Open Ended Blog I, My Role in The Community

So I was searching for blogs of my classmates in order to write this one, but did not see that anyone had done it yet, so I guess I will be the first. This next series of blogs appear to be very open ended, which is fun as it leaves room for exploration, but could also be challenging due to the lack of guidelines. To start off for the day, I don't think I will talk much of my site for the UK project, but more of the way I fit in to the UK culture in general.

As a student here at UK, I obviously spend much of my time going to class, and then working on the assignments and homework for those classes. This seems very basic, and is probably assumed to be true by most people, it is simply the nature of a student. However, the college experience is much more than simply continuing studies from an academic stand point. Social interactions and engagements will inevtiably shift in a new direction during college from what they were in highschool and previous years. The fact that we now all come from different backgrounds and are living together in close proximity is a new and exciting trend. Instead of going to school and interacting with friends and then going home and being alone with family like in primary school, social interactions are continuos in college. Key differences and reasons for this change is that now not everybody's schedule lines up identically, and when we return to our dwellings, we do so together. It is unavoidable to encounter peers outside of class and around residence halls and common areas when not planned, and the way these engagements move on from there are unique. These interactions shape our new social personalities and change the way we communicate with each other. Also moving into a community with many more people than we were used to before, there are now a seemingly limitless number of strangers around us. My highschool had over 2,000 kids in it, I saw faces of different people everyday I did not know, and did not know the names of my 500 peers in my graduating class. However, here at UK, this feeling is even larger. The number of strangers I encounter daily is highly increased, and most of these people I will never get the chance to interact with. This is the thought that blows my mind, attempting be a cosmopolitan, one should interact with strangers, however, it is impossible to meet all strangers. Because of this, I have to speculate what would happen if I met one person versus another? Say I approach person A, I ask them what they are doing, I do not know them. Say they are not interested in my company, and tell me they are busy and walk away. During this time person B is walking around us in the background and pass by in the few moments of my interaction with person A. I have to wonder what would have happened had I engaged with person B versus person A? A whole new series of events could have transpired on a parallel timeline. Perhaps me and person B would have hit it off, and made a great friendship. Because I missed the oppurtunity to meet this person, I can now never know what would have happened. With the large pool of strangers at UK, it is impossible to tell which people to interact with, I guess I should take it upon myself to engage with as many as possible, and then to get lucky. I feel as thought the true spirit of cosmopolitanism is interacting with others, and seeing what happens from there.