Study hard, play hard – right? College is a major balancing act. It’s delegating what needs to get done and when, setting priorities and holding yourself to deadlines. And after a long week of working hard (attending class, writing papers, and staying ahead in the reading, just to name a few tasks), it is no wonder that college students have a reputation of wanting to party.
No one should be expected to sit in the library or stare at their dorm room walls every day of the week with their nose in a book. Everyone needs something that helps them unwind, especially on the weekends.
Sometimes finding something to do – especially on a campus where parties are a rare occasion - is hard. I knew when I signed my life away as a Hollins woman, I was going to be living in Roanoke, Virginia,and that I wouldn’t have a big city as my playground on the weekend. I knew I wasn’t attending a huge state school where fraternity parties are the social factor and that club activities would be endless. As a prospective, I remember asking about the student life on the weekends only to hear the same fib that my fellow peers heard themselves as prospective students: “Don’t worry about it, you will always find something going on.”
Oh, but that is very far from the truth. Options on campus are very bleak. From the first weekend as a first year, I realized as no one was around on the weekends I would have to be entirely responsible for finding something to do Friday and Saturday nights. While not feeling bogged down by having too many social activities planned, I like that Hollins has a sleepy atmosphere (especially for those weekends I need to do a lot of work), but for the most part – I don’t understand why we can’t have some sort of decent entertainment when the weekend rolls around.
I don’t know about your college, but the food at UMass is well, not the most scrumptious. The salad bar got old after the first week (of freshman year) and I swear the food is mixed with laxatives; I can never keep anything down (TMI, I know, my B).
Anyways, eating in the dining commons at my school was my least favorite option and I imagined it to be the same for every campus, until I came across an article on Yahoo about the Top 20 Rankings for Best College Food and became insanely jealous of these delicious treats.
At Wheaton College, ranked number one in this survey, Klaud Mandl, the General Manager of Food Services at Wheaton, who previously worked at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, has a menu of Belgian chocolate homemade truffles, lavender-infused pork chops with onion gravy, and cumin-lime baked chicken with avocado cream sauce. Are you serious?!?! Homemade Belgian truffles??? The closest thing we got to that at my school was a help-yourself ice cream machine with watered down frozen yogurt. Read More »
February 8th: Female student shoots two fellow students to death before ultimately killing herself at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge.
February 11th: 17-year-old student shoots and critically wounds a fellow student during high school gym period in Memphis, TN.
February 12th: 14-year-old boy shoots a classmate, 15, at junior high school in Oxnard, CA. The victim is declared brain dead.
These three shootings preceded the most recent school tragedy to take America by the heartstrings. February 14th, 2008 will not go down in history as just another Valentine’s Day: instead, it will be remembered as the day of another fatal college campus massacre, this time, at Northern Illinois University.
Six people, including gunman Steven P. Kazmierczak, were shot to death, with 14 more shot and wounded. The gunman appeared from behind a curtain in a geology class minutes before the period ended and began to open fire. Read More »
I had a HUGE crush on him when I first saw Grease. Like, gigantic. My mom was concerned.
Hard to believe that this is what Danny Zuko looks like now. (Looks like some one’s got a case of the Man Boobs!) And even weirder is how he looks in the upcoming summer movie Hairspray.
I mean, look at him. I’m embarrassed for him.
But worse than John Travolta’s outer appearance is his recent blabberings-on about the horrific events at Columbine and Virginia Tech.
Page Six reports that Travolta said publicly, that all of these tragic school shootings are not really the fault of those who committed the acts, but but on psychiatric drugs. “I still think that if you analyze most of the school shootings, it is not gun control. It is [psychotropic] drugs at the bottom of it,” he said.
This goes along with Scientology, of which Travolta is a devout follower; Tom Cruise, as we all know, is also a major figure in the religion…er…the science…er…belief? Basically, they all believe that all drugs – prescriptive or otherwise – are completely uneccessary and are the root of all evil. Read More »
In a recent Time.com article, author Richard Corliss wonders if it’s more than a strange coincidence that one of the pictures Cho took of himself where he “looks fierce and holds a raised hammer” is very similar to a shot in Korean director Park Chan-Wook’s film.
Just because he raises the question doesn’t mean Corliss actually believes there is any connection. In fact, he challenges anyone who thinks these movies are somehow responsible for the aforementioned shooting sprees to “explain why [everyone else] who saw Oldboy, and The Matrix, and Saw, didn’t do the same.” Read More »
As this tragic week for college students comes to a close, I have been pondering one large question over and over again: Should NBC have aired the footage of Cho that he mailed to them after killing two students and before massacring 30 more?
