Welcome to the Forum!

Knowing that they are seated in the center of the massive Healy Hall, students experience a sincere feeling of meaning towards their studies in the Carroll Forum. Students in the Forum have thus far worked towards two overarching objectives: to understand both themselves and others, and to use this understanding to communicate and work with others in a positive way. Through these objectives, students have thus far focused on several major projects, among them learning their personality types, practicing active listening, and exercising the “power of the positive no”. In order to pinpoint their personality types, students took the Meyers-Briggs personality test, the answers of which matched them with a detailed description of the particular habits and attitudes of that personality type. Students also engaged in active listening; this requires that while conversing with another person on a contentious issue, the student – as the active listener – make a conscious effort to corroborate the other person’s arguments. In taking on the other person’s point of view, the student can most effectively realize flaws in both the other person’s argument and their own. Therefore, the goal of active listening is not to try and change the student’s thoughts to fit the other person’s argument, but to encourage the student to understand the issue from all points of view. In the positive no exercise, students were asked to decline participation in an event or activity even if saying no could possibly damage a relationship. The techniques of the positive no taught students not to decline the person with whom they were working, but instead to explain to this person what it was that precluded them from accepting their offer.

The CFI has also worked to teach students to embrace, analyze, and express their passions. At the CFI Winter Orientation over a hundred students joined in a massive meet-and greet as well as renditions of John Lennon’s Imagine and Les Miserables’ Do You Hear the People Sing- an exercise in enthusiasm, and, for some, in self-consciousness. Students have also worked on writing concise, yet detailed and faithful, summaries of news articles and speeches. This teaches students to write concisely, using every word present in a sentence and excising unnecessary ones. The class has also taken a trip to the Library of Congress’ Kluge Center to learn about research opportunities. Finally, students have learned a new technique of thinking, based on the theory that the mind operates on two basic systems. System one is an instantaneous, involuntary thought process, of the type that one uses while driving. System 2, in turn, is the deliberate, slow manner of thinking that one may use to solve a complex equation or to read a map. To implement these methods, students have analyzed two cases: the Sinking of the titanic, and the Harlem Shake, a meme-like cultural artifact. In both cases, students were able to derive underlying tones and meanings that would have been lost without their newly learned methods.

Post written by Annie Wang (COL'16) and James Gadea (SFS'16)