Work Work Work

Today's morning session was very interesting! Our guest speaker for today, Sam Arora, was a very interesting speaker! He was closely involved in political campaigns in the past, and is still working in politics today! I believe he used to be a student of Mrs. Z in the past also. Anyways, he had a really interesting presentation today. He went over campaign stratagies and how political campaigns were organized, using real data from the 2000 and 2004 elections to show us how the decisions in real life were made. He showed us how resources are allocated onto the battleground states using past results of elections and polling data, and why the polling data sometimes isn't the most reliable source of information. He also had some cool examples of past political advertisements, and talked about the messages that the advertisements were trying to convey to the audience underneath the obvious rhetoric. He was also a very funny person, mixing in a lot of political jokes into the speech to keep the mood light and calling on the audience to make it interactive.
In the afternoon, I went into the Butler Library stacks to get the books I needed for my research. It was really strange, being alone in claustrophobiclly small corridors filled with books. At first, I was kind of scared, as a high school student, to be able to use these books that were used by some of the world's finest scholars. Anyways, I managed to copy out pages from several books that I needed for my research, which was good.
After the daily check-in with Mrs. Ishmael, I had dinner, and went back to my dorm room to work on the paper some more. Speaking of my dorm room, I don't believe I've posted any pictures of it! So here are some pictures!

You can see the Coca-Cola that's keeping me awake, the souvenirs I've bought so far on the top shelf (the figurine and the LEGO's are for my brother!), my various electronics (phone, Ipod, camera, laptop), an orange (vitamin C is important!), and some of the books for the class on the right, next to the phone.

The air conditioning unit gets it's own special place because it is quite possibly the most important furnishing there is here. Without it, the room would become ridiculously hot and humid, just like it is outside. It was so humid today that it was literally harder to breathe for all the water in the air. I leave it on pretty much all the time, and it is definitely helping me survive the East Coast weather. The GoldStar AC unit gets the gold star for the day!