Fears.

Having been playing water polo for 3 years, I got used to swim in a swimming pool. When you swim in a swimming pool every day for three years, you become very used at being able to see the bottom of the pool, and everything that is going on under water. You also become accustomed to the idea that there are no unforeseen creatures or dangers under the water, with the possible exception of an unnecessary kick coming from underwater… But nothing too bad. 

Basically, what I see inside of every wave, haha!

The ocean, on the other hand, in very different. The ocean is violent, messy, and unpredictable. To me, the ocean is scary, because I don't know what is going on below me. If you have you ever been surfing in the SB area, you know that when you look down, you see nothing. You see water, but you can’t see through it. You can only see that greenish color that results from the combination of the blue reflection of the sky up above and the yellowish movement of sand underneath. The very fact that there could be something under me that I don't know of, kinda freaks me out. 

What I see in waves in which I don't see seaweed monsters. LOL

In addition, ocean waves are big and powerful, and when the ocean gets agitated, it’s harder to get back to the shore. I grew up in Italy, and we don't have the open ocean like in the United States. Instead, we have the Mediterranean Sea, which is calm, usually clear and limpid water; at least it is at the beaches where I have been hanging out during summer as I grew up. The waves in the Mediterranean are… well, not really waves! They are small, so you never have to worry about being sucked into a wave and having to keep your breath and play dead while you are catapulted to the bottom of the sea :)

In other words, while I love being in the water, I am a little scared of the ocean. However, I really love surfing and I use this as a reason or motivation to face and win my fear. Usually I go surfing with my friend Isaac, however this morning I went by myself for the first time. 

I woke up feeling rested and happy at 9 o’ clock. I opened the door of my house, stepped outside, and I was welcomed by the heat of the sun and the freshness of the oceanic breeze. So I decided I would go surfing. I put on my wetsuit, grabbed my board, and walked to the ocean, where I realized that there was nobody else out. 

A picture of my playing with a seal. Cute! haha

“That’s scary!” — I thought; “what if something bad happens and there’s nobody around to help me or even realize I am in trouble?” I told myself that nothing bad was going to happen, and I started paddling out. I stayed in the water for about 45 minutes, and I had a good time. I even got to see a seal and I thought it was really cute. Many times I had a temptation to leave, but I always told myself I should stay, partly for the challenge of winning my fear and partly for the desire of catching another wave.

When I got out of the water I felt really good about my morning, in part for being able to face my fear of being alone in the ocean, and in part because I felt fortunate and grateful for living right by the ocean and being able to go surf on a Wednesday morning. 

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Long story short, facing your fears is the only way to win them, and you should do it. 

I really like this quote.

It may take some time, but I think that there’s nothing wrong with being scared of some things. While they are not an issue for me, many people are scared of spiders or other insects, some are disturbed by clowns, and I even know people who are afraid of… having feelings! Everybody has some fears, and I think being able to admit it demonstrates maturity and self-consciousness, and as Socrates would put it, it is of fundamental importance to Know Thyself. Being able to admit your fears and not being ashamed of them is the first step to win them, and facing your fears will make you grow as a person.

A presto,

- Fede

Field Trip to Rattlesnake Canyon

After months of sunny weather, the beginning of the week was very foggy. On Monday morning I woke up early, got on my bike, and started the day with some coffee from Starbucks. I never drink coffee in the morning, but on Monday I wanted to workout before class, so I needed a little boost!

At 9:30am— like every Monday morning, I have class. This week my classmates of Physical Geography Lab (ERTH 141L) class and I went on our second field trip. I really enjoy going on field trips, because on top of studying the local geology and topography, I get to hang out in the sun and visit beautiful places; I get to discover the Santa Barbara area, which is something I have been wanting to do for a while, but never actually took the time to do. 

Last Monday’s field trip was to Rattlesnake Canyon, not far from the Santa Barbara Mission. This was a hike, and thank goodness I remembered about it, differently from the last time we had a field trip, so I came prepared— a water bottle handy, running shoes, and comfortable, light clothes. If I wore long pants and loafers to this field trip it would definitely have been a messy problem!

The hike was pretty steep and some less athletic classmates struggled with it. About half way up, one girl commented: “Heck, it’s the first time I break a sweat since the new year!,” which I thought was really funny.

As the morning progressed, the weather got pretty hot, especially with the sky being completely clear and the sun beating on our heads. The scenery was beautiful and suggestive, with the whole ocean and the coast being covered by low clouds (fog) and us being on top of them, thus enjoying the clear sky. 

