Monday, October 5, 2009

We're all an Alice at UT

Six weeks ago the Alice book would’ve been unrelated to incoming freshmen at UT. When I began reading the book I thought it was just a random assignment that professor Bump had given us all, but as I read through the book I learned that I could relate to Alice in various ways. In the book Alice “…is willing to venture into the unknown or, that which is beyond self” (208). When we decided that we wanted to attend UT, we were willing to leave our homes, family and friends behind to experience what was beyond our environment. It took me a little longer to realize how the Alice book linked to this leadership, ethics and animals class.

After giving it a tad bit of reflection I realized that Alice is a hero in the book because she “…encourages us to ‘know thyself’” (208). At the beginning of the course we discussed how we are now attempting to figure out who we really are or who we want to be. It’s a natural conflict that occurs within us as we learned in the Alice book. Our search for self identity is relevant when it’s compared to the book. On page 208 Humpty Dumpty asks Alice who she is and when she tells him he asks what it means. Her response is “Must a name mean something?” (Alice 208). In the book, Alice is expected to know what her name is, but we are expected to know who we are and who we want to be.

There are other internal conflicts that are occurring in our minds as well like learning to survive our first year at UT. The campus is huge, the classes are challenging, there are so many students and we feel tremendously overwhelmed. In the book, “Alice finds the key to power by rising to the challenge of survival in Wonderland” (210). Once we learn to approach this situation, we regain our confidence and we face the situation with courage and motivation. An example of this in the Alice book is when “she opens the door to power with the self-confidence that she had all along that was hidden” (210).
In Through the Looking Glass, Alice is not longer wandering around in Wonderland. She is now attempting to become a queen and she is the only person she can turn to for guidance and comfort. She tries to get help from others, but nobody sees things from her point of view. In our case we are being forced to guide ourselves at times because of the vast diversity here at UT. Alice’s leadership and ethics are obvious in the book. Her decisions are based on the values that she was brought up and she learns to become her own leader in the book by making her own decisions. In the end we all want to be queens/kings (graduate from UT) and we are in our journey in our own personal UT Wonderland.



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