You are beautiful in every single way...

Hello there! I hope you all have been doing well since we last talked, I know I've been crazy busy. It turns out that as time goes by it doesn't get any easy to juggle all the things you do in college because you typically get roped into more and more things.

One of the new and really cool things that I'm doing this year is working with groups of middle school girls from LTMS on their views of beauty and how they can learn to see themselves as beautiful. I had planned on doing this as an after school program, but working with the school psychologist I'm going to be doing sessions during the day. I went over to LTMS after class this morning and worked on mailing out permission forms and hopefully I'll get to start working with the girls in two weeks.

This whole program has grown from a series of workshops I did two summers ago that were inspired by the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty and I was motivated to get involved in this type of community service by the Phillips University Legacy Fund, which is an outside scholarship I recieve that requires all of its recipients to complete a service project where we take on a leadership role. The Phillips University Legacy Fund is a unique scholarship because it's a fund create by the alumni of Phillips University, a university that went bankrupt and had to close but since then has paid off all of their debts, and is given only to students who attend Disciples of Christ affiliated universities and colleges. Every year they send us somewhere new and exciting, my first year we were outside of Santa Fe, NM, last year we were in Davis, OK and this year we're going to a Ranch in Van, TX.

The other Transy students at the Conference in OK.

I know that Transy isn't known for its religous affiliation but that affiliation did play a major role in my college decision, as a Disciple I had a special Disciple admissions counselor and I became eligable for outside, Disciples scholarships. Now don't get it wrong, Transy may have a good core group of Disciples students but the affiliation doesn't require you to go to worship everyday or anything, it's just a little friendliness between the university and the church. If YOU'RE a Disciple and you're interested in finding out more about the Transy DOC connection, shoot Betsy Pigg and email at bpigg@transy.edu, she's really awesome and can answer pretty much all of your questions.

Find some time to enjoy the fall!