Living ArtsEngine (formerly Living Arts) is a Michigan Learning Community (MLC) at UM. An MLC is a group of students who live in community together and also are dedicated to learning more in a certain topic. Living ArtsEngine focuses on interdisciplinary creativity.

Living ArtsEngine has three program elements:

Each CCP team is made up of a few freshmen peers in the program, and one Living Arts alumnus called a peer mentor. My freshman year (2019-2020) saw the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and so my team was not permitted to complete our CCP.

During my sophomore year (2020-2021) I became a peer mentor myself with a group of 3 freshmen. As peer mentor, I lead one workshop on how to build a haunted house.

Peer mentorship requires many skills, including communication, team building, planning, goal setting, personal awareness, persistence, dedication to learning, and of course, creativity and leadership.

Stay tuned to see my team’s CCP, set to be finished in April 2021.

Below are some of my reflections as peer mentor.

September Reflection:

I am exhausted tbh. I have attended just about every living arts thang and have reached a breaking point, so I’m gonna be backing off a few things Living Arts related an others.

As for my mentees – I see K almost daily at lunch/dinner, I almost never see J, and I’ve texted with S (who is my only remote mentee [due to COVID-19])

My main action step needs to be to invite J to the daily lunches/dinners we have. Idk how to include S beyond inviting her to virtual tea time / Scooby night.

Haunted House planning meeting is today. I’m hoping it goes well but I still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m expecting the Google Cardboards to be more expensive than expected which will derail the whole thing.

Growth Goals:

-Invite J personally to things

-Learn to say no to some of the things that we do.  If I do everything, then everything will be half-effort.

-Stop procrastinating communication.

October:

I have backed off of various commitments and am much less exhausted. I was out of town for 2 weekends so I think next month I will be even less exhausted. Honestly I love midterm season because that means less homework on the daily.

Mentee interaction is the same. We had a discord call to start planning CCP and have another zoom this time with the faculty adviser next weekend.

Haunted House is going to be very make or break. I think I’ve put a lot in this and this weekend will be dedicated to figuring out the VR editing. I still don’t entirely know what I’m doing. I am also slightly disappointed we couldn’t do the competition thing but I think our storyline looks great.

I have joined the task force. This has been good for planning better programming [for the community as a whole]. I am definitely better at the event planning than the small group interaction. From each mentor, their own skill.

I’m not doing any more zoom lunches/dinners. They are stupid. However, I will continue to individually invite my mentees to our programming and text-check-in regularly.

With regards to classes, this is definitely my most interesting semester yet. I love EECS 370, and Math 217 and 286 are cool too. Stats 280 is an absolute joke. TC 300 is tolerable. Thursdays suck because HW for both maths is due then.

Also I sprained my ankle. It was very worth it since I had more fun playing volleyball than I did since covid started but I will be in PT 2-3x per week until we are sent home in November. My schedule will be tighter for a while.

For goals: I am not getting a job. 17 cred hrs is enough. No more family dinners :-(.  Otherwise I am making good headway on [my other goals for the semester].