Levin+Reading+Respone+2

In chapter three, the author finds the community on the college campus to be a loose term. In college, students don't like being told what to do or when to do it. Like the freshamn seminar class, many students didn't do the reading because they were forced to do it. When the RAs tried to get group activities together noone showed up. When students go to college they get a sense of freedom and they like to be able to choose how they spend their time. Many students do not like being forced to get to know each other. They are adults and if they want to get to know someone, they will do so in their own way. The more clubs or organizations a student joins, the more likely they are to have groups of friends from all over campus. They create many different networks. People usually group together with those they feel a likeness to and who they enjoy being around. Freshman year, I became very close with my roommate. I then joined the water polo team and made friends there. I joined a sorority and made friends there. I have never felt trapped in any group I joined. Sophomore year I lived with my roommate from freshman year, two girls from water polo, and 1 girl from my sorority. We all got along really well. We all have friends outside of each other and we never become clicky. We chose to get to know each other, we were not forced to do so and it worked out quite well.

In the second ethnography reading, the author explains how hard it is to go into a unknown environment and how difficult it can be to stay objective. As a sociology major, being objective and not making judgements is very important when doing research and collecting data. The author goes into how to do studies and the difficulty of finding past research that is helpful...it seems like many other ways of doing research. Researchers observe a person or a group of people and describe how they act and what seems to cause them to make such actions. This part of the reading was not as difficult to pay attention to, it was more repetitive of other information I've learned in the past.