Week 1 & 2

My name is Kevin Badger and I would like to thank you for reading my blog. My BIS concentration areas are Communication and African American Studies. These concentrations are a fair representation of my identity. My experience as being the president of my fraternity and being a student leader in the Army ROTC program has put many communication concepts that I have learned to the test. Being an African American in a historically black Greek lettered organization aligns with the African American studies concentration. The Multicultural Student Services department at Arizona State University is my applied study site. Academically I hope to learn more about institutions higher education as a business, as opposed to academic (for some reason that is hard to word correctly). I know that I will be working with student organizations, that part is not foreign to me. But I will be representing the MSS as a whole, instead of representing a student organization, which will be slightly different. I’m looking forward to working with majority university staff and faculty on projects as opposed to working with other student workers. So far I have been assigned as a team member on a undergraduate event on ASU Tempe campus. I have also been assigned to work on a presentation comparing and contrasting other universities programs focusing on minority leadership development. The second part of that project is to take the pros and cons from their programs and make suggestions for ASU’s own minority leadership development program. These relate to Communication because it will take many different communication skills to negotiate the undergraduate project, and public speaking for the presentation at the end of the semester. Also, it will put my research skills that are stressed in the cornerstone and capstone courses of Communication. Working on behalf of the minority organizations and researching minority leadership programs across the nation directly aligns with the African American studies. My study site focuses on Student Affairs issues here at ASU, which includes high school preparation for college for high school student and focuses on the university as a business. This internship is not exactly what I plan on doing in the future, I am an ROTC student and I will be a full time Army Officer when I graduate, so the knowledge and skills will be transferrable, but the job itself is not what I plan on continuing.