Citizenship of Pi Kappa Alpha

Before this class I believed that citizenship is the state of being a citizen of a particular community. My definition now isn’t too far off from what it originally was; it just has a little more detail in it. Citizenship is a community of people that help support each other and benefit others around them.

How does my fraternity show citizenship?

Well I take that as, “how does my fraternity better the community it is around?” I say that with my fraternity being on 15^th we help develop the community around us by building stronger bonds with our Greek life by having open invitation to our bon fires and random events that we hold on our lawn. Granted we don’t get to go to every house to invite them or else that would just be chaotic, but it’s open. We better the Ohio State community by being awesome and showing that being Greek doesn’t mean we only drink.

We are badass in athletics granted only certain ones but we are working on it;

We are not skipping classes and are getting better grades;

 

We help out the unfortunate people by doing philanthropies to help better them;

 

We also try to keep our community clean by adopting a street and cleaning it up every other week.

Because my chapter does all of this stuff, I can say that Pike has changed my definition of citizenship because it shows me what type of citizens actually help the community and which ones don't, and the positive of the two helps me further my definition of citizenship because people should care about their community that they live in.

Also here is a kitty that my sister owns. Granted it's bigger now but this is my favorite picture of one of them:



Rawr



Panel Take Away

During the panel, I asked one question. I asked them, "What was their greatest difficult encounter while being Greek, and how they overcame it?"

I managed to take 2 things from my question, to be a better leader.

1) I took that I have to be more trusting of others. I grew up believing that I could trust people to get things done for me, but after many disappointments I decided that I couldn't rely on people to get things done for me, and that I should do things that I want done by myself. That has worked so far, granted sometimes when I would need help and I would ask for it, but I would still be there with them to make sure it gets done right. So I guess you can say I have a problem trusting people, but I would say I have a problem of people getting things done right in a timely manner. Trusting people might take some time to get used to, but once I have a lot of responsiblilties and I can't do everything I will have to rely upon people and be forced to used to it. The only thing that I don't want to happen to me is that I become lazy and put all of the work others and do nothing myself, because then I will become a person I dispise because they do nothing but expect everything.

2) I also learned that chapters/organizations should be more "transparent" because everyone should know what you have planned and why it is being done. We have personally had that problem in our chapter a decent amount this quarter. Some things aren't discussed at chapter and people are expected to be there when it was a randomly planned event. For example we made some pumpkins and wanted to carve it, we managed to carve it, but a lot of brothers said they wouldn't help because didn't know about it and had something "better" to do. This was planned by a few people and they expected everyone to help, but since we weren't transparent no one wanted to really help. I don't want to hear, "well I never knew we had to do this," or "why weren't we informed about this" ever again. I'm going to try to make my chapter more transparent so we are all on the same page from here on out.


On a lighter note. Here is a cute little panda dancing


Also here is a place that I want to go on vacation to one day:
http://justpaste.it/5ko

The place is Maldives

And it Looks Awesome!!!

PS: Click on the pictures for a bigger view of them

Oath

I am sorta confused of where to go with this I mean the prompt was one word... I guess I'll start by doing this:

Highlight the blank spot below to ready what it is :p  <--- yes I'm sticking my tounge out at you

Oath is a promise to yourself or your organization to uphold it's values and mission. I believe we all took an oath right before we joined our organization. We said that we would up hold our values and to try to live them everyday, to make sure we better our organization, to make sure we take care of each other.

How am I living up to the oath that I made? Well I can say that I honestly try to be myself. Being my I represent our slogan, S.L.A.G. Scholars Leaders Athletes Gentlemen. I readily study to make sure I don't feel dumb while taking quizes and exams, and to keep my grades up to get a better job. I am a leader because I do stuff before everyone asks because I am a leader by example, I can't say I'm too good at commanding people to do stuff. I am an athlete because I want to keep in shape no matter what because I want to be healthy for as long as I can and being active and working out regularly helps me do so. I can't say I'm much of a dick in any way unless I'm messing around with a person. I learned it from my mom to be a gentlemen to everyone and it has been engraved in my morals.

What else I am doing to uphold my oath. I personally take care of all of my brothers, friends, and family whenever they need help. I will generally stop doing whatever I'm doing to help them out because I know that if they are asking me then they either can't do it themselves and need actual help. I am a brothers keeper because I'm on constant watch when we are out partying to make sure all of my brothers are alright, and I keep track of my friends and make sure they don't get in a fight.

Well now can't really think of anything else to write about, but here is something fun that I stumbled upon while being bored.

http://atdpweb.soe.berkeley.edu/2130/tstadelman/websiteproject/jokes/zen_quotes.html

my favorite quote is this:
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.

Also be happy live by some of these things:
http://www.globalone.tv/group/gratitude/forum/topics/21-habits-of-happy-people&title=The+Article+Title

The Bad...

One thing that we all can agree on in our visions and mission statements is that we all want to better ourselves, the community, and each other.  But there are some times in which we don’t follow to what our statements say or want. What is happening? We are doing stupid drunken stuff. This leads to society to look down on us, the Greek community.   This also giving people with the intent of being drunken messes to join Greek life, therefore keeping the stereotype going.

