Through videos, blogs, posters, small group meetings, community outreach, and presentations, our UAlbany Project MyStory bloggers their experiences – the good and the bad; the ugly and the beautiful. Check us out every Monday, after 12 pm, for MyStory Mondays, when we share the latest posts.
Meet Simonti and Anik
My name is Simonti Banik and I am a very talkative, travel-loving, dog-loving, Biology and English major at UAlbany.
And this is us, just two kids that happened to grow up right around each other in Sutphin, Queens with all the same mutual friends but didn’t meet until we accepted to join the 21k Student-wide UAlbany family. Anik having moved to Albany through his middle school years, and me surfing the MTA and enjoying NYC public high schooling, has forcibly and unknowingly led us to grow up in two very different environments.
In this blog, we decided to work together to talk about some of our resolutions, past present and future that we have made, broke, are in the process of becoming resolutions or are working on to see how different we are. Having a resolution itself, big or small is important because it indicates that you want to work on something – anything, to improve yourself. This is an important first step, especially in today’s world, considering everything that is happening around us, such as incidents of racism, police brutality, and bullying.
One person working on one slight aspect of themselves to improve for the better can affect many individuals in their path and can lead to a more aware, open minded, and sensitive society. That person’s little resolution may help some of societies issues to subside or, may even, start a transformation that will be captured in textbooks, many years from now. Be sure to check out both my and Anik’s blog to read about our successful and failed resolutions along with the ones in progress and hopefully it will influence you to make a resolution, big or small, for yourself.
Click here to check out Simonti’s previous posts.
My name is Anik Paul. I am just entering my junior year here at UAlbany. My friend, Simonti, is also entering junior year with me. I am an economics major with a business minor and she is a double major in biology and English. In my two years here at the university, I have learned a lot and have grown significantly as a person. Time management is a major thing that I have grown in. I used to be a huge procrastinator. Over the semesters I have learned how essential it is to plan ahead of time because sometimes professors may give last minute assignments. Another aspect I have grown in is staying motivated. Every semester, lots of students go in to the semester thinking this is their semester, they are going to study a lot and do amazing, but as the semester goes on, they get tired and loose motivation. I was one of these students as well. In my blogs, I hope to address all the obstacles I encountered as a freshman, and a commuter student, and in general to help the other students get through these obstacles by telling them how I have dealt with situations and what other ways there are to deal with these various situations by setting goals to make changes/ improvements. As a result, seeing that other students are dealing with the same problems they are will make them feel like they are not alone.
Knowing that this semester ends around New Year’s, Simonti and I have decided to collaborate on resolutions to speak out about the many ways we’ve improved through the years with resolutions that we’ve set that were successful, not so successful, and in the progress. I made a personal goal of comparing my resolutions with Simonti because I expect them to be very different and our ways of dealing with goals to be very different which may represent how everyone in a society are tackling their own goals and making their own ways for improvement. As a result of this, I hope that our readers can take the idea that it’s necessary to be kind and respectful of others in a world where it is hard to improve for oneself and maybe even make a resolution for themselves, big or small.
Find out more about Project MyStory Here!
Many people are heavily music dependent and for all the right reasons. Music fills the void of silence when doing the most mundane tasks, like homework, working out, or going to a party you really had no intention of going to. The first “English” song I ever heard was Katy Perry’s “Hot and Cold” from a friend in the 6th grade. One song turned into an ipod, stored to the brim, with music that I listened to nonstop that summer, during my trip to India. This would continue on through the 7th grade and so on. Over the years, my musical tastes changed from Katy Perry-like sounds to a wide range of genres.
Welcome to the Peer Advisor Blog 