Today was our last day of class. In the morning session, we read cases about Affirmative Action. This was convenient, because both the essay I wrote and the debate I would have (later in the day) were on this subject.
I spent my lunch break in the classroom with my group, preparing for the debate. We were the first group to go. We were defending John Baker. John was suing the University of New York, because they didn't admit him, while they accepted his next door neighbor. His neighbor, Juan Lopez, had nearly identical academic merits as John, but gained extra points for being a minority. Our basic argument was that Juan and John came from the same background and had the same level of education, so there wasn't any reason to give Juan special treatment. The two judges, Jeffrey and Luke were split on the decision, so they asked a random student to be the tie breaker. They student happened to be Alec, who sided in our favor.
All of the rest of the debates were interesting too, but I won't go into detail on any of them. Lucas and Tomi can describe in their blogs what happened in their debates, far better than I can.After the last decision was made, we got our essays back. I was very pleased to see I received an A. The teacher who graded it, which I believe was Luke in this case, seemed to like it. He did make a lot of corrections, but almost all of them were about punctuation. Apparently, I should not use contractions in formal writing. I was not aware of that, but I will try to avoid them in the future.
At about 5:15, we all met up in the John Jay cafeteria to grab some food before leaving campus. Our cohort decided to end our trip with a tour of the city. The first stop was the High Line Park on the Lower West Side of Manhattan. This urban park was created from the remains of out-of-use railway tracks. The city renovated them and put in plants, benches and walkways. It's an excellent place to take a stroll, with an awesome view of the city. While there we happened to cross paths with Ms. Lilhanand and her son. They seemed to like th location, just as much as we did.
After parting ways with Ms. L., we took the subway down to Brooklyn. We sat down for dinner at a really nice Italian Restaurant near the water front. The place was great, but it must not be very well known, because it was almost empty. We ate outside. We ended up staying there until night fell.
After dinner we started our trek across the Brooklyn Bridge, into Manhattan. Our goal had been to cross it just as the sun set, but we were a little late for that. The view from the bridge was great, but I wasn't able to get any good photos from it. It took about half an hour to cross, but it was definitely worth it.
We got ice cream on the other side of the bridge: highlight of my day.
After wandering around the area on the Manhattan side of the bridge for a while, we took the subway down to Times Square. We wanted to spend our last day here, really traversing the city. We ended up exploring some of the most significant locations NYC has to offer.
When we got back to the dorm, I found that I was hungry again. So were many of the other students, so we all pitched in to order a pizza. That's essentially how I ended my time in New York.
It's really hard to believe that this time tomorrow, I'll be asleep in my own bed.
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