What Does Obama reelection means to the world and to me?

As I watched the presidential debates before the election, specific details called my attention to things that are highly influential to the elections. The Foreign Policy Debate was the one that made me reflect the most, and even though I am Republican, and a Romney supporter, I have to admit that Obama's thoughts on this surprised me. Overall, being open minded, in the end, is more important than your political position. The main aspect of the Foreign Policy Debate that called me attention was the fact that even though both Obama and Romney were running to be the president of the United States, they were discussing how to rule the world. 

Anyone who watched the news during the campaigns of both candidates, or read the newspaper, or somehow saw graphs and researches that showed numerical data on the public's response and reaction to the candidates' ideas, saw that around the world, the clear majority wanted Obama, the "free-world president", to win again. While in the United States the percentages were extremely close, and the election was one of the tightest of all times. I believe that what made Obama be the favorited around the world is the same aspect that I agreed with among everything about his campaign: his beliefs and ideas regarding foreign policy. Obama never showed any radical position that wasn't what people wanted to hear. Even though this is part of the Democrats' strategies, I believe Obama represented it very well, and never stood in a radical position on issues. He always tried to favor both sides of the situation, exposing his opinion being always respectful, which gained the support of the world population, and automatically, the leaders of other countries. The reasons why people wanted Obama to win are simple: Romney is easily associated with Bush, his foreign policy works, and the world loves the image of the Obama family.

As I mentioned before, I am a Republican supporter, because of various reasons. If I said I am happy about the fact that Romney lost the elections, it would be a lie. I believe the U.S.A needed someone like Romney now, with experience on business drive U.S.A's economy out of the depths again, and bring back the conservative view that the world needs. However, it doesn't mean anything to me personally, only to my beliefs and my political view. The fact that Obama was reelected makes it clear to me that the Democrats are gaining there place more and more every day.

Time Management

Time Management 

Organization and Goals

Throughout the years in which I have been attending ISC, I have learned that the quality of the work you do at home depends a lot on how well you organize yourself and manage your time in order to prioritize things in the right order and get everything well done on time. As I moved from Middle School to High School, I have learned that prioritizing things in the wrong order, or in another words, procrastinating, is a way of fooling ourselves, but not our superiors, and our teachers will always know, just by reading a certain piece of work done by its student, how much time and effort one has put into it. Organization is not one of my strongest qualities, I have to admit. However, some of the goals I had set to myself and that I've been working on include: getting my materials organized in order to have a clean space to work on at home, annotate everything that has to be done at that day and check it off once I get it done with, always check my schedule in order to prioritize things in the correct order, not to procrastinate (by procrastinate, in this context, I mean finding excuses not to do what I should get done with), and learning to manage my time well.

Generally, I have been accomplishing my goals well enough, however, I recognize that there are still things I need to improve. Some of the things that I have been successful with are managing my time well, and what I did to accomplish it was that before, I would get home around 7pm, sleep until 8pm, take a shower, have dinner, and then I would get started with my homework and studying tasks, which usually would make me get done with everything I had to do after midnight, and I was not having full nights of sleep. What I do now is exactly the same thing I did before, except for the little nap when I get home. Instead, I start my homework earlier so I can get everything done and have a good night sleep as well. 

I believe that technology has a huge responsibility on both helping students get organized with their homework and also taking their attention off the things they should be really doing. I don't really have a problem with getting late with my homework because of social networks, but I have to say, having an Apple mobile device helped me a lot considering organization regarding school. By the beginning of this semester, I found an app called Myhomework, in which you can create folders for all the classes you have, and post reminders for each of the classes, so for example, one day before this post is done, I would received an alert on both my cellphone and my iPad with the assignment, the description of the assignment and the day in which I should turn it in, and this helped me a lot, because now I don't have the problem of forgetting about a certain homework, project, quiz or test.

The main point I have learned throughout the process in which I'm going through, is that I cannot put myself under pressure, because that will get me tired faster and won't help me get done with the things I was supposed to do. Even though I have been accomplishing my goals at the right pace, I believe that there are still things that I need to improve, such as not leaving everything to do at the last minute (such as this blog post which is being written by me at 9h49pm and is supposed to be turned in at midnight), and most important of all, realizing that there is always some things that I can improve, but perfection is not an option.

Planning the Future - Do we have the power?

Each and everyone of us tend to spend a lot of time planning the future, especially when we are young and have a lot of dreams and goals, and sometimes, everything just seem to have been there the whole time, waiting for us. It might happen that we plan something during our entire lives, as if it was some sort of challenging dream, for which we would have to work as hard as we could to make it true, and when the time comes, when we have to face the tortuous road ahead of us, we just don't know what to do and everything becomes a blury. So here comes the question, the big one, should we even plan so much, or just "go with the flow"?

