Conservation Impacts on the Global Scale

Kalyanee Mam's presentation put into perspective something that many may take for granted. She began her presentation with a question of "What is home to you?" The general trend among respondents was a series of responses pertaining to family or interpersonal relationships. However, Mam's film that she screened, Lost World, covered something radically different yet equally significant: the land beneath our feet. The film covered the story of a Cambodian woman, Phalla Vy, and her perspective as she observes dredging, piles of sand being used for the expansion of Singapore, and Gardens by the Bay, an artificial garden theme park. What struck me about the film was how Mam displayed the flippancy of the dredging industry as a whole. They failed to recognize the importance of sand to the locals in Cambodia, as without sand, the local crab population goes down, and the livelihood of fisherwomen like Vy is endangered. The government stopped protests by the locals who w...

Ms. Atar's presentation on her program, Miry's List was a very enlightening presentation on the struggles that refugees have to go through in order to settle in the United States. While I wasn't able to attend the entirety of her speech, the parts I were able to hear gave a lot of insight into many issues that refugees are faced with that we may not consider, including the trauma that many families face upon forced immigration to the United States. Not only are families faced with the pain of not being able to stay with loved ones back in their home countries, knowing that they could be in danger due to armed conflicts or political instability, they also have the difficult task of adapting to a completely different society in the United States with its unspoken rules, standards, and of course, different languages. Many families have to endure harsh conditions when living in the United States; Miry described one family in particular having to live in a small apartment with ...

Something that I'm interested in looking at as a Global Scholar will be epidemiology. Along that vein, climate change is going to make disease-related issues worse. The higher temperatures will be better for mosquitoes to spread infections, which will really put pressure on us as a society. How will we remedy this? Guess what: there's a neat little thing called CRISPR that we have now that we can use to hopefully deal with this problem. I'm also going to use this opportunity to clear up with CRISPR is and why it's a pretty cool discovery. Everyone knows that humans have immune systems: that's why we can fend off those pesky colds and flus. However, lesser known is the fact that other organisms have equivalent defense systems, namely plants (very interesting, but not too relevant yet) and interestingly enough, microorganisms such as bacteria. CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. Quite a mouthful. What's important here is th...

I greatly enjoyed Reyna Grande's presentation on her growth as a writer. I wasn't particularly informed on her work before I attended the event, but with the little prior knowledge I entered the event with, I could definitely appreciate the nature of her work. Grande is a Mexican writer who has proverbially "gained her wings" as a writer and writes primarily to reveal the complexities surrounding immigration. The importance of her work cannot be stated enough in this day and age. Speaking from the Mexican perspective to help shed some light on the complexities of immigration at a young age should do wonders to better the understanding of immigration of those that read her work. I myself can speak to the complexities of immigration: my parents were immigrants to the United States who struggled in its radically different environment. I think of my mother when I hear the story of Reyna Grande: she succeeded in an engineer in a male-dominated industry like Reyna, who foun...

I thought Arn Chorn Pond's event was a very valuable one to attend. While I had previously seen him speak in 7th grade (if my memory serves correctly), I thought this event provided a lot of fresh perspective on his life as a survivor of the Khmer Rouge and an immigrant in the United States.  Some points that Pond made that especially struck me were the ones concerning his actions in America. Pond talked candidly about his experiences entering high school with little knowledge of English or the regional culture. He stuck out like a sore thumb in his school environment, and thus, his classmates teased and mocked him. Pond said that the loneliness and ostracism he faced in school pushed him into a deep depression. This especially surprised me because he had previously elaborated on his struggle for survival after fleeing the Khmer Rouge and braving days isolated in a jungle, with little food and little assurance of any. In a sense, the environment Pond would face in America w...