Pamplin Society of Fellows

As we are all gearing up for finals, I hope everyone is keeping in mind the relaxing time ahead. I know that the thought of winter break is definitely helping me get through this last stretch of the semester. With only one more week to go, I thought now would be a good time to reflect on and share some of the highlights of my first semester.

Just as a brief introduction: I’m Nikki, one of the 2009 inductees and I am a double major in history and art history with special interests in the American West, Native Americans and beautiful paintings. This semester I took History 336: Wilderness and the American West, Biology 100: Perspectives in Biology, History 300: Historical Materials, Art 207: Pre-Columbian Art, and P.E. 101: Yoga (which I highly recommend!).

Now that everyone has a bit of context, I’ll go back and pick out a few things (both big and small) that in some way or another made this semester unique.

#1 Joining the Pamplin Society…

…which I honestly did not know existed until I received my nomination letter. Being inducted was a great honor and I had the opportunity to meet some truly talented and fascinating people. At the same time, the fact that I didn’t know about the Society, or that there was a connection between the Society and the Teacher of the Year Award, has gotten me thinking about ways to make the Society more visible on campus. Nothing brilliant has struck me yet, but as I am on the Service Committee, I hope to find more ways for the Society to connect with both the LC community and the greater Portland area.

#2 Visiting the Dovecote café for the first time!

This probably doesn’t seem particularly special, but I seriously did not visit it at all during my freshman year. Thanks to the lab section of Biology 100 for getting me over to that part of campus.

#3 Being a New Student Orientation (NSO) leader

I guess this would be more of a pre-semester experience, but I am still including it because it was so eye-opening. When I signed up at the end of last semester, I did so because I wanted to experience NSO from a non-freshman perspective. Wow! Certainly as a freshman it seemed to me that a lot of work went into crafting NSO, but I didn’t quite appreciate it until this past August. I was a “floater” NSO leader (meaning that I didn’t have a little group of freshmen attached to me), which allowed me to help out with a bunch of different tasks. Everything from supervising dorm check-ins to guiding parents to being traumatized by exploding balloons to hanging fifty feet in the air during our ropes course…and the list goes on. In spite of the diverse range of activities, they all had one thing in common: AWESOMENESS! For anyone who has a few extra weeks in August and is looking for a fun leadership experience with a great group of people, I definitely recommend the role of NSO student leader.

#4 Doing the epic Historical Materials project AND being invited to dessert at Professor Beckham’s house!

Any history majors who read this probably saw this one coming. For those unfamiliar with Materials, each of us chooses a primary document and writes a set of annotations, an introduction, and a conclusion to clarify or supplement its content for the reader. We had the entire semester to do this project and near the end of the process, Professor Beckham invited our class to his house for marionberries and vanilla ice cream. YUM! A definite semester highlight. For my project, I chose an interview conducted in 1995 with the contemporary Native American artist Fritz Scholder for the Oral History Project of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. Scholder was only one-quarter Native American, but his abstract and unidealized representations of contemporary Native American life gained him credit as one of the founders of the New Indian Art Movement. I found Scholder’s name while randomly browsing through the online interview transcripts on the Smithsonian site, but credit goes to Professor Beckham for suggesting that I pursue an artist for my project topic, as a way of combining my interests in history and art history. While I gained massive amounts of knowledge about contemporary art and artists in the course of my research, the greatest takeaway for me will be a reconsideration of the ways in which non-Native Americans view Native Americans and their culture. I’ll be going to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota this summer to volunteer for a week; until then, I’ll be thinking a great deal about what I learned from my project.

That concludes the little snapshot of my life this semester. I hope I didn’t bore anyone too badly. Since I heard from several sources that one purpose of the blog is for people to find out more about the Pamplin Fellows, I wrote with that goal in mind.

I hope everyone pulls through the end of the semester and enjoys a relaxing month off.

Happy Holidays!

-Nikki

Tags: 2009 Inductee; History; Fall 2009

This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 2:43 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.