Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead

This was a fantastic speech! Frank Meeink spoke about his descent into the Aryan brotherhood. I always wondered how someone came to have so much hate for people of other races and ethnicity's. He was in a big way a victim of circumstance. He was introduced to the neo-nazi way of life so early in his life that he simply believed what he was told by his peers. He became so well known and powerful within the brotherhood simply because of his intelligence, and it's that same intelligence and later life experiences that led him to leave the brotherhood. Through his life, he met so many great people of different cultures that he couldn't hate them for the color of there skin anymore. He overcame hate and addiction making you believe anything is possible. His story is a great one! I can't wait to read his book!

Resources

Last week's class covered a very relevant topic for us as peer mentors. It was all about situations we could face with our students next fall and resources on campus that could help us help them. I can see quite a few of the situations we discussed coming up next fall. For a few of the situations we ourselves could offer advice, but for the ones that we can't offer much insight into, there are resources and places on campus that can help. Its nice to have all that at your finger tips so to be as helpful to the students as possible.

Team Work

This week was all about team work. Working well in a team environment is going to be huge in our success as peer mentors next semester. Everyone brings something different to the table as a team member; this s what makes group work so powerful. Two heads are better than one as they say. Which brings me to the two followup questions. What do I do well in groups and what can I work on? I feel I bring a good work ethic and good leadership skills to most groups I work in. I find myself falling into the leadership role quite often and I am always willing to go above and beyond in my contributions to the group whenever needed. One thing I could work on is making sure I involve everyone in the group. Sometimes I notice that I dominate conversations when brainstorming for ideas in a team. This could cause some good ideas to be overlooked or even not brought up at all.