__A Portland, Ore. native who discovered the College of William and Mary partially because it was conveniently listed on the Common Application, David Cooper has thrived on the East Coast within our campus community. A member of Kappa Delta Rho, director of Public Affairs for AMP and chairman for the Council for Fraternity Affairs, a common theme in David’s life is his desire to bridge the naturally occuring communication gaps between people. Sporting a KDR shirt and drinking a cup of hot chocolate, David sits down to discuss his unruffled life’s pace and chat about Dragon Boating, Halloween and how to dispel the myths of Greek life.__

*What’s the difference between here and the Pacific Northwest, where you are from?*

I guess the first year here people would ask me how it was all different from the West Coast. It’s not really that different — I’ll say pop instead of soda or Coke, but that’s the only thing really. When I first got here I’d ask people where they were from and they’d say NoVa and I thought it was a city; I was like, “there’s this huge city in Virginia that I’ve never heard of.” I didn’t realize it was “northern Virginia.” It took me a while.

*You are now on the advisory board for your fraternity, Kappa Delta Rho, even though you initially never thought you’d join a fraternity. How did you get involved?*

I never, never thought I would be in a fraternity, but I met a guy here who was also from Oregon who was a KDR who I started to get to know, then realized I fit in and decided to join. I guess at first I didn’t want to join because of the stereotypes.

*What do you think of the stereotypes that sometimes plague Greek life?*

It’s just unfortunate. It’s just the one incident that happens really rarely that fits the stereotype that perpetuates it. I’m the chairman for the Council for Fraternity Affairs so that work is just trying to be an example and encourage others to not fit that stereotype in the community.

*What do you do to dispel negative stereotypes?*

Our work is based on personal relationships with chapter presidents, school administrators. What I do as a KDR will reflect on the entire Greek community, so it’s important to raise awareness of that.

*Do you like to move around or are you a homebody?*

I’m a homebody. Foreign places are fun and interesting and I’m sure it would be fun to travel around for a year … but I’d rather have a home base and then visit places.

*What is something people around here might not know about you?*

I am totally a TWAMP. I enjoy video games and reading, but I also love to Dragon Boat. I did this all four years during high school and actually got to travel up to Canada and do it. Basically, it’s like canoeing with 20 people in a boat. [The boats] have an ornamental head and an ornamental tail and there are two styles [of racing] — Taiwanese and Hong Kong. In Taiwanese you have someone lean off the side of the boat and catch a flag out of the water at the end, and in Hong Kong you just straight race. I’ve got videos of me doing it on Facebook.

*Did you dress up for Halloween?*

Yes, I was totally TWAMPy. I decided [in] the last 20 minutes what I’d be and didn’t go out and buy a costume or anything, and I was the recession. I was like half-business, half-bum. I mean I just had a dress-collared shirt with a loose tie and these raggedy shorts that have these holes in them and are falling apart. I just wore dress shoes without socks and a nametag that said, “Hello, my name is The Recession.”

*What good movies have you seen lately?*

“Zombieland.” I enjoyed it. Me and some of my fraternity brothers play “Left For Dead,” an Xbox 360 game where you shoot zombies, and I really enjoy that, so the movie was hilarious. There is one scene where there is a clown that pops out, so someone in the theater must have been afraid of clowns because they screamed and launched back in their chair and their popcorn went everywhere.

*What’s a fun fact about you?*

I’m a dual citizen. My dad’s British, so every other summer or so we’ll go back to England for a little while, two weeks or so, with my family. What’s really exciting about that is that I have [a European Union] passport, which means I don’t need a work visa, which means I could work for the EU or something. So, we’ll see if something like that works out later in life. Ideally, I’d like to do something with international development and aid, like USAID, State Department or some other nonprofit or something like that.

*Can you speak with a believable British accent?*

No, I can’t. People have asked. I pick it up when I go there but I would just be embarrassing myself beyond anything.

__He might not be gifted in the accent department, but David is a self-titled “renaissance man,” who is active in a variety of organizations. Plus, he has a fun and relaxed attitude to boot. And, for the record, Dragon Boating is definitely worth Googling.__

One ordinary day, a member of Teach, Refine, Advance, Inspire, Navigate — a student-based leadership group — decided to cut his losses and jump out of a plane that was unable to land. This, according to Beau Blumberg ’11, is what the game jetfighter is all about.

In the activity, the group members have to pretend they are landing a plane given various codes and symbols.

“You can only feed your information to certain people, and they feed it to some people, so that not everyone is speaking to everyone,” Blumberg said. “It’s very effective at showing how some people take on a lot, while other people only work for a few minutes at the very beginning, so you imitate that organization structure. ”

Jetfighter is one of the games that TRAIN knows best. TRAIN, a campus organization dedicated to helping student organizations develop better leaders, provides workshops for on-campus student groups to strengthen different types of leadership skills. The workshops are led by fellow students, who have also gone through the workshops themselves.

“Since we go through the workshop first, it allows us to work on our feet,” Elizabeth Miller ’11 said. “If we’re running a program and it starts to head in a certain direction, it allows us to adapt to the situation and tailor it to meet the group’s needs.”

