Outline

1. “Close the door and keep it locked.” The voice of my friend Becky yelled at me when I entered her room one friday night before going out. My opening scene is about a first hand experience i had about drinking in the pollock dorms, so I don’t want to go in too much detail on this blog and give it away
2. “If anyone knocks, put everything in the freezer so no one finds it.”
3. I am writing about drinking and underage drinking in the Pollock dorm rooms. I am out to find if a lot of students take part in this ongoing phenomena and if the sororities in pollock dorms, and what the police is doing and the consequences.
4. Freshman have always drank in their rooms, especially pollock cause its very easy to transport alcohol because you are very close to downtown. This can be dangerous and risky, because an RA can easily call the cops and they can show up and you can get cited.
5. I don’t want to give away data that I have obtained from the University Police department, but its related to the number of citations and arrests in residence halls related to alcohol. Shows how big of a problem this is.
6. “I love him, he gets me four lokos every weekend and i just hide them in my purse, its a short walk.” This a quote from Becky, an 18 year old freshman who lives on the floor below me, and she is saying how easy it is to get alcohol and keep it in her room.
7. Quote form an interview conducted with the University Police showing how they are handling the situation and to see how they can stop drinking and if they are doing all they can to prevent.
8. Drinking is a major part of the culture here at Penn State, and especially here in the Pollock commons, because some students are of age to drink. It is very easy to obtain alcohol from upper class men and to hide in your room like under your bed or in the freezer, and after talking to my RA, they only take action if they are suspicious of something. Some students wont do it, because a hefty fine is involved and can lead to expulsion for numerous offenses, but that wont stop most kids and it just continues to get worse. It is hard to control drinking everywhere when WE ARE... the number three party school.

journal 5

For my investigative report I decided to get to the bottom of underage drinking in the pollock dorm residence. Whats the big attraction and why people do it?

The pollock dorm complex is very close to downtown and right next to south halls. It is very easy for kids to transport alcohol from downtown to the dorm rooms and never be seen. Also, all the sororities are locates in these two dorm complexes, so does that mean more drinking goes on here than other dorms like east and west? Most of the pollock dorm rooms are rearranged so that there is a lot of space. the beds are perpendicular and both desks are against the wall, so the middle of the room is very wide open. There is a lot of room to have people in the rooms and even room to put other furniture like small chairs for when people come over. Also, the closets are on opposite sides of the room from one another. It is not a hard thing to hide alcohol in these rooms and the RA would never know where it was. From in the closet right behind the door to under the bed in the front corner of the room, you could get away with hiding a lot of alcohol and other things in these rooms.

I interviewed many people that I know in the building, who know people or who have had first hand experience drinking in their rooms. Mick, a 19 year old freshman who lives on the sixth floor said,

“I watched people drink in their rooms first hand, they always keep the door locked and are very cautious about the noise level and if the RA is around.” Becky, an eighteen year old freshman, who lives on the fifth floor of Mifflin hall mentioned:

“I have kept alcohol in my room before. I kept it in the freezer and locked my door at all costs, even if I was just going down the hall.” My good friend Tom, who is also a freshman, lives across the lawn in porter hall. The first weekend we were here he texted me saying,

“A kid down the hall just got caught with alcohol cause he was carrying around the hallway, what a dumb ass.”

I was reading the policies of Pollock commons and my building does not allow alcohol in the dorms no matter if you are of legal age, so it is illegal. Also, two hundred students have been cited for alcohol in residence halls during the schools first two weeks (Pittsburgh Tribune Review). I talked to my “floor keeper Shaunee, who takes the trash out and cleans the bathrooms and she said she notices many different types of alcohol in the garbage cans, and notes she sees a lot of four locos. After taking a look at the policies, it is legal to drink if you are twenty one only in non first year dorms.

