BSI

Gretchen Norris

October 13, 2011

This summer I had the opportunity to go to Belin Blank Summer Institute (BSI) at the University of Iowa.

I applied for the visual arts class. We got to apply for this camp through TAG. Lorena nominated us and then we had to get two letters of recommendation. I got a letter in the mail saying I was accepted. Dally had also got excepted so that meant we got to go together.  BSI started on the last week of June. We went up to the college on a Sunday and came home on that following Friday. On the Friday before we went to BSI, I got a concussion and Dally got a sprained ankle. When I first got there, there was an opening ceremony. The ceremony introduced everybody to the teachers and showed us some of the things that we would be doing. After the ceremony we went to our color groups. The color groups are the people who we did the activities with. Dally and I got very lucky, we were in the same color group. That made it better because I actually knew someone in my group. We went to Dairy Queen the first night and then hung out in the dorms. My alarm went off at 6:30 AM for the first day of classes.  Dally and I went and ate breakfast and then waited a little while for our classes to start. My class was on the fifth floor in the Belin Blank building. On the first day of class we looked at pictures of life-like statues. She then told us that we would be making a statue out of packaging tape. We all wondered how it could be possible to make a statue out of packaging tape. Sonya then showed us what we had to do. We picked our partners and then started making our statues. We did that for a day and a half and then started making comics. We had to draw our heroes in four different scenes. The last thing we did was make wallets out of paper. They turned out pretty cool. In our color group we learned sign language, did wacky Olympics, a dance, and learned how to fence.

Fencing was pretty fun. On Friday, there was a closing ceremony. It showed a slide show of pictures and then we got certificates of completion.  It was a very fun experience and I would go again if I could!