40 million years old rock.

Rock looks like a smiling frog! (Has mouth and eyes :)

On our trip, we got to see a few interesting rocks, such as one that really looked like a freaking happy frog, and another one with oyster fossils dating FOURTY MILLION YEARS back! Pretty impressive! 

During the field trip, my partner Sarah talked to me about her vegan diet, so when I got back to city college I decided to go for a legal lunch. Although vegan diet is very healthy, it’s not for me. It does not fill me up enough, thus resulting in spending more money and getting less satisfaction, since I LOVE dairy, meat, and eggs! I just wanted some recognition for my effort, at least I tried. :)

A presto

- Fede

International Food Fair & Language Exchange

Like every Friday, yesterday I went to the weekly International Student Ambassadors Program meeting. We are currently working mostly on two upcoming events, which are a Food Fair and the Ambassadors signature event: the Beach Volleyball Tournament. 

While last year I was leader of the Vball tourney committee, this semester I decided to switch it up. Originally, I asked the program director if I could get a position in the Marketing committee; however, she informed me she would have preferred I stay in the Event Planning committee, of which I am a co-leader. I decided to stay, and I am in charge of the Food Fair committee, together with my friend Felipe (whom I mentioned a couple of posts ago).

The International Food Fair and Language Exchange event, sponsored by SBCC International Student Ambassadors Program and the International Student Support Program, will take place at Antioch University between 3pm and 5pm on Friday, March 11th. The reason why we host this event at Antioch is mainly because SBCC has stricter regulations regarding “food-based” events; specifically, we would need to purchase the food from the SBCC Kitchen if we wanted to hold the event at SBCC. However, the International Food Fair and Language Exchange concentrates on typical foods that are not commonly offered by the cafeteria: in fact, international students from all over the world come together to share their culture and their country's characteristic food with everybody. 

At the event, we will set up tables of different countries, such as Italy, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil, China, Japan, and many many others. So if you are a student reading this, you probably don't wanna miss out! No need to be said, the event is not restricted to students; everybody is welcome, and this is a free event. 

During the event, we will have a raffle with $1 tickets (or a food can), Every single dollar (or piece of food) will benefit the hungry, and by participating you will get a chance to win a sweet prize! 

In fact, the Food Fair is a wonderful opportunity to meet people and make friends around the world as well as try delicious food from various cultures at the same time! This is also a great opportunity to meet with Antioch's transfer advisors and get a tour of the campus, in case you are considering transferring to Antioch or are interested in learning more about the University.

Finally, you will be enjoying a wonderful view of Santa Barbara, as the event will be held at Antioch's beautiful patio, overlooking state street and the mountains, located on 2nd floor, 602 Anacapa street.

You can find more information on the International Student Ambassadors Facebook Page, or by clicking on the Food Fair Event link right here.

Calling SBCC donors to say thanks with PTK.

Wednesday afternoon was a special Wednesday. I went for the first time to a meeting of the Entrepreneur Club of SBCC (as you can read in my last post), and I took for the first time an online midterm, in the subject of Art History (as you can read in the same post). 

After the exam it was about 5 pm, time to tuck in my shirt, pull out my blazer, and get ready for my weekly PTK Leadership meeting. Oh! Wait a minute; we did not have a regular meeting this week. 

In fact, instead of holding our general weekly meeting, this week the PTK Leadership has agreed to take on the job of calling and thanking the supporters of the SBCC Foundation, who have donated over 4 million dollars to the various programs of the school. 

So this Wednesday afternoon was also the first time I picked up a telephone and called strangers to thank them.

Pizza and a view. That's my friend Adam at work.

This was a new experience for all of us, and as always it was fun and entertaining just because we were doing it together. It started out very awkward. We were handed a list of names and phone numbers and a script. We were supposed to call the phone numbers and thank the donors by reading off the script, which read something like: “Hello, am I speaking to ______? Hi _______, my name is Federico. I am a student at Santa Barbara City College and I am just calling to thank you for your support of the SBCC Foundation. It really means a lot, and I wanted to personally tell you how much SBCC students appreciate your contributions.” After that, we were instructed to stop and give them time to reply, and let them say anything they wanted; if they wanted to carry on a conversation, we would give them the opportunity, and once they were done, we would greet them and wish them a wonderful day. 

