Second Blog on a Group Presentation

The second group I took notes on had a presentation about stress and how it particularly affects Howard University's students in the negative ways. They first took the base dictionary definition of: A mental or physical strain that comes from outside factors that can be environmental, personal or physical as well. They expounded on that with some symptoms of overstress like lack of sleep, frequent urination, and dry mouth and irritability. They passed out a test, and as a part of the Freshman/Sophomore group, I accordingly scored over 300 points, meaning that I am super stressed in my life right now. According to the group, stress reduction methods also correlate with cardiovascular disease, and they can reduce the risk of getting it by 75%. To me that was pretty fascinating, knowing that simple reduction techniques could effectively stop a life threatening risk like heard attacks. They talked about reducing stress since it cannot be entirely stopped like other performance damaging things such as diseases and viruses. Time management seemed to play a humongous role in this reducing stress portion. More than one of their scholarship sources said so, and they also reiterated it with their presentation. Other factors were actually asking professors for help, and to just be simply organized. In fact their scholarship wrote a book entitled "Stress 101" I think Dr. Livingston helped their powerpoint prove its point.

First Blog on a Group Presentation

The first group I took notes for was a group that focused on the psychosocial aspects of 'wild children'. Some children grow up without any exposure to humans at all, which is a truly saddening and damaging experience. The children take on animalistic traits from a very young age and as a result, exhibit a slowened thinking in human actions. The group showed a video of a young girl acting as a dog or wolf, even drinking from a spigot like apparatus in dog-like fashion. She crawled on all fours and howled to mimic her 'family' at the time. Since young age is the primary time of brain growth and development it makes a big difference that this girl was not around any humans at that time. She missed some very important lessons, and has even missed speech. The group talked about relief programs in the UK and the US for children such as these, raised by animals or in complete isolation from humans for the beginning and very crucial years of their lives. These programs try to use methods of psychotherapy in order to get the child to regain their speech, so that they would be able to express themselves and live as normal human beings with practice. In conclusion they stated that in general more awareness toward children like these would heighten the chance of their survival along with donations to organizations that help these children. These children are humans as well and just because certain conditions forced them to grow up in a different way does not mean that they shouldn't be able to go and get normal education and jobs like everyone else.