Yan Jia

This is a campus activity reflection paper from PROV501. I choose this because it describes the first political event that I experienced in America. That was a very different experience from watching TV. It reminded me a successful speech needs much more other skills than only practice, such as courage, resilience, and work experience. After I wrote this reflection paper, we got a group presentation topic in Final. The topic was about United States elections. Thus, that event gave me sources to present my opinions about the elections to classmates.

An Experience of American Political Rally Event

 Being an audience of an American politician’ speech, is an efficient access to experience American politics.  I got an opportunity on Feb. 29^th. Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton host a political rally on GMU’s Fairfax Campus. This political rally was used to raise support to help her to run for president.

This event was scheduled to begin at 4 P.M. in the Hub ballroom. In fact, I was standing in the open air for more than 3 hours before entering the ballroom. It made me surprised. Lots of American students attended that event; people from other states were shown up as well.

One special phenomenon gave me a deep memory when I waiting in the line. I saw a student standing by the waiting line, holding a poster with a slogan, which relates to Hillary deals with official events with personal emails. The interesting thing is the reaction of official securities. One security saw this poster, just showed a smile at him. That is very different from China. I don’t believe that a Chinese student standing out of People’s Congress, holding a post of leaders’ scandal will be acceptable. According to this phenomenon, compare to China, I think that America respects human rights a lot, and social supervision does a powerful force to politics.

This political rally included two parts. The first part is warm up. The president of GMU and two other persons, and Hillary’s husband (on TV) did endorsements for about 1 hour. I think this part was an interesting part. It revealed the importance of every vote.

Late, Hillary did a nice speech, and that speech touched me, even I am not a citizen of the U.S.A. . I state that she showed good speech skills for some reasons. Firstly, she knows that what kinds of topics were prevalent and acceptable in that situation. For example, feminist, new employment opportunities, community building and other issues were involved in the speech. She did not spend much time on talking China related topics or how to deal with international relations. Instead, she spent much time on talking about domestic issues. Furthermore, the excellent skill is that she talked these issues in a specific way, as a saying “from little things, big topics grow,” not just giving a skeleton without bloods. The lastly skill she showed is remarkable resilience. For instance, electors’ stand in from of her, and invoked Hillary to care about gun control. She responded resourcefully.

This event gave me an experience of American politics. On the one hand, I got a lot of experiences in person, which beyond only from news. When I shared this event to my family, my mother in law was proud of me, because I can understand English. Besides, I admired Hillary’s speech skills.  I guess that she must practice many times before she did the speech. However, a successful speech needs much more other skills than practice, such as courage, resilience, and work experience. On the other hand, this event reminded me that I should keep reciting English words to help me understand others better.