Aaron Reyes
Winter Quarter
2023
Joining Omega Delta Phi
Coming into UW I knew I needed to find a Latine community that would help me navigate through my 4 years. I came from a very diverse small town and high school so finding community was very crucial to me. I found out about Omega Delta Phi through a friend at the beginning of the year and after meeting all the guys I knew this was where I wanted to be. I never thought of joining a fraternity but something stood out about them. I went through the prospective member process where i got the opportunity to get to know the active brothers and build a strong connection with my line brothers. I not only learned many professional sills but learned more about myself that I did not know about. In February I was able to have my probate where I was presented as a new member to the entire Multicultural Greek Council. it was a great presentation and felt all the support from the community on that day. I am really proud of myself for getting out of my comfort zone and decing to join this fraternity because they brought me that male friendship that I lacked throughout my high school and middle school years.
Speaking my truth in Honors 391
Winter quarter was the first quarter I had taken a honors class that was not Honors 100 so I was a bit nervous, yet eager to see what it would be like. I decided on this environmental class that focused on the history of Seattle and the Coast Salish peoples. For our midterm paper we were asked to find a historical photo of a landmark/location in Seattle and write about how it has changed from what it was to what it is now. I decided to write about the totem pole in Pioneer Square. I put a lot of hard work into my paper and shared many of my personal opinions on the totem pole and how it got to Seattle. I got a grade of 75/100 which I was surprised about and did not agree with. Looking at my professors comments on the assignment he said I needed to shape up my paper and realized he had commented on sections that were my opinion on white people and my personal experience which I could tell from his feedback that he did not like. I decided to look back at my paper and only changed some grammatical issues and left the rest alone because I believed my paper was worth more than 75. When I resubmitted I left a long comment letting him know that I did not think it was fair of him to mark me down on information that was my personal opinion which came from my own experiences. I believe he felt threatened and scared that I would report him (I had already talked about this issue with my honors advisor) so when he regraded my paper I went from a 75 to a 95 which is a significant jump. Especially since I had changed not much of the actual paper besides small grammatical issues. I felt very empowered and proud of myself for standing up since this was the first time I had ever done something like this. I did not want my grade to decrease immensely and especially not because I made my white professor feel uncomfortable for sharing my negative experiences with white people as a brown POC.
Neuron project in Psych 202
PSYCH 202 was the second psychology class that I had taken at UW. It was with the same professor that I had for PSYCH 101 as well so I felt very comfortable with the professor and enjoyed their style of teaching. It was a bit of a difficult subject at first as it was one of my first bio classes and my first time going in depth into the human brain and the rest of the body. What I enjoyed was that we had 4 feature projects throughout the quarter where we had to create a project on a subject covered in class and go more in depth on it. I was able to use my creativity to build an interactive game that focused on the different parts of a neuron and what the functions of those parts were. The goal of this game was just not for entertainment purposes but also as a resource for students to use to study. This had been my first time ever creating something like this so I felt very proud to be able to have a class that allowed me to create and learn in a non traditional way.