I am a journalism student at a large school of communications, and issues like this one are highly debated in our classrooms. We are constantly given situations in class that a news director or journalist might run into and asked to figure them out ethically. I understand that NBC receiving this footage was a ratings jackpot and it would be hard to keep it contained…But I have come to the conclusion that NBC betrayed fundamental journalistic principles.
Was it wrong for NBC to air Cho Seung Hui’s Video?
The package containing a 23 page diatribe and a 10 minute DVD arrived at 30 Rockefeller Plaza yesterday afternoon by US mail. The carrier alerted security to the orgin of the package and NBC notified the FBI.
NBC has released photos and video clips of the gunman’s last moments. They are insanely disturbing. He claims “This didn’t have to happen.” “You could have prevented this.” “You threw gasoline on the situation.” “You forced me into a corner.”
While the VTech tragedy was a rare, stupefying, isolated incident, the debate over carrying concealed weapons has been cracked open once again.
Here in Texas, now the site of the second-and-third most deadly mass shootings on American soil, people from students to doctors are arguing passionately for their right to carry a gun. Many conservative pundits (check out nationalreview.com for coverage of the pro-gun debate) are suggesting that it may be essential for every student to carry a gun in order to protect themselves should something happen in a classroom, or anywhere, for that matter.
I never really consider if anyone around me is carrying a gun; I don’t think I’ve even ever seen a real gun up close, besides on a police officer. But it is frightening to think that more people than I could imagine have weapons in their homes, their cars or actually on them.
And the thought of guns in the classroom, well, it makes me not want to go to class. Ever. I value safety and security, but not to the point where the pursuit of it causes me to live in fear of my lab partner’s semi-automatic going off in class. Read More »
I’ve been checking CNN.com as much as possible these last couple of days, reading updates about VTech, wanting, like everyone else, answers. I want to know why. Who. Who does this sort of thing and why?
As of 2:00 pm this afternoon, nobody really knows. Authorities have his name, but that’s about it. They have his name and they know he was “a loner”.
I’m tired of that word. I’m sick and tired of hearing it attached to these boys who walk into their schools and shoot innocent people. When we’re grasping for reasons, grasping for solutions, this is word we keep slapping on the front page of every media outlet going to print. He was a loner. As if that explains everything.
It doesn’t. It never has. Not to me.
What does the word loner even mean? These killers had no friends? These killers never talked to anyone around them? They ate alone? They had no roommates? They never raised their hands in class? They didn’t interact with their families? They had social issues that everyone could feel? They dressed strange? All of the above?? Read More »
As the horrific events transpired today in Blackburg, Virginia, students, faculty and family members at Virginia Tech found themselves in an unfathomable position- searching for information about the shooting, the shooter and the condition of their classmates, loved ones and friends. The answers just don’t come quick enough as they wait painfully for any information concerning the who, what, where when and why.
As the 24 hour news stations recycle the same 5 minutes of available information, the people of VTech have turned to Facebook in effort to assemble the pieces for themselves. Students are sharing first hand accounts, overheard stories, and names of potential victims- providing them with unprecidented access to information that until now has only been available to the authorities.
In addition, new profiles and groups are rapidly appearing on the site offering condolences and prayers from students around the country. Facebook has become much more than a place to find a “hook-up” or a kegger, but rather a virtual townhall for the VTech communtity to begin a dialog and somehow find a way to pick up the pieces.
Below are some of the Facebook profiles created today:
Study hard, play hard – right? College is a major balancing act. It’s delegating what needs to get done and when, setting priorities and holding yourself to deadlines. And after a long week of working hard (attending class, writing papers, and staying ahead in the reading, just to name a few tasks), it is no wonder that college students have a reputation of wanting to party.
I don’t know about your college, but the food at UMass is well, not the most scrumptious. The salad bar got old after the first week (of freshman year) and I swear the food is mixed with laxatives; I can never keep anything down (TMI, I know, my B).
February 8th:
John Travolta used to be 
Did 
As this tragic week for college students comes to a close, I have been pondering one large question over and over again: Should NBC have aired the footage of Cho that he mailed to them after killing two students and before massacring 30 more?
While the 
“Cho was a loner and authorities are having a hard time finding information about him”
As the horrific events transpired today in Blackburg, Virginia, students, faculty and family members at 
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