I’ve continued to settle in, and in case you thought the title of my blog means I’ve been catching up with Donald Trump, instead last week I met Elon University’s President, Dr Connie Book.There is an amazing photo wall of pictures in one of the new buildings on campus and I liked this picture of Dr Book connecting with one of Elon’s students. it also demonstrates a US tradition of fist pumps, which I believe are as popular as high fives. I will need to practice these new greetings as I believe they can occasionally be mismatched when one person goes to fist pump and the other tries to high five, which leads to a slightly awkward version of rock, paper, scissors! Dr Book was very welcoming, (she didn’t fist pump me on this occasion – I suggested we didn’t shake hands as I’ve been suffering from my first US cold). She has apparently been reading my blog … I’d better watch what I write!

Another interesting picture on the wall, was discovered completely by chance. I wandered into the wrong building by mistake, only to find on the second floor, a picture of the cover of my book that I wrote in 2014 with Peter Felten (from Elon) and another colleague Alison Cook-Sather at Bryn Mawr College, Pennslyvania (more of Alison in due course as I hope to visit her in November). Someone offered to take a photo for me – so that’s how I met Gabie Smith, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychology!

So my final piece of Elon wall art for this blog demonstrates that they don’t just put nice pictures of Dr Book and nice pictures of my book (see what I did there) on the walls. They also have a wall of inspiring global citizens and informed leaders. However, when I saw that David Cameron had a spot, I wasn’t sure whether I might need to have a chat with the Elon interior decorators. Let us not forget the mishandling of a referendum and the current Brexit dogs breakfast is all down to this ‘informed leader’!

Meeting the president / Star spangled banter by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0