When people ask me what I did with my spring break, I can say three things: relaxed, got sick, and before all of that, thankfully, attended Clinton Global Initiative University.
My plan is to use this space to explain the conference, why I was a part of it, and connect you with one of my latest endeavors. Since it will be a great deal of text, I’m going to link you to specific portions. That way, you only have to read what you want to read. This is made possible by GoogleDocs.
This all begins with the basics: the conference was held March 14-16, which was exactly the window of time I had in the Big Easy. I arrived in the afternoon on Friday and didn’t stop until getting back to Denver late Sunday night. What happened in between can best be explained by Link #1.
Clinton Global Initiative University is an extension of President Clinton’s Global Initiative (CGI) Conference. Every year, the Clinton Foundation hosts CGI at the opening of the U.N. to bring world leaders together to workshop on change. CGI U is a similar conference, but for university students and presidents.
Part of the requirement for CGI is that attendees must leave the conference and make a commitment to change something big in a year. For CGI U, students had to come to the conference with a commitment with the goal of using the knowledge learned at the conference to put their promise into action. More details about this can be found in both link #1 and link #2. 1 will have some commentary, while 2 is just the bare-bones proposal.
For more info on my commitment and its progress, I created a new blog (gasp!) that will be updated with plan-specific news. This is housed at mjscommitment.blogspot.com. It has not launched yet, but will be going shortly, once I figure out some image issues and content!
In the meantime, know that spring quarter is now in full swing for me. I’m still working 20 hours/week with LC and balancing that with three classes: Intro to Editing and Field Production, Comparative Western European Democracy, and Political Inquiry. All are supremely interesting, but the 13 hours feel like more of a full load than expected. We’ll see. I am adding to the juggling act meetings with the DU Sustainability Council and sub-RRR committee, where I will greatly enhance my CGI U commitment (and put it into action!). The DU Political Science Association (or Network, we haven’t decided), will also swing into gear, as well as new events for National Society for Collegiate Scholars. Spring is a rockin’ time…clearly.
Blogging will be less, but that’s probably best. The Commitment Blog will hopefully be updated pretty often, at least every two weeks.
In the meantime, thanks for reading…I’m sure we all have great adventures to come.
~MJ
PS pictures from the conference are up on facebook. I'm having issues with my GoogleUploader on the mac, so the picasa album is non-existent at the moment:-(
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