I’m no stranger to moving. I moved in and out of Loomis Chaffee for three years of high school, Franklin & Marshall for my first year of college, and NYU for the remainder. But unlike my experiences going back and forth between school dorms and home, this is it. There’s no coming back. And even as I type the words, I’m having a hard time coming to terms with it. You see, I always knew those places were temporary. And I approached it like that – to the point of rarely putting anything on the walls of my rooms, since I’d just have to take it down at the end of the year.

Now you might be saying that that’s no different than anybody who rents an apartment, right? So why not decorate? It certainly didn’t stop my peers. But the truth is that while I lived in those dorms, I still had my room at home. Which meant a place to keep important items, an attic to hold left over things, and a house to, well, live in. I suppose moving back in after I graduated didn’t help any in that regard (like a good number of my peers, I ended up back home after college to save money). But I’m not going to have that anymore. Anything I want to keep I need to take with me now. Which has led to a lot of emotional decision making.

It’s such a “first world problem,” right? It’s something that has resulted from the culture I grew up in and afforded to me by my parent’s socioeconomic status. After all, modern American culture allows for the accumulation of stuff, and my parent’s financial resources enabled me to collect and house the flotsam and jetsam of my life. And it’s true that I’ll be able to keep some of it. Hell, I could keep all of it if I wanted to – so long as I don’t mind shipping it to California.

But why should I? What possible reason would I have to keep textbooks from high school and college for things I don’t even study any more (microbiology textbook anyone?) The answer is that I don’t. So I dropped off five boxes of books at the library. And I’ll probably be donating some portion of the contents of my closet in the next few days. But that stuff is easy. The books and clothes are replaceable, and if I haven’t worn/read it in the last six months then I’m probably not going to in the next six.

But some items are difficult. When I graduated from NYU, I put all of my notebooks in the attic (right next to the box containing my textbooks). I haven’t looked at them in two years. Logically, it’s just paper that can be recycled. Emotionally, it represents hours and hours of hard work. This isn’t an issue so long as I had space to keep these things – I could keep my notes in the attic, just like I keep my memories of those classes somewhere in my head. It joined some boxes of childhood toys up there, right next to the suitcases. But I don’t know where I’ll be living in California, so I have no concept of how much space I’ll have. And let’s face it, my notes from school are hardly important. Nor are some of the other items I’m unsure about taking.

I could keep this stuff here. I might still. But unlike when I was in college, I can’t bank on the house being here for a variety of reasons I don’t care to share on the internet. So it’s now or never. It’s take it with me or give it away. A simple dichotomy, right?

So why is this so hard?

Anyway, the first step in the colloquium process is to assemble a book list and rationale around the topic (which may or may not be related to the student’s concentration, or area of study).  You can read my rationale and book list at the end of this entry.

Now I had at some point read about 3/4 of the books on my book list, so the next month or so was spent reading the ones I hadn’t and brushing up on older ones.  At the end of my review, I wrote anywhere from a few sentences to one page on all of my books that I decided to bring in with me – a lot better than bringing all 20 of my books with me to my colloquium.

My colloquium took place on April 8, 2009 at 2 p.m. in a little conference room at Gallatin’s home, 715 Broadway.  It was a really interesting experience.  We only got through six or seven of the books (which is expected), but it was a really satisfying conversation nonetheless.  Ultimately I ended up theorizing that a possible role of propaganda in modern democracy could be to overcome flaws in our decision making that arise from psychological heuristics and other behavioral quirks (see Dan Ariely’s TED Talk “Are We In Control Of Our Own Decisions?” for some examples) –  which I didn’t really even mention in my rationale, but studied in a class at Stern called “Decision-Making Strategies in Marketing and Management” (also known as “Judgement and Decision-Making” – here’s an old syllabus).

Overall, my colloquium was quite enjoyable and something which I actually wouldn’t mind repeating.  It would be interesting to one day further explore these topics, especially as more and more research is performed across a variety of fields relating to this topic and other areas of decision-making.

Now if you’re interested, you can read my original rationale and book list:

The third tutorial I’ve participated in has taken place during this semester. It’s title is the rather abmbitious “New Politics, New Media, and the Future of Democracy” (then again the first two were the equally ambitious “Advertising Democracy I and II). We’ve been focusing on the role of the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICT) on politics, and over the course of the semester we’ve examined a number of diverse topics including the role of new media during the 2004 Howard Dean presidential campaign and President Obama’s campaign (and his first 100 days in office), network theory, and the role of ICT in civil conflict.  Anyway, the whole point of this post is to discuss the class website, http://newmediatutorial.wordpress.com - it’s the place to go to read some of our work and take a look at what we’ve been working on.  Also, if you go back far enough, you can even see some of videos taken from class discussions at the beginning of the semester.