Despite the ironic situation of some of us catching a cold in one of the world’s most warm countries, we have continued with our research and mutual cultural exchange. Day started casually in the company of dr. Cecilia Milanes, who privileged us with a reading of her new book and music soundtrack made by her husband and herself. After this interesting cultural experience, miss Milanes gave us her signed book and a CD as a priceless souvenir to take home with us.
Next interesting person who welcomed us in her office was Harriet L. Elam-Thomas, UCF Diplomacy Program Director and ex ambassador of the USA to Senegal. She is really interesting, intelligent and capable person to have conversation with about her numerous international experiences both in her personal and professional life.
Finally, the time has come to attend the long expected Information Fluency conference where we had the opportunity to present International Student Research Symposium and various other international activities that we do. In addition to this, we had the opportunity to attend several sessions on that topic which proved itself as a very useful experience.
The campus of University of Central Florida is so impressive in size that even people who study or work there, still haven’t seen and gotten to know it completely. We have had the luck to meet get to know the campus up close through a guided tour form one of the McNair students, Vu Nguyen from Vietnam.
Vu has shown us some of more important locations on the campus and through fun stories got us a little bit closer to knowing the history and tradition of the UCF. For example, the logo of the UCF is represented with two characters. One of them is Pegasus, which stands for academic aspect of the University, and the other one is a knight called Knightro who represents the sport side of the UCF.
Most of the students in UCF are enrolled in Engineering, which is located in one of the buildings with really impressive contents. In the lobby of the building, there are various items that were made by the UCF students which include various models, roller-coaster trains for theme park Disney-world, space shuttle models etc. At the end of the tour, Vu told us that UCF students have the opportunity to participate in various extracurricular activities and the ones I found particularly interesting were kayaking and canoeing. One additional interesting fact is that the food which students eat around here is grown by them in a specially equipped arboretum.
One could really get used to living and studying on UCF!
p.s. Vu, if you are reading this, THANK YOU for an awesome and fun time! :D
