Most, if not all, of the classes incoming freshmen take are mandatory, assigned without any student input based on your majors. While this sucks for a few terms, once all of the general education credits are out of the way, you’ll have a ton of freedom. What do you plan to do?

The pragmatic answer, the one that requires no thought, is to take every class that I need to graduate. But many majors require prerequisites. This means you’ll probably end up taking electives that you have no interest in just to fill up your schedule. Since you’ll be taking extra electives anyway, why not get yourself a minor? And not just any type of minor — a language minor.

A language minor is ideal because there are many opportunities associated with it, and odds are, you already had to take some sort of language course in high school. It is simple to just continue what you have learned and turn it into an actual minor that has value in the working world. The placement tests can be incredibly hard, but the tradeoff is that about a 30 percent will allow you to skip the entire first level. If you are reasonably fluent, you can begin taking the courses that count toward your minor immediately.

As a resume builder, language skills are unparalleled. Potential employers look to see what sets you apart from the dozens of applications that land on their desk and knowing another language is just uncommon enough to stick. If nothing else, it is a talking point that you can use to branch out to other areas and better gauge the mood of the room. Being fluent in another language, especially one that you had to dedicate quite a bit of time learning, means that you are naturally more fluent in your first language. This eloquence translates to new connections and greater care when choosing your words, something that employers realize.

Your sphere of influence expands as well. Suddenly, you do not have to limit yourself to this country and can reach out to go international. If your field has important ties to a certain area, learning that language will give you a leg up on your competition. An engineering major would benefit from learning some of the German language because they could then take a position available in Germany. Skilled international workers are always in demand. Studying abroad is another potential option and certain classes will allow you to secure the placement and fit in easily.

Involvement in college is key, everyone will tell you that, but your involvement should not be as random as it undoubtedly was in high school. Now that you’ve made it to college, all of your extracurriculars should be in areas that interest you, so that they can ultimately allow you