First Day

The first day of class was pretty hectic. I'm not gonna lie, I've never been in a college class like this before. One word to describe the class: change. From the very first five minutes of class, I learned that this class was about change. How can we change fraternities/sororities at OSU? How can we change fraternal structure all around the U.S.? But most importantly, how can we change ourselves to become better leaders and better people? These all seem like big questions that could be too much for one person to handle, let alone a college student. I know I was intimidated after Tyler's speech about changing the world. However, my thoughts about changing the world changed after our first class.

We started out by watching a movie called Pay It Forward. I'd already watched the movie once before, but it's been awhile. Pay It Forward is about this 7th grader who is inspired by his teacher's challenge to change the world and comes up with a system called Pay It Forward, in which he would help 3 people out with something they couldn't do themselves, and then those 3 people would pay it forward and help 3 more people themselves. In the end, if the system worked to perfection, there would be a lot of happy people in this world. After watching the movie, I was pretty impressed with the idea. Not everybody can just come up with a genius idea like that, and whose to say everyone would play their part?

All my questions were answered during our next assignment in which our class was to Pay It Forward by making sandwiches for people in need. During the assignment, I also got to talk with a lot of my classmates and get to know them, particularly, Dana of Alpha Kappa Alpha. I learned what position she held in NPHC, what her major was, what her career goals were, and what she thought about the concept of Paying It Forward. In the end, we both decided that Paying It Forward was just help somebody without the expectations of being paid back for your good deeds.

While making sandwiches and thinking about Pay It Forward, I realized that changing the world was not so hard. I realized that changing the world is taking it one small step at a time and it's definitely a group effort. Changing the world is about helping others out and inspiring them through your actions to help other people as well. Even if only one out of three people are inspired by your actions, the world will still become a better place. Just like changing the world, we can change the fraternal structure of this country in the same way. We must start it now, and through our small changes, set precedents that the future leaders of the greek councils can follow and build upon.