While it definitely felt kind of weird at the beginning (especially when I was saying “I wanted to personally tell you how much we appreciate…”), all of us soon began to have fun with it. It was funny to hear each others trying to be professional while reading the script, but although we were having fun we also managed to call and thank almost 500 people! 

Some of the donors would literally just answer “ok” to our message, and some were even slightly rude; but many others were very glad we did take the time to call them and they thanked us back and wished us a great day.

The experience was made even better by the fact that there was free food… Rusty’s pizza, and I LOVE PIZZA so that made me happy. Finally, this took place in one of the press box rooms at the top of La Playa Stadium, and the view from there is breathtaking. 

It was another great experience, thanks to my fam in PTK. :)  

A presto,

- Fede

Entrepreneur Club and an online midterm

Commonly known as “hump dayyyyy,” Wednesday is actually my rest-day of the week. While I have class 9am to 9pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, on Wednesdays I have no classes at all. My only commitment is a 1-hour meeting with the Leadership Board of Phi Theta Kappa, from 5:30pm to 6:30pm. 

It is great to know that no matter how stressful my Tuesday may be, I don't have to worry about my next day, because I can just sleep in if I want to catch up on rest. I like Wednesdays because the fact that I am not going to class gives me extreme motivation to workout, so I give my best on that day and I really enjoy it. I wrote a post a few months ago specifically talking about workouts, and you can find it here if you are interested.

My Wednesday morning was therefore pretty average, but in the early afternoon I went for the first time to a meeting of the SBCC Entrepreneur Club. My friend Isaac (one of my best friends and my partner in E-Launch) is the Vice-President of that club. We were supposed to meet at 1pm in order to work on our business idea for the Enterprise Launch class. As I mentioned in my last post, our next step is to figure out what is our target market, and then reach out to our target customers and interview them, in order to learn what they think about our idea and then analyze the data to elaborate an effective marketing strategy. 

Instead, I ended up in the middle of his club’s meeting, and I have to say I really enjoyed it. The club is pretty small, with less than 10 people actually involved. But they are all very passionate, and I already got to meet most of them in the past one way or another. I liked the club meeting because the young entrepreneurs and the wanna-be-entrepreneurs (like me) that were there discuss on interesting business ideas and dream big. Entrepreneurship is a fascinating lifestyle because bases its success upon the goal of improving society.

When the meeting was over I walked over to the Library, found a quiet spot, and I took my Art History online midterm. This was the first time I took an online exam, and my professor said he makes the exam very hard, because he has no way to check on us since we can take the exam at home on a computer. Although some of the questions were phased in a way that multiple answers could have worked, I personally didn’t find the exam to be all that hard, but probably it is just a result of the fact that I prepared for it. In addition, when studying for my SAT exam, I learned that when taking multiple choice tests, it’s always a smart idea to eliminate the answers that are for sure incorrect, and then take the ones the make sense, and read them a second time focusing on what the question is actually asking. Most of the times, it is possible to realize that in the context outlined by the question, only one of the answers is actually correct in any sense, while other answer choices may be true under certain conditions, but not under others. If you find yourself claiming: "But... both C and E are TRUEEE!!!," then you just have to ask yourself... "Which one is more true?" Or "Which one is true most of the times in this specific context?" After all, only one answer is the correct one, and an educated guess will usually lead to good results! :) I ended up with a 98%, which made me proud of myself.

A presto,

- Fede

Long hours but lots of learning.

The beginning of this week has been pretty rough. 

On Monday, after school, I took a bus back to Isla Vista. I had lunch at home, and then I hit the library. Not that I didn't already expect so… But I realized that my E-Launch class is really hard, and there is A LOT of work to it. Being a 1-day class, it requires more discipline and responsibility, because you need to be able to spread the work throughout the week, otherwise you'll end up crammed and overwhelmed on Sunday and Monday night, like it happened to me and my partner Isaac.

This week is Week 6, and Week 6 is the week of Pitch #2. Pitch #2 is a 2-minute pitch like all other pitches, but its focus is on the analysis and description of the Industry, Intellectual Property, and Competition for our business. In case you didn't read my previous post in which I talk about Enterprise Launch (or E-Launch), ENT 206 is an Entrepreneurship class in which students work on an idea and launch a business in one semester. In order to do this, a lot of research and “figuring-things-out” are essential every single week. In the upcoming weeks, we will need to research, analyze, and get ready to present in front of judges important elements of a business such as the target market and marketing strategy, customer validation, use of funds, exit strategy, and the presentation of a working prototype.

Isaac and I ended up doing all the research for Pitch #2 on Sunday night and Monday afternoon, and we spent Monday night putting together a speech and a power point presentation. Since our idea involves an app that provides a service that deals with physical products, figuring out what industry our business fits in was a little confusing, but we decided our industry will be that of online bartering services, which connects to the service that our app will provide. This is a $12+ billion industry in constant expansion, with over 450,000 companies in the United States alone.

We worked very hard to put together a presentation, and I finished writing the speech at 2am. At that point, I left the library and biked home. 

On Tuesday, my alarm goes off around 7:30 am, so I was tired the whole day. I have been busy with work and classes until around 2:30pm, and after that, I went back to edit the speech, but it’s really hard to cut it down to only 2 minutes. 

Finally, I started memorizing the speech around 4pm, and class starts at 5:30. This is a very stressful and very much not efficient way to approach tasks, and I do not recommend it. Everybody procrastinates sometimes, but Isaac and I would agree that procrastination is the worst choice one can take if you want to succeed in ENT 206, and in entrepreneurship in general. 

For our next speech, we are planning get on it way in advance, so we will have time to edit it, practice, and memorize it to perfection.

When I got home at 9pm I was exhaust. That is alright though. After all, “long hours” appears in every description of Entrepreneurship... It is part of the game! ;)

A Presto,

- Fede

Economic Club of SB 1st Event

The first event/meeting of the Economic Club of Santa Barbara was a success. Although we didn’t have as many people as we expected, the event had a good flow and was interesting. 

UCSB Visiting Professor Shinder Thandi, an expert of Political Economy of Development, started off by talking about the positive force of Globalization for about 15 minutes; he was followed by SBCC and Ventura College Economics Professor Phillip Bohan, who rebutted with a discussion of some of the negative consequences resulting from the issue of Globalization. Finally, SBCC Geography Professor Jennifer Bernstein gave a PowerPoint presentation on the role that Globalization plays in our world and the importance of space in the field of Economics. 

A picture taken in a sweatshop in China

The discussion proceeded with an analysis of pros and cons of sweatshops: for example, on  the one hand, sweatshops workers are paid low wages to work long hours and in very poor working conditions; sweatshops often employ child labor, and have many negative connotations attached to them. On the other hand, however, it is true that most of the times sweatshop workers take the job voluntarily, which means that although the job conditions are poor and the pay is minimal, this situation is still better than anything else available in the area; some would also make the case that $1 in China is worth more than $1 in Santa Barbara, a claim that suggests that the impressively little pay is not actually that insignificant.

Left to right: Prof. Bohan, Prof. Bernstein, Prof. Thandi, and Sebastian, Club President

I think this is a very controversial topic, which makes it interesting as a result. Eliminating sweatshops would mean eliminating jobs for the poor people who have no other options than accepting the bad working conditions offered by sweatshops. Improving working conditions would mean that clothing and apparel giants would not be giant, and probably would have to pay more for your Nike shoes and Under Armor shorts. The discussion continued to include the impact of Globalization on the environment, but by then I had already left to go to my class. On Thursdays, I have Macroeconomics lecture from 6PM to 9PM, so I had to miss over half of the event.

The students who did come seemed to be interested and payed attention

Overall, although we had less people attending the discussion that we had planned, the event was a great success because it was organized with tight deadlines, by a group of students, and most importantly it was the very first event of a newly started club. I think it’s great that we were able to get three speakers be our guests, and now we have some room to improve our marketing strategy for our future events. 

Making sure we had all the needed materials for the event.

Some of the ideas I will bring to the table when the club leadership meets on Tuesday are to consider holding future events of Wednesdays rather than Thursdays (because most SBCC students don't have class on Fridays, so they are less likely to stick around on Thursday night), raise enough funds to offer coffee and cookies at the event, plan to involve the Economics, Political Science, and other related departments by asking the professors to allow us to advertise the event in their class (i.e. at the beginning of lecture), and perhaps even considering offering extra-credit for attending our events. I also would like to reach out to UCSB students by promoting our club and events on the UCSB campus, which would require we turn to our connections and try to involve UCSB students in our club, The Economic Club of Santa Barbara— not just SBCC Econ Club.

I'll catch you in my next post. As always,

A presto!

- Fede