This is the apartment complex my grandma used to live at back in Busan, South Korea. Nothing was really special about this place, but it had a lot of memories in it. Behind these apartment complexes were big mountains we used to hike for fun and eat wild strawberries. My grandma lived on the 15th floor of the last building so we never used air conditioning because the air was so cool at night. This place brings a lot of happiness in my heart.
This place is a very sentimental place for me because as a child I would spend most of my time here while my dad was going to school. This is the campus area for Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. There were lots of Koi fish and I would go here often with my dad and feed it white bread. Next to me in the yellow building was the library. There I would rent books and cassette tapes of my favorite shows like TMNT and Veggie Tales.
This is the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona, Spain. The home field of the Fc Barcelona soccer team. I traveled here in June of 2015 and it took my breath away. When you walk up, they make you know of the history of the excellent team they were and still are to this day. With breathtaking ways of displaying various trophies and pictures of tremendous athletes that have played on this field I am standing before. As you walk into the stadium, you first notice the size and fan base it brings along with it.
These are the things that mean the most to me because it is a meeting point for the fans to celebrate not only what happened in the past but to create history each time the soccer club touches the field. It was truly inspiring to me to see it for myself on that day. I had grown up watching them play and to then see where all those amazing games happened left me feeling blown away. A memory I will hold on to for the rest of my life.
This is the National Weather Center (NWC) and National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL). I was first introduced to this building in 2014 when I attended the Oklahoma Mesonet Meteorology Camp. Even back then I knew that my passion was meteorology, specifically severe weather phenomenon. I fell in love with this building! Fast-forward four years and I am back in Oklahoma studying meteorology at the building that is known all over the world and is the epicenter of weather.
This is a beautiful building houses the National Severe Storms Laboratory, National Weather Service, Oklahoma Mesonet, Storm Prediction Center, as well as classrooms for the University of Oklahoma’s School of Meteorology students. One of the classrooms is even on the roof of the NWC! This allows students to experience the weather phenomenon that we study in the real world.
My outlook on this building has shifted slightly. I used to see it as this magical place that I could see myself potentially work in one day. Even though I still believe that, it has a more serious feeling now that I am a student and take classes in this building. However, every time I enter this building, I think back to 2014 and cannot believe that I get the privilege to study meteorology at the National Weather Center as a student at the University of Oklahoma.
This building is the Physical Science Center on the University of Oklahoma’s campus; however it is also known as, “the blender.” As you can see, the tall tower and style makes it look like an actual blender. This building holds a multitude of different classes at OU ranging from English to math. The faculty offices are in the tower and the classrooms can be found on floors 1 to 4. Personally, I have spent hundreds of hours in this building, mostly for my math classes.
When I first came into this building during my freshman year, I was excited because I knew that many of my classes would be in this building and I would be spending a lot of time here throughout my collegiate career to earn my degree. However, I feel as if my experience and thoughts of this building have changed since I have been here. The building itself is very closed off and does not have any windows where the students learn. The classrooms are also incredibly hard to find, especially on the first day of class, so you usually have to get there early. However, I do appreciate that this building does allow me to learn the necessary information that I need for my degree.
I went to Taiwan 10 years ago and I loved everything there. The thing that I found most incredible there was the Taipei 101 skyscraper. The skyscraper has 101 stories to it, and it is said to resemble a bamboo stick. When I first saw this building, I was completely amazed because I have never seen a skyscraper before and looking at it closely was breathtaking. At night, it was able to change colors on the outside of the building and I got take the elevator to the top to see the city from there. It was nice to see how elegantly they had build the skyscraper in order to be so tall and that it won’t collapse so easily. After seeing this building, I wanted to learn more about architecture because I wanted to know how they built the building.
Picture Citation
Hogg, C. (2004, December 31). Asia-Pacific | Taipei 101: A view from the top. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4137865.stm
Growing up my mom was a kindergarten teach at the Madill Early Childhood Center. The ECC was only for kindergarten and first grade. For the first twelve years of my life that building was a part of my everyday routine. I would go there very morning with my mom, leave to go to my class, then come right back after school. I really enjoyed it there because I had many friends who were also teachers kids that I would play with after school. It was really fun to have the entire school basically to yourself at that age. However, the older I got the less I wanted to go there. By the time I was in high school I hardly ever went there. It was not as enjoyable as it used to be.
Mitchell Stroud
Blog 4
For my final personal blog, I chose the Ten Eyck boathouse on Lake Onondaga in Syracuse, New York. For me, this symbolized the culmination of 6 years of hard work. I started rowing in 7th grade for fun and to lose weight but I never expected it to lead to rowing for the 10th ranked university in the US for rowing or rowing in college in general. The lessons that I learned in just one year rival the 6 years of lessons I learned while rowing in middle and high school. I was given a rare opportunity by being recruited here. I was not nearly as fast as the rest of the freshmen that were recruited with me, but I was eager to prove myself and gain fitness. I would like to say that I gave it everything I had, but rowing taught me to never make excuses and that just feels like an excuse to me. Most of the year I was nursing an injured back and I made the decision that the benefit of rowing for 3 more years did not outweigh the cost of permanent back problems. I could write for days about how hard that decision was to make and how it made me feel, but I’ll summarize it to this: I gained a second family up there that year, and being stripped away from that and the sport I dedicated my teenage years to is very painful.
But enough of the sob story, let’s talk about how cool the boathouse is. You would think that coming from the Chesapeake boathouse here in OKC to this more traditional, no frills boathouse, that I wouldn’t like it. This could not be further from the truth. Walking into the boathouse, you are immediately hit with a wave of history and nostalgia. From old oars hanging on the wall, to the trophy case in the corner, you feel overwhelmed by the amount of hard work and dedication that this building was essential to. The boathouse has an actual house attached to it, and the head coach lives in there to keep an eye on everything. They would always string up Christmas lights upon the pillars and the balcony that overlook the inlet where we would launch the boats. It was always beautiful to see the lights from the water as we would end a tough practice and carry the boats back into their bay.
Mitchell Stroud
Blog 3
The building I picked for this blog is my high school, Harding Charter Preparatory High School (HCP). I have a whirlwind of emotions about this building. Unfortunately, HCP was forced to relocate under the “pathway to greatness” project. It might have been built in 1925 and still had asbestos in it (we were assured it was properly quarantined), but it was rich with history and character.
I did not start to truly understand how much this school meant to me until I graduated. Freshman year was a huge transition. The first two and a half years there I absolutely despised it. I complained that there was so much homework and I never had any free time. I did not see where all of the work was leading to until the last year and a half. My junior year I started to realize how all of the work that I had done over the past 3 years fell into place. I was taking college level classes that made it so much easier now that I am in college. I started to look at other schools’ high school curriculum and realized how much more that HCP taught me. This made the transition into college much easier. I already knew good study skills and how to write cohesive thoughts. These things that thought were common among college freshmen actually allowed me to stand out and excel in classes that my peers were struggling with. Finally, it gave me the academic resume to pursue college athletics at Syracuse University. Although I got injured my freshman year there, I would not have been able to get there without the work that I put in during high school.
Overall, apart from the visual appeal to this building, it became a symbol of the community and comradery that I formed with my peers while also gaining a top notch education.
