sabrina huang's photo blog

Continuing Studies

I love to learn new things because it keeps me fresh and happy.  I love California because we have the best environment with the best people around here which provide us with the greatest resources available to everyone.  We have wonderful weather year round to do anything we want at any given time.  Just the sense of that energy makes every day a fantastic day!!

I just received a Continuing Studies catalog from Stanford University for Spring 08 which is from April to June.  I saw a couple of interesting classes and would like to share with you.  I don't know if I have the time to take those classes, but if you do, please take a full advantage of it.  If you do, please come share with us about your experience.

First of all, it's about Photography, of course.  In this Self-Publishing Your Photographic Book (ART 127) course, students will learn to edit and sequence their photos, decide on a title and text, make layout and design decisions, consider production and marketing options—in short, everything necessary to produce a beautiful, professional, hard-cover photo book. Final books will be printed and bound by Edition One Studios. The last class meeting will be a book-signing party at Modernbook Gallery in Palo Alto on June 12.  If you have been shooting for a while, you must have some beautiful photos that you want to make into a photo coffee table book. Don't know how?? This class will surely get you started.

Second of all, it will be Food Writing again.  This Food Writing from Soup to Nuts (EGL 243) course introduces many aspects of food writing: restaurant reviewing, magazine and newspaper articles, recipes, publicity, book proposals, cookbooks, food history, and memoir. Readings include culinary writers from M.F.K. Fisher and Ruth Reichl to Michael Pollan. Assignments are based on real food-writing situations and provide practice in research, writing, and exploring opportunities for publication in various media. Students will receive personalized, detailed feedback on each assignment and will be encouraged to develop a personal voice in relating food to their life experiences.  This is not an online class and the instructor is different than last quarter as well.  If you didn't make it last time, don't miss it again!!

You do like to travel, don't you?  Other than my mom and my brothers, I don't know anyone on earth who doesn't like to travel,  a chance to smell different air, taste different food and doing something that you never get a chance to do back home.  This quarter they offer a Travel Writing (EGL 145 W) online course.  Why is it that we must leave home in order to know ourselves? How does place inform our understanding of ourselves and the world? This online course explores the writing of the traveler—essays of place, exploration, and excavation. But you do not need to go far to write about place; the festival in your hometown, the view from your back porch, or the memory of traveling with your grandmother when you were a child all serve as perfect catalysts. We will use Best American Travel Writing 2006 as our guide, taking cues from its essays on how to structure, organize, and propel a travel piece. But for the most part, this class will function as a workshop. Students will write several short pieces to explore different aspects of technique and approach throughout the term. The course will culminate with every student writing a full-length essay, and receiving thorough critique from the class to help hone it for publication.

I made a wish to myself a few years ago that I want to be a very influential person and use my influence to have a positive impact on society.  I told myself it may take ten, even twenty years to achieve that goal but I know I will be that person one day.  So the next class I found is very interesting - Increasing Your Influencing Skills (WSP 131) Command and control used to be effective for creating change and achieving outcomes across an organization. Today, we are finding ourselves in the midst of a brand new game. Whether you work in a matrix organization or across functional silos, you may face the need to influence without having authority or hierarchical power. It is no longer effective simply to mandate how you need others to perform. This poses a challenge particularly when it comes to aligning interests and creating common goals and objectives. In a supportive environment and through practical activities and exercises, we will refine our influencing skills, hone our capacity to engage other people, and expand our sphere of influence. In the end, we will learn to effectively communicate organizational needs in a way that creates receptivity and engagement.  This is a one-day class, held on 5/17 from 9:30 to 5:00pm.

If you are interested in Real Estate, maybe a homeowner-want-to-be, maybe an investor-want-to-be, or maybe a Real-Estate-Agent-want-to-be, you might want to consider to take this class - Residential Real Estate: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (BUS 76) Mark Twain said, "Buy land; they're not making it anymore." In this course, we will examine the pitfalls and opportunities to watch out for if you are tempted to heed Twain’s call. After providing some general background on real estate and discussing some of the unique aspects of today’s market, we will provide a conceptual framework for use in the purchase or sale of a personal residence or residential investment real estate. This course will help demystify elements of a transaction while highlighting the most critical issues. Topics will include property valuation, financing, investment issues, title reports, title insurance, property inspections, mandatory disclosures, risk management, staging, marketing, Internet marketing, and special issues for seniors. This course is designed for individual investors, homeowners, prospective homeowners, and persons considering a career in real estate sales.  This class has two instructors and their background is impressive.  I am sure you will learn first hand information on Real Estate.   

Food Writing Class

I love to eat, shoot, and write.  I am getting picky on what I eat, how to shoot, but I still have a hard time to write.  Writing is hard for me.  How to make readers feel the same way I feel through words?  It is hard to writing in my native Chinese language and even harder in English.  Since I was born and educated in Chinese, I think it is easier for me to write in Chinese than English even though I have studied in American college for four years.  I can write research papers and legal real estate contracts which are required for my job, but writing for food is still hard.

I have always wanted to improve my English writing skills, especially for food and travel.  Recently I received a Continuing Studies catalog from Stanford University, and one of the classes is the Online Food Writing, 10 weeks from 1/14-3/23, limited to 17 students, registration starts on 12/3.  I am really interested in this class, but not sure my schedule would fit.  I post it here in case someone would be interested.

Food Writing: The Literary Gourmet (Online Course) (EGL 243 W)

If you love to eat, cook and read about great food, and you'd like to learn more about the many different forms of food writing, then this is the course for you. In this course, you will read a wide variety of food writing by some the most successful practitioners at work today, including former New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl, food blogger and bestselling author Julie Powell, chef Anthony Bourdain, science and food writer Michael Pollan, and Vogue contributor Jeffrey Steingarten. Using their work as models, you will learn how to write restaurant reviews, how to test and develop written recipes, and how to write travel stories focused on food. You will also each write one personal essay and one magazine article in which food—either dining out or dining in—takes center stage. We will discuss practical aspects of the business as well, such as how to submit your short pieces to publications and how to write book proposals. This is an online writing workshop, so be prepared to respond to other students' writing in an editorial capacity, and to receive great feedback on your own.

Created in close partnership with the Stanford Creative Writing Program, this online course will be useful for students looking to improve their craft. Because this course can be taken anywhere, anytime, it is designed to be attractive to those students who live far from campus, or who lead busy lives and can benefit from the flexibility of the online format.

Malena Watrous
Former Stegner Fellow
Malena Watrous is a fiction and nonfiction writer based in San Francisco. She has taught creative writing at the University of San Francisco, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Iowa. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and was a Truman Capote fellow. Her fiction has been published in such literary journals as Story Quarterly, TriQuarterly, and The Massachussetts Review, and her nonfiction has appeared on Salon.com, and in The Believer, Real Simple, Organic Style, and other magazines.

For other online writing classes, please click HERE.