A Variety of Speakers
As you may have picked up, this semester is pretty packed for me — but there’s no cause to worry! Even with eighteen hours and a Mayfield Project (refer to other post), there’s still plenty of time to do things that I like to do. (And if I can do it, I know you can!) I’ll just share a few examples of some things I’ve participated in — “for brevity,” you know the spiel.
I was semi-starstruck for the first time when I met Brandon Stanton, founder of the amazing photo campaign Humans of New York. He gave an inspiring speech, answered a plethora of questions from students, and (most important) took a selfie with me!
Okay, I ambushed him while he happened to be smiling, you’re right, but I still got a picture with him! I’ll let the words of my friend Sami tell the story even better.
Less than a week later (and with minimal essays hindering me), I saw what I believe was my fourth play on campus, Othello! I had never read the play; in fact, I knew little more than that my Shakespeare professor had, while she was in college, mistakenly called the play Iago. I now understand why — it almost seems like Shakespeare misnamed the play. As is usual, VUT did a fantastic job with the set and costume design. All of its plays are consistently excellent — this one was no exception.
A couple of days after that, I went to an enormous event called TheHeist. This was a counter-event to the speech of a certain Milo Yiannopoulos, who the creators of TheHeist view as using free speech in poor taste. Though I don’t have the official count on hand, the Facebook page says more than 300 people turned out. It was an evening full of food and performances, one of which was from the president of Vandy Spoken Word, James Zhang, pictured below!
Altogether, though the past few weeks have been hectic and time-consuming, I’ve been experiencing a lot of what Vanderbilt has to offer. There’s so much to do all the time, so many opportunities; even though I don’t get a chance to engage in a fifth of them, each one contributes so wonderfully to my experience here.
But yeah, back to the grind, so stay tuned for more exciting tales of goings-on at Vandy! If you have any questions or a burning need to send an email, contact me at matthew.austin@vanderbilt.edu!