells you anything about who I am, but at least now you know that I think musicals are dope and I love my brother. And that’s enough, I think.

Abby

[youhadmeatcollo-blog]

Um...Hi!

What’s crackin’ fellow honors students, random people on the internet who somehow found this blog, and most likely Mr. Hedden. I’m Abby and I have no idea what I’m doing with my life, but I do know that some really awesome people at ETSU’s Honors College thought I deserved a scholarship, so I’ll try not to disappoint. And step one in not disappointing was to create this blog–unfortunately I’ve already failed this task because it was supposed to have been created a long time ago. In my defense, I have several other classes that also required me to create blogs so this has all been very difficult for me to keep track of. But enough rambling from me. I hope you dig the following posts.

Abby