One thing i did stumble upon is that all the different sororities in the pollock commons and i feel as if I need to investigate that and see if they drink in their dorm rooms at all. Another Thing I feel I need to do is interview some of the house coordinators and see what their take is and what can the eventual consequences be. Also, have they ever caught anyone themselves and what are the RA’s trained to do in a situation where they see alcohol in a room.

PARTY PARTY

After listening to the Radio broadcast on Penn State being the number one party school, I have many opinions on the piece. First, I am going to analyze the investigative report. The reporter does do a very nice job of identifying the problem and makes it listenable to many audiences across the country. They give many reasons including: The death some students the had previously gone to school and drank too much in one night. Also, they do a very good of interviewing on duty police officers to tell their own experiences and how it easy it is to cite kids for underage drinking and public urination. They give good data like the number of citations in a weekend, so it should make kids more aware how easy it is to be arrested and how kids should be smarter if they are going to drink. The radio broadcast is very straight forward and clear, but it does give details on how this affects different groups. One example that they use is how mostly boys will get drunk and break into a house and fall asleep there. Also, how flirtation increases at frat parties with the presence of alcohol. I have to give them credit for doing good investigative work, but I am not overly thrilled with it.

This piece gets quotes from many students and even quotes President Spanier on the issue of binge drinking. Also, many officers were quoted as I already mentioned. This is good, because there a perspective from almost every angle, so they at least tried to not make the report one sided. The main conclusion is really not to binge drink and they give the example of Jeff Dato, and how he was alone. The main idea behind that was that if he was with other people, he might have never jumped off the building and died. It was a strong conclusion that made me think.

In my opinion, I thought this piece was complete bull shit. They made it seem like that Penn State is a horrible place to live if you have family. They pretty much said that all students do hear is drink. They never mentioned one thing on how high this University ranks in certain categories for academics. They could have said even though it is the number one party school, it still ranks high in several academic categories, but no all they say is PARTY PARTY PARTY! I would like to have a little talk to the person who made all these interviews and made this broadcast. One quote i thought would have been good is from a professor or two. I would be very curios to hear their take on the issue, and I think that would make the report even stronger and more appealing. I would have like to hear more of the students too, but not when they are drunk. The person interviewing should have talked to students during the week to see what they thought on the issue.

Journal 3

After reading The excerpt from Anne Lamott’s book of the chapter “Shitty First Drafts,” I can reflect off of what she is saying and relate it to my own writing process that I do. I think Lamott is saying that writing a first draft is more about the process than the product, but I do have to disagree with her in some aspect. I usually only do two drafts, so i try to do as best as i can on my first draft. But other times I am just looking to get a start and get something down on paper, so i do in some ways write a Shitty First Draft. My favorite thing i like to do is write a few sentences or a paragraph then go back and read it to make sure it makes sense before i go on with the rest of my paper.The main thing i can relate to in the writing is when i first sit down at my computer I do a million other things first and get distracted very easily. I will also get and walk around the room maybe get something to eat, so it always takes me a while to get started on something. Then when i finally do sit down, I get in the “zone” and just start typing away. Another problem i run into is in the middle of my first draft. A lot of times i will get stuck and then i will do more un productive stuff like surf the web, read the paper, or watch some television. So alot of the time it takes me a long time to get a first draft done. I also agree in the way if you do type something that is too long, there is always something good in that writing that you can take in use when you start doing a second or third draft, so something good always can come out of something you write.

Recently when i wrote my personal narrative i stumbled upon this problem of writing a first draft. Like Lamott i took notes on what i wanted to talk about and eventually sat down to write my draft. After getting distracted by many pointless things around, I finally got started on my draft. Like I said before i wrote my intro then went back and fixed it and continued that process. So it is kinda like writing a shitty first draft, but i just like doing it piece by piece instead of the whole paper at once. This made my story stronger, because it forces you to put more time into the writing you are doing and try different styles and formats, so overall it helps the paper dramatically. Like Lamott, a lot of the times i will edit my paper myself, but since we were doing a peer review in class, i opted not to until after the exercise, because i wanted to see what my partner had to say about my paper.