I can't believe it's been almost a year since I last posted on this blog. Plenty of things pinging around in my head, though, even if I've not written about them.
One of the reasons I started this blog was to help make connections. There have been a lot of things that I've thought about in the last couple of months along those lines, but what finally lit the fire under my behind to write was a conversation with a college friend last weekend. I stay in touch with a lot of friends from both high school and college, but there are few that I see in person. We caught up a bit and during that, we got on to the topic of what I do here at Virginia Tech. When someone asks, I normally laugh and say something like "a little bit of a lot of different things." But in this case, we ended up talking about the student engagement part of my job, which to me is the part that helps connect the dots.
She has a middle-school aged daughter who is interested in computing and is also a percussionist. When we started talking about college, I suggested her daughter would have a much better chance of getting a scholarship in computing or engineering than in music. She was surprised. I told her about Aspirations and how I came to work with the program. I told her that my passion has always been to help students in Southwest Virginia and in other under-served areas. (I'm slowly finding more ways to do that which I hope to write about soon.) I mentioned that we are still the only school in the state of Virginia that offers a scholarship to Aspirations winners. I mentioned summer programs at GMU, NC State, and here at VT.
I could talk about helping students find opportunities all day long depending on what the student is looking for. At one point, my friend said "How am I supposed to know about all of this stuff?" I said, "Ask me." Seriously. That is the reason I do what I do at work and why I felt the need to write a blog about opportunities available to students and cool things in technology.
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