1. Take some time to reflect on how you dress and customize yourself. Consider and respond to the following questions:

• Are there any personal beliefs or values that are supported and expressed by your dress or body adornment?
• Why do you make the choices you do?
• How has this changed over the years?

For my personal dress or body adornment, I open to a variety of clothes styles and I am not a type of person that chases after top fashion. I enjoy choosing clothes from a variety of styles and make my own match that fits my personal values, which are to be simple and make me feel comfortable and relax. Simpleness and being relax is the core value I have been hold to my dress and appearance. This is also the way I treated to my surroundings. I like to play with friends, and I am a really kind person to them, and I would like to help them as anything I could help. I enjoy shopping but I am not crazy about it. I have a specific set of clothe styles that I always buy when I shop. For top wear, I enjoy choosing sweaters, hoodies or T-shirts, which are really casual and can have variety styles tie to them. For bottom wear, my favorite one is jeans and I also wear sports legging a lot. I have a lot of shoes which can fit different occasion that I may attend. I think family, career this two values influence me most when I choose what to wear. For the family aspect, I am inherent from my family is to be conservative sometimes and to make my dress be acceptable in most situations. Thus, I choose to wear casual and sport wear a lot, since it can be accepted by many people and do not have negative effects on children. For the career aspect, since I am a scientific background student and always need to work in lab. Thus I am more careful about the safety aspect when I wear if I have a lab section to go. I will wear long sleeve and simple T-shirts when I do my professional stuff. In addition, if I need to attend a seminar or have a presentation before professor. I will change my dress to be more professional and give others a good first impression, because it is a respect to others and myself.

My dress also changed over time. The biggest change happened in my transition from China to study in America. I gradually change my lifestyle and personal beliefs about dress. The first think I noticed is that people in the U.S try to dress more comfortable rather than to be dressed brightly all the time. Girls in China especially in the age like me, enjoy chase fashion and to be dressed up and use makeup all the time. After I came to U.S, I found that we did not need to always be prepared when met with people. We just need to be comfortable and dressed as simple as possible. In addition, I changed my mind about body adornment. Before I came to America, I thought tattoo was a very negative thing and only strange people will tattoo. Later, I found that tattoo is actually a very normal thing and people use it to express their personal belief. Even though I do not have tattoo, I am pretty open to it currently.

2. What were the core beliefs and values in your family and how were they communicated/sustained through dress or body customization?

My family all like to wear sportswear, which could make us feel relax. Being simple is the core belief to us. We usually do not dress any adornments – my mom only wears her wedding wing. The core beliefs and values in my family, such as being conservative and respect to tradition, influenced my dress. For instance, during my high school, my family does not allow me to perm my hair or color it, since they think it is unrespect to my teachers and it will cause negative effects to my classmates. They think girls with colored hair always do not pay much attention on their study and they should be considered as problem kid. Thus, girls should never wear miniskirt, color their hair or have strange hair styles.

3. What are the core beliefs and values of your peer community? How are they expressed through dress and body adornment?

 In my peer community, the core beliefs of most of us are to be casual, friendly and professional sometimes. Since a lot of my peer communities are international students that come from diverse aspects of cultural backgrounds, the most important value of all of us is to be friendly to others and make friends with more people. Thus, we tend to dress more casual and more acceptable in varies situations. Sometimes, my peers also wear professional dress to give other good impression and show their confidence in study or presentation situations. They want other to believe their confidence and believe they can work well with each other.

 All above are how my personal values influenced on my dress or body adornment. I will constantly change my dress according to different occasions in my future life to better fit the situation and convey my positive attitude to others through my dressing.