After participating in all the programs they run, the teachers can better judge the effect they will have on the groups they facilitate.

“[The jetfighter program] was incredibly frustrating,” Blumberg said. “I finished doing my job really early, and then I had nothing to do but sit there. One [player] is given the opportunity to jump out of the plane, and when it came time to do it, our person did jump, and that was a bit intimidating. But we did actually land the plane. The whole experience was very eye-opening.”

TRAIN officially got off the ground last fall after evolving from the Recognizing Achievement in Leadership committee.

“We thought leadership competencies for leaders, as well as organizations, were a need on campus,” Assistant Director of Student Activities Jennifer Leung said.

Leung, along with Betsy Shorts, serves as a faculty advisor to TRAIN. Programs like jetfighter are due in large part to the advisors.

“We are very much involved with the group; we develop the programs and teach them to the students so that they can facilitate the programs for other student organizations,” Leung said.

Aside from the workshops, TRAIN is committed to distributing the RAIL award to one exceptional student leader per month.

“It’s an intense process,” Miller said. “We spend well over our normal hour [deciding about RAIL].”

Part of what makes RAIL so difficult to decide upon is the nature of the award. Each RAIL recipient must be nominated by a member of his or her organization. The nominees are then discussed at TRAIN meetings. The Outstanding Student Leader of the Month award is meant to encourage exceptional leadership in all types of organizations around campus.

“We want to spread the love, if you will,” Blumberg said, “So we try not to give [RAIL] out for just big, highly publicized events … RAIL is a really nice way to recognize someone who has gone way above and beyond.”

Despite the difficulty of the decision, Miller says it’s worth it.

“With RAIL applicants there are a lot of [nominees] you don’t know, but you read the applications, and some of these people are so amazing you just want to be friends with them,” she said. “And the people who nominate their leaders say such nice things. They’re so nice to read.”

TRAIN’s programs are designed to help a wide range of organizations, and this year members have facilitated events for everything from Greek organizations to AMP. This month, TRAIN is attempting to branch out to the rest of the campus by providing its first open workshop.

“[The workshop] is color-based, and I mean actual colors,” Miller said. “The color you are given determines what kind of leader you are.”

Depending on the student turnout of this workshop, TRAIN may begin to offer more campus-wide programs.
“Our hope is that by offering a couple of workshops this semester, student leaders on campus will gain an understanding of what TRAIN has to offer and will begin to invite TRAIN to facilitate workshops for their organizations,” Shorts said.

Although a relatively new organization on campus, TRAIN strives to make its presence known to all students and organizations. Recent advertising efforts to generate RAIL nominations have included tri-folds in all the dining halls.

“I’m really proud of the work TRAIN does,” Miller said. “We’re going to keep on chugging. [Laughs] We spend so much time coming up with train metaphors.”

Exploring the tragically ironic behavior of people in love, one of the College of William and Mary’s performance troupes, Shakespeare in the Dark, will be putting on its interpretation of the Bard’s comedy “Twelfth Night” this week.

The play is a modern interpretation of the classic work, falling somewhere between Shakespeare and “She’s The Man,” a movie starring Amanda Bynes and Channing Tatum. Student director Megan Behm ’11 conceived the idea during her freshman year to put on a version of the show set in the modern day political and social elite.

“It was originally a much crazier concept, with lots of cross-dressing and other things,” Behm said.

The show, which premieres Wednesday at 8 p.m. in the Sadler Center’s Commonwealth Auditorium, will be a milder version. Although still true to the original script, it contains plenty of modern touches and interpretations to make it relevant.

The largely Shakespearean dialogue provides an intriguing clash with the modern day costumes. The story is very much the same but contains less of the Shakespearean cliche, according to Myron Kimble ’10. Kimble plays the role of Antonio, a pirate in the Shakespearean version.

The cast has wholeheartedly adopted Behm’s translation of the story from the Elizabethan era to the modern day.

“I love working with a student director who’s very passionate. It makes everyone more enthusiastic,” Eric Nold ’10 said. “The emotion comes out more because we can sit and talk about [what’s going on in the play].”

Playing the role of Orsino, Nold is central to the play’s focus on the follies of love. This explains why Nold spent the first day of rehearsal talking about the meaning of love.

“Loving is like digging a hole,” he said. “You’re digging up this treasure in a new person … You keep digging until [he or shes] leave[s] you. You can’t get out of the hole when it’s over because you’re so far in.”

The rest of the cast agreed that this was a good summary of the first day’s discussion and of what the play is about in general: the beautiful combination of deep emotions broken up by plenty of comedy.

“[I love that] the cast had the chance to work with the director to create scenes and add the humorous bits,” Megan Ammirati ’10, who plays the female lead of Viola, said. “I also love that we have a grown male in a onesie.”

This mixture is exactly what Behm is aiming for. She said she wants the audience to laugh, cry and feel empathy for certain characters. But she also wants them to think.

“I hope people will wonder about things we value in our society that are not always admirable. I also hope they’ll laugh their butts off,” she said.

The show will be in the Commonwealth Auditorium Nov. 4, 5 and 8 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $3.