We need to stop being drunk everywhere. Granted most of the Greeks do drink on the weekends (including Thursdays). People see us with letters on being dumb at community service events, philanthropy events, and so on. Even though it is just a few people doing it most of the time during the day, what about night time when you have a social event, singing songs and yelling letters. Society already has a bad view of us; we don’t need to give them more reason do dislike us.

Most of us are SOCIAL fraternity/sorority but this doesn’t mean we need to belligerent or being stupid in front of others.  My definition of social is interacting with other people and making connections. That doesn’t mean we have to drink in order to fit the definition of social. I feel as though having other events like philanthropy events are social, as well as just ice cream socials, fire pit and smores and so on. We don’t have to have TG’s to be social, but that doesn’t exclude TG’s from being social in my definition. We just need to have them less than like once or twice every week, so we are less drunk in the community therefore we have less chance of doing something stupid.

We need to change how society views us. I mean look at everybody else in the world they drink, they get belligerent, they do stupid stuff, but they don’t have letters on representing a group. To the outside world the Greek letters we wear mean almost nothing the specific organization, they see the  Greeks as one big group. We need to wear our letters and do GOOD, not bad.

I Really Want A House Dog

Since there is no blog prompt this week, and I'm sorta bored and waiting to go some where here is a couple of things to maybe keep you busy.

Short, but freaking AWESOME!!!!!!


Same dog but still cute as hell


DOGGIE!!!!


Man I wish we could have a house dog. I would never get anything done though...

Setting the Standard

Our mission statement is very clear in what type of goals we want to do. We want to set the standard of whatever we are doing to the community as a whole. I feel as if we are congruent with most of the things that we want to set the standard for or at least striving to achieve our mission statement.

Pi Kappa Alpha will set the standard of integrity, intellect, and achievement for our members, host institutions, and the communities in which we live.

Our integrity of our chapter is amazing. People are honest with each other and tell each other their opinions of things. I feel as though all of our member’s morals and ethics principals aren’t challenged because we are accepting of each other’s opinions and we try to cooperate with each other to make each other happy.

Even though we aren’t near the top in fraternal rank in terms of GPA, we are striving to be better than the undergraduate GPA and the overall Greek GPA. So we are aiming towards our goal so I can say that we are trying to set the standard for that as well.

I would say that we strive to get our members to achieve all their goals. Last year we had to set goals for the quarter and we had a brother to keep track and make sure that we were achieving those goals. Also now even though it’s not written down, people voice what their goals are and some brothers help keep them on track to achieve their goals.

I feel as though we are partially achieving our goal of hosting institutions. I mean we have Zack Rubin-McCarry as president of IFC, Zac Beals as VP for Community service for IFC, Michael Farniacci for senate of USG, and Ben Nagel as the current recruitment chair for USG, and is founder of the youkali club here at OSU, just to name a few of our high positions on campus. I feel as though we can be doing more in some significant organizations on and off campus, but we are doing fine now.

Since we moved houses I feel as though we have impacted our community immensely. At first we were in Iuka which almost no one knows where the heck it is, but now that we are on 15^th people can see what we are doing and how we are affecting the fraternities and sororities around us. We are already creating a bond between different sororities because we have little get overs, like s’mores, with the sororities around us and they all get along. Also we are communicating to the people around us that Greek life actually does stuff either than drink because we try to promote our philanthropies, and we try to get a huge showing at our community service events.

R.O.A.M.

R.O.A.M. = Runners On A Mission

This organization was created through the people in my high school one year after I left it, so the beginning of my sophomore year here at OSU. It was created because a levy didn’t pass in my hometown area to let students do extracurricular activities. This organization familiar to me because I ran track and cross country with most of them in high school. Granted some of the students I ran with went to different schools because they wanted to compete in sports and transferred, but some were unfortunate and some wanted to stay because they didn’t want to lose the bond that they had created with the people they ran with over 300 days of the year, the ones that stayed behind created R.O.A.M.

I would say their values are:

Friends
Family
Health (fitness)
Integrity
Positive Change

Here is an article where you can read more about it if you are interested: http://www.milesplit.com/articles/29781. The article also features the R.E.B.E.L.S. because they were in the same school district and were facing the same problems.

ROAM was an organization that had a tremendous amount of heart, because everything was against them, and they still put up a battle, they still managed to compete in meets because the moms of the members helped get the athletes to participate in certain meets as well as purchase jerseys for everyone. They displayed their values to the public because they wouldn’t let a levy hold them back from doing what they love, they were in the news, they were on http://www.baumspage.com/ (a site where peoples times and records were posted for various sports), they were letting everyone know that they wouldn’t give up on their passion to continue running, to better themselves to compete and to win trophies.

Now the school passed the levy, and R.O.A.M. is no longer needed, but they will always have the memory of what they created, and how much they achieved by themselves, when nothing was looking good for them.

On a side note: the guys team won first place at a meet but was unable to collect their trophy or any medal because they were an unofficial team. This did not discourage them, made them sad, but didn't discourage them.