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 Thursday
March 1
posted by Nguyen
A bad snow-storm hit Macalester College (generally
the Midwest) last weekend. After several weeks with no snow,
I had started to wonder if spring had arrived. The ice layer
was slowly melting away. But it was just camouflage; we have
about 2 feet of snow now. On Saturday night a senior guy drove
me out of the dorm to hang out. When we were on our way back
(about 2:00 am), we had to shovel the snow off the car. Nonetheless,
I thought it was nice to have some more snow. As creative
and playful as Macalester students are, people had a lot of
fun building snowmen or playing a ‘ruthless’ snow
ball game (I got attacked by two of my hidden-behind-the-bush
friends and was soaked wet on my way to class.) Overall, the
snowstorm is a delightful event for me.
I went on a trip with the P&U club to the Minnesota Science
Museum last Friday to see a race exhibit. If I could only
say one word about the trip, it would be: ‘beyond-the-horizon’
(not really one word isn’t it?). The exhibition comprises
a range of interesting sections about tons of race issues.
They have a television screen show of people experienced with
race, speeches by race professors, problems emerging from
race… There are quite a lot of self-learning stations
where you can sit down, turn on the button or take an interactive
quiz. I found it very helpful to learn about race this way.
For example: you can take the survey of how people define
racism and find out that you do not really answer most of
the questions correctly even though you think you did.
Here’s one question that I encountered: “Are
we different because of skin color?” The historical
side of human migration and biological analysis behind race
were displayed for people to have a comprehensive view that
we are not different. We spent two hours on different machines
(voice distinguished, face recognition, house price discrimination…)
trying to grasp a solid understanding on top of what we talk
about at Macalester. I was impressed by the display of the
wealth of different races using cash piles. The “white”
has the highest pile of about 30 packs of cash, compared to
only 3 packs of cash for the “black.” I also glanced
through other floors in the museum. They have all kinds of
fascinating nature-mimicking machines (you can become a magician
by waving your hand to create a tornado, wow!), and a beautiful
display of dinosaurs and human history. Check the photos that
I took.
There are a few interesting events going on at Macalester
this week: Founder’s Day and Asian Festival. No worries,
photos of both events will be posted for you to see. We are
building a forum on the web for admitted students. I know
this is early but please do email us if you would like to
make any specific request of what should be on the forum.
We really appreciate your opinion. By the way, if you get
a phone call from a Macalester student, please feel free to
address any questions that you have; that is your chance to
get to know more about Macalester from the perspective of
Mac students.
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