#2

For my first session (Friday 9/25), I brought Insomnia for the circle and we hung out on the diag for the hour. While I had prepared a few questions/conversation topics should they become necessary, I found that conversation for the most part flowed naturally between my group members, four of whom were able to come to this first meeting. After going through the necessary introductions (name, hometown/country, year, major, etc.), we got right to chatting. Our conversation didn’t slow down for the full hour - we talked about everything from class-based associations with skin color in China, to Laser Tag, to seasonal activities in Ann Arbor (corn mazes, pumpkin carving), to Chinese and Korean cuisine differences. All in all I felt pretty good about the first session; while there was one rather quiet student, he did speak up at points and I wondered if it was just that he was a bit more shy than the three girls present. 

For my second session, we met at Espresso Royale on State Street - in retrospect a poor choice of location for a conversation on a Friday afternoon. This is to say, while we were able to talk to each other for the most part without difficultly, the noise level interfered somewhat with our ability to hear everyone around the table. In any case, again I had four people present (1 notified me that she could not make it, the other did not), but the two that were not present last week were able to make it, which was great! Again, conversation was pretty good - we talked a lot about the economic situation in China (3/4 were economics majors, 4/4 were from China), and this topic led to a discussion about what we had all done over the summer, since one student had interned at an investment bank in Shanghai during the onset of the crisis. 

In the end, I was happy to have had the chance to hear from Carlo and Angelo before my first session. While I prepared for (and worried about) my first sessions to a certain extent, they reminded me that my focus should be on actively participating in (rather than at the head of) the group and on being flexible to roll with whatever interests my circle members.