If I am being completely honest, I had no idea the requirements for the Honors Program were due at the end of the semester. I thought I had all the time in the world to get them done (before the end of the year). However, at class Wednesday morning, Professor Duntley sent me into a tailspin. He started talking about the service requirements the class had been doing throughout the semester, and I did some things. I wasn’t sitting around doing nothing, but I was nowhere near where I had to be. I had never felt more panicked here than I did after that class. It was nice to know I wasn’t the only one who had completely dropped the ball so far. My friend Rachel (who was also completely shocked at this new discovery) and I devised a plan to get all of our requirements out of the way with only two weeks to spare.

On my sheet, I already had one Honors Activity (an honors meeting), a dialogue (the Convocation), and an ongoing volunteer activity being a tutor for young kids. However, to me in my moment of crisis it seemed as if I had done nothing and this was the end of my stay in the Honors Program. Luckily for me, Rachel had done even less than me which made me feel a little better about where I stood. I started planning out what I could do as soon as I got back to my dorm, and as I started looking at the different dialogues I could attend in order to get credit, I started to feel better and better because there were so many that would count as an event.

I am not in the business of procrastinating getting stuff done though. I like things to be done weeks before they are supposed to in order to give me peace of mind. I decided I would go to the first possible thing, which happened to be the next day. Working with Children and Families in Social Welfare just happened to be the next event, and also the only one I could see myself remotely being interesting in and wanting to sit through. It was an hour long event, 5-6, and upon my arrival I got a very nice surprise. They were serving pizza, drinks, and dessert at this event, which was a plus for me. There were a ton of people in the room, and there were almost not enough seats for everyone, and I later found out that was because it was required for another class to attend this event for extra credit.

I got my pizza and sat in the first seat I saw and patiently waited for the speakers to begin with the PowerPoint that was on the board, but they never did. They didn’t use the PowerPoint at all during the presentation, and they did not just tell the audience what they do and how they help people. They actually spoke to the audience in a way that would spark a conversation among everyone, and the people in the crowd were loving it. There were so many questions I couldn’t keep up and I almost felt bad for the speakers because the questions were flying in from every angle.

Towards the end of the talk, some people who were clearly just there to get the extra credit and didn’t care about anything the speakers were saying began to get up and leave as the presentation was still happening. I found this to be extremely rude because it was ten to 6 o’clock and they only had to wait ten more minutes before the presentation was over. However, the people getting up to leave did not seem to faze the presenters in the slightest (probably because it was clear that most of the room was extremely interested in what they were saying). When they had said all they needed to say, and the questions ceased, everyone started to occasionally get up and walk either out of the room or towards the presenters to ask them more questions, and I patiently waited my turn to get them to sign my paper and tell them how surprisingly interested I was in their presentation.

Overall, I have almost completed my requirements form, and therefore am not in crisis mode anymore, but being forced to go to this presentation turned out to be more fun and rewarding than I ever would have imagined.