I grew up thinking there was no other option rather than going to Civil Engineering for college, and then work with my father, taking care of the family business and assuming what is mine by right. The truth is, there are far greater things I wish to accomplish in my future life, other than just taking what is done and making it better. If anyone asked me today, right now, what I want to do in the future, there are just so many things that would cross my mind, like going to Law and Economics school in Brazil, at the same time, and actually being able to work with my dad, or study as hard as I can for the next three years ahead of me, trying to apply to London School of Economics and Political Science and then come back to Brazil, take the "Rio Branco Institute" test and be a diplomat (DREAM!), or even apply for four out of the Top 10 universities in the U.S.A, take Political Science and then choose to work either here or abroad.

My expectations for college are many, and I must admit, my expectations vary when I think about college in the U.K, Brazil, or in the U.S.A. I believe that college in the U.K would be very challenging for me, especially because the culture of the country is very different from the culture in which I grew up into, but I believe, however, that I would be in contact with great teachers, in a country that has a lot to offer culturally, academically and for my personal development. My expectations for college in the U.S.A are extremely high, I expect to be offered a whole lot of oportunities to increase my knowledge and my leadership skills, not only inside the classes, but also with the clubs and activities that a good university in the U.S.A would offer me. The idea that a person who graduated from an American famous college is automatically going to succeed professionally isn't always true, so if I get to go to the U.S.A for college, I intend to make the best out of my opportunities in order to honor the chance of going to an American college and be a successful woman in the business world.

The main goal I have concerning my future career and proffessional life is to be independent and successful in whatever the career I choose. Even though woman woman are much more recognized in the bussiness world nowadays then they were before, there is still prejudice and a lot of bareers that need to be crossed, and by choosing the university I will go and the career I will follow, I want to make sure that I will be strongly prepared to face challenges in the future and grow up professionally and personally.

Some of the things I would like to ask a college recruiter are the criterions they use to designate a certain amount of scholarship for international students, as well as the oportunities I would have throughout my years living in the college campus, and what would that certain college offer me that others wouldn't.

 London School of Economics and Political Science

"In our first two weeks, you have read two articles, seen several videos and been engaged in several discussions related to the concept of academic leadership. At this point, and in your own words, what does the concept mean to you? What subjects or interests do you have a sophisticated, intellectual understanding of that you may want to turn into a major academic project in this class? How do people sometimes abuse academic knowledge to manipulate others? How would you feel if someone used your work to manipulate others (as Jared Diamond claims Mitt Romney has)? How can creating academically sophisticated, intellectual leaders help prevent such people from taking advantage of others the way they do? How can this create a stronger democratic society?" 

 

Example of girl raised in a democratic society, who had the opportunity of speaking up for herself and the future generations.

Academic Leadership means, from my point of view, developing my leadership skills in order to achieve high standard goals in the future, and not only that, become able to perform the holes of a leader, regardless the environment or situation I'm at. During Academic Leadership, I feel like I am being strongly prepared to face and solve issues not only during my High School life, but also during college and in my future career. The course of Academic Leadership was developed to help students build a relationship of confidence with themselves and the choices that are ahead of them, and also to teach High School students that they will not always be able to rely on a superior, and therefore they must be able to make wise decisions themselves. I strongly believe that having the option of choosing the topic each student would like to work on is also extremely important for building interest among the class. By having the opportunity of choosing a topic, the students will be able to choose a topic that is related to what they want to do for college, what university they want to go to, and even what career they want to follow. 

Since last year I have been doing Model United Nations (MUN) as my elective class, and I will most likely choose subjects related to world politics and issues to transform and develop into a major academic project. I would also like to make a major academic project in topics such as university courses and criterions of choice for students who go to schools like ISC, for example how did past students decided whether they wanted to go to an American university, a Brazilian one or one in Europe.The ignorance among people has been growing considerably in the past years, which means that, in most countries, mostly the ones that are in development process, people do not have access to that much information or knowledge, due to low quality education provided by the government, informations that are manipulated by the midia before being published, and sometimes, the choice of not knowing the real situation itself. Political leaders take advantage of such an ignorance in order to expose their thoughts and the situation in a way that would benefit them. 

Considering that most political leaders are often highly educated, they use that in favor of themselves to make a fool out of the population of their nations.If my work was used in order to manipulate people who are not as educated as I was, I would feel frustrated, because certainly, my work's purpose was to provide knowledge rather than manipulate knowledge. The building of a population academically sophisticated, with strong intellectual leaders would prevent this to happen because as highly educated people, they would not believe in everything that is said, would be able to filter information and to stand up for themselves and for the things they believe in. A democratic society means that everyone has the right of exposing their thoughts about decisions that would influence their lives, which means that a highly educated society, with strong leaders, would give each and everyone of the people in that society the right of speaking up for themselves, their beliefs and their thoughts, which would give them a better quality of life. Highly developed countries, as well as the ones that are not as developed, use the low quality of education and ignorance of their people as a way of manipulating the decisions in favor of the political leaders and the government itself.