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Then + Now… yeah, I’m one of those “same face in every picture” people

When I first got to Brown in September 2009, I was lacking all kinds of life experience. Never been kissed. Never been drunk. Never gotten anything less than a B+ in a class (screw you too, AP Euro). I can say with confidence that none of those statements apply to me anymore (screw you too, Math 35). Milestones aside, though, it’s kind of astonishing to look back and see just how far I’ve come. At the start of my freshman year, I may as well have been thirteen years old for my lack of maturity. Now, well, I probably don’t always fit my parents’ definition of how a 22-year-old should act, but I’m pretty sure I at least match Taylor Swift’s.

The thought of graduating and entering the “real world” is terrifying. I’m one of the lucky ones with a cushion under me, what with my moving back home and going to grad school and all, and it’s still scary. I’m not going to have to deal with broken appliances in some crappy apartment and I’m not futilely searching for jobs, yet I’m still fighting the urge to look at May 26^th like the Mayans were off by five months and the world as I know it will end. [Read more →]

I’ve been webmaster for BlogDailyHerald since midway through my freshman year. In all that time I’ve written a grand total of zero posts, preferring instead to focus on behind the scenes technology work. Now, as a soon-to-graduate senior, I’m lucky enough to have a kick-ass successor who has taken on all of my Blog related responsibilities and somehow still finds time to write fantastic posts. But through a combination of peer pressure and procrastination I’ve been given one last job to do: write my first and only post for Blog.

In keeping with my love of the Internet and all things technological, I’m going to leave the eloquent, well-written posts for the other seniors to write. This post chronicles my time at Brown in the best way I know how: with animated GIFs and photos of cats.

Freshman Year

Meeting people in Keeney (Unit 3!) for the first time:

Writing my first essays in college:
[Read more →]

Last week, I went to the MGMT concert at Lupo’s. The delay in relaying my concert knowledge is of course due to my several nights of deep contemplation about the concert. It really has nothing to do with the fact that we’re in reading period/finals week. At all. But seriously, these lessons are going to be deep, so pay attention.

MGMT is a band worth contemplating—I am willing to go on the record stating that if I were going to Penny Lane any living, actually-of-our-era band, it would be them. I am shamelessly in love with Andrew VanWynGarden. I think everyone our age should have spent a little time watching interviews with him. I remember going to my first MGMT concert when I was 16 and thinking it was totally plausible that Andrew might pull me up on stage and kiss me. At 19, I recognize the delusion of that thought—of course he wouldn’t have made out with a 16-year-old. Going into Wednesday night, I felt like it was much more likely this time around!

Obviously, my first lesson is that:

1) Third time is (will be) the charm. Meaning next time, Andrew and I will end up together. It was a bit ambitious to assume such a momentous occasion in my life would happen at Lupo’s. Lupo’s is sort of tacky. [Read more →]

Then + Now

“What are you doing after you graduate?”

Those terrible, terrible words. I give the curious friend / acquaintance a passable answer. I try to change the subject. What am I doing after I graduate? The jobs I casually applied for rejected me. Living with my mom in NYC is much cheaper than finding my own apartment, (evidence: this tumblr is terrifying). What do you even do with a history degree? Were those econ majors and math majors right all along!?!?? But then I calm down. I remember the most valuable thing I’ve learned at Brown: Uncertainty should be embraced. Uncertainty is natural.

I used to have it all wrong. When I was in high school I kept my head down and powered through SATs to gain entrance to my *perfect* school. After a year I hated it, so I agonized over my almost-perfect-but-not GPA and sent off a flurry of transfer applications. I almost went to Columbia since I didn’t think Brown was “academic enough,” or so I posted on College Confidential. (My friends found this post two years ago and have never stopped making fun of me since, for very very good reason. No, I won’t post the link.) My main motivation was moving up that next rung on the meritocracy ladder. Even as I told myself that these artificial markers, like grades and enrollment at an Ivy League school, didn’t matter — I deeply cared. I really believed there was only one way to be successful. I was very unhappy. [Read more →]

The U.S. Department of Education recently released a list of the top 25 freshmen retention rates of private colleges and universities. The difference between consecutive rankings here comes down to a fraction of a percent—Brown has an average retention rate of 97.5 percent, coming in at an unlucky a respectable thirteenth place. According to a Yahoo! news report, this officially renders Brown the school with the thirteenth happiest freshmen. The equivalency being presumed between retention and happiness can be easily deconstructed and dismissed, but it’s easier just to point out how irrelevant Yahoo! is.

Unfortunately, they aren’t the only ones that mark these statistics as a measure of our  happiness—HuffPo and CBS News, among others, do the same. We always find it disconcerting when studies attempt to calculate the amount of happiness someone has (or a group people have), but in this case it is particularly discomforting as Princeton is ranked happiest. Sorry, but if this letter situation is happening at your school, you can’t win the happy-go-lucky award. Also, Princeton sorta just sounds sad. (Whoever said orange was the new black was seriously disturbed.)

We commend these sites for trying to gauge our happiness, but laugh at their shortcomings. [Read more →]

Looking for a good-luck omen during finals period? Look no further than the sky… in Australia.

At 4:25 today, you can watch via SOOH’s live video feed the annular solar eclipse happening in the Southern Hemisphere. Since the moon is at its furthest point from the Earth while passing in front of the sun, it’ll form a particularly bright halo called the Ring of Fire.

And if you missed it? The next solar eclipse will be in our backyard will be this November 3rd.

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Finals suck, but The Great Gatsby soundtrack doesn’t. In the midst of this stressful time, music is always a great thing to turn to. So instead of flipping the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel for your English final, take a listen to The Great Gatsby album instead.

Our thoughts on this new soundtrack? It’s pretty damn awesome and drenched in pleasurable sounds. Using jazz and instrumentals, each track commingles two different eras, creating unique and modern notes that resonate within the twenties. Did F. Scott Fitzgerald ever imagine this would happen?

Who knows? But it did – and we like it. Check out our breakdown of each track after the jump. [Read more →]

Feeling bored and uninspired by all that reading you put off until now? Or don’t know what to do with yourself other than obnoxiously brag to your worn-out friends about how early you’ve finished finals?

Whichever category you fall under, you should take advantage of the annual TEDxProvidence conference from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the RISD Auditorium this Saturday, May 11.

While Brown held its own TEDx event this past semester, the Providence conference boasts an impressive list of speakers with ties to the area, including Rhode Island state poet and Brown professor Rick Benjamin; Umberto Crenca, the founder of AS220; and Cassandra Lin, an RI high school student whose U.N.-recognized nonprofit works to convert kitchen grease to fuel and has offset over 2 million pounds of carbon emissions. Not that what you’ve been doing with your time isn’t important or anything. [Read more →]

Put on your groutfit and upgrade that drink of yours from a grande to a venti—we’re kicking into high gear. Despite the fact that we feel we’ve been writing and studying for centuries, reading period is winding to a close and we’re moving into finals territory. As deadlines and due dates approach, and, more importantly, as you anticipate donuts and visits from your naked peers, you retreat to your sanctuary where you work diligently and encounter no distractions (ha!)…at all. Tell us where you get on your study grind below.

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YAM hears your weeping in the stacks you asking for a study break! Rock-dwellers and SciLi-ers alike, drop everything and head to room A10 in the basement of the Rock for a quick yoga sesh at 10 p.m. Check here for updates throughout the day. No matter what test you have tomorrow, YAM promises to keep you calm, cool, and collected with more yoga breaks throughout finals period.

See you there! Or at Pizza Nite. Or both.

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