Jamaican in Vermont

I'm currently a junior at Bennington, concentrating in Japanese and International Relations. If I'm not running around trying to get two billion things done, I'm usually in the kitchen or trying to ween myself off of orangina. THINGS I’D REBLOG Recipes ; Homemade Music Videos ; News feeds from websites focused on politics and world economics ; Things people don’t know about Jamaica

[janieles-blog]

HOW I FEEL WHEN THERE'S AN UPDATE ON BENNINGTONGIFS

[disportment]

i go to school in the most beautiful place in the world, it’s pretty k

[janieles-blog]

Visit Original Link

Just started practicing dance for the Intercultural festival and it feels like so good. This is a snippet of a medley to beat all dance medleys.

[benningtonstudents]

How easy is it to get transportation to Amherst and Albany?

I’d say getting to Albany is relatively easy, there are good people on this campus who will drive you there for gas money or you can bribe them with McDonald’s and/or Crossett library paraphernalia.

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[benningtonstudents]

It is snowing pretty hard outside right now so I’m reading by my ginormous window so I can keep watch

-Janiele ‘12

[benningtonstudents]

日本語のテーブル

The first Japanese lunch table of the term was great. We caught up with students who were in Japan last term and laughed at the horrors Yoshida-sensei faced with the deer in Nara. Japanese class is fun and all but there’s something about the very low pressure environment of lunch that makes speaking Japanese a more enjoyable experience. It might be faces sensei makes when she relives horrifying experiences.

-Janiele ‘12

[benningtonstudents]

The NYT delivered to our common rooms, every weekend.

[benningtonstudents]

Vermont is crazy in terms of weather but it is finally FINALLY warm enough to read outside…for now

[janieles-blog]

and now we're all cuddled up in the common room

[himmelskip]

If you haven’t read Jonah Lehrer’s recent article in the New Yorker, “Groupthink”, hop to it. Here’s why:

Humans tend in two directions simultaneously - we limit each other with our sameness (that’s why we tend toward people we already agree with, or why we are ethnocentric or prejudiced, or why when one person buys things we all tend to want it); or we can inspire each other with our differences (that’s why we explore, travel, create, innovate). We’re neither one or the other. We are always both. 

When it comes to college education, understanding these dual tendencies becomes very important. Why is it that we tend to think job=business major, or rich=economics major? Why is it that we just apply to the same 10 schools our friends or parents did? That’s groupthink. But the true joy of college is seeing the incredible opportunity you have to begin carving your own path. To do that, you want to be in an environment where you will interact with (not just walk past) different kinds of people studying different kinds of things and asking different kinds of questions. If you’re a bio major, you want to be living, talking and thinking with artists and writers and historians. You want to live and eat and play with people who are diverse not just in where they come from or what color their skin is, but in what kinds of intellectual questions drive them, what things they are curious about, how they want to impact the world. An environment like that encourages collaboration rather than groupthink; it will stimulate your creativity rather than stifle it. 

When you read Lehrer’s article you’ll see that Steve Jobs understood this deeply when designing Apple’s campus - putting the only bathroom in the whole building in the atrium so that engineers and designers and managers all HAD to bump into each other; or why MIT’s Building 20 is known as the “magical incubator,” one of the greatest idea labs in modern intellectual history. The world is in desperate need of innovators, creators, and collaborators - not more groupthinkers.

So hop to it.

[janieles-blog]

Good Advice from our snazzy Dean of Admissions

[janieles-blog]

[janieles-blog]

Fave classes that had everything to do with my focus:

日本語//Hedge Funds//Problems of Political Development//Second Language and Culture Acquisition

Fave classes that had nothing to do with my focus:

Humour In Spain//Films for Photographers//Viola

[janieles-blog]

I love so many things about this video: Stephen Fry, linguistics, typography based motion media and Stephen Fry

[janieles-blog]

[janieles-blog]

How much managerial, bookkeeping, advertising and networking skill have you got? Or willing to cultivate? Can you go after money folks owe you like a Strella locking in an MH-47 Chinook?

- translatorscafe.com on 'should I become a translator?'

[janieles-blog]