Her Majesty The Queen

Last night, I was able to attend an event at CU with Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan. Queen Noor became the first American-born queen of an Arab country when she married King Hussein in 1978. Last night, she spoke to a full house at Macky Auditorium about tolerance, common humanity, some of the causes she supports (like Global Zero, fighting to rid the world of all nuclear weapons), and her belief that the current generation of students have the ability to change the world. I'll do my best to summarize some of the points I found most interesting.

Queen Noor first detailed how all humans share 99.9% of our DNA, and that all our differences, be it our hair and eye color, or our religious beliefs and culture, arise from that one tenth of one percent. She said that this understanding, that there is more that unites us than what makes us different, is key to our human destiny. She believes that, with all the many conflicts in the world currently, we are failing to engage with each other across our differences.

In a topic that reached my interests particularly, she discussed the biased portrayal of the Muslim world by Hollywood, describing a study that looked at over 900 Arab characters in Hollywood films and found only 12 of them to be portrayed positively. (The rest were categorized as "balanced" or negative portrayals).

Finally, since this was an event organized by students and for students (though a great deal of the Boulder public turned out as well), Queen Noor discussed what amazing technology the world has nowadays, mentioning that she herself often uses Skype to talk with her children across the world. She described a type of "study abroad" program which allows students to interact with students from around the world without the costs of traveling somewhere else (although she also encouraged students to travel and really experience other cultures).

She also described the current moment as one of the most exciting times to be a student, that she believes with every fiber of her being that our generation has the capacity to change the world and find lasting worldwide peace.

Overall, this kind of event made me glad to be in college, and at a large college in particular. Sponsored by the Cultural Events and Distinguished Speaker's Boards, this was one of those "wow, how cool is it that I got to see this person" moments. I found Her Majesty Queen Noor to be remarkably optimistic and a great champion for many worthy causes.

That's it from me for now. Only two weeks left this semester, I can't believe it! Cheers :)

Registration

There's not much going on in my life other than the final haul that comes with the last three weeks of the semester. However, it is course registration time at CU right now, and with my registration time coming up this week, I thought it would be a good time to talk about it. In general, I want to take a lot of course at CU - I mean, sky's the limit... if it looks interesting, I want to try to fit it in. I'm interested in philosophy, psychology, photography and anything from Greek to graphic design.

However, it just so happens that with the fall 2010 semester, I won't really be choosing from that long list of courses that interest me - I'll be sticking to my major, minor, and CU's core requirements. Also, because it turned out two of the course I'll be taking are 4 credits each, it looks like I will only be taking four classes, instead of five, (for a total of 14 credits) which will be an interesting change from this semester, when I had 16.

Overall, assembling my schedule for the fall was really quite easy, more a matter of figuring out which recitation periods would work than which classes to take. I just hope everything I want is still open by the time I actually get to register. Furthermore, CU notably changed the registration system they used this semester, and I'm hoping it functions properly and easily when I get to sign up for classes.

What should be interesting about the fall is that I either have long classes or short classes - I have two 3+ hour film courses in the afternoons, but then I don't have any hour-and-fifteen minute lectures, I ended up all with 50-minute lectures/50-minute recitations. Perhaps this will end up feeling more like high school.

Those are just a few of my musings on registration for the upcoming term. If you have any questions about CU's registration process, feel free to ask. If you're a student, have you registered yet? Did you get the classes you wanted?

Cheers :)

This blog is sponsored by the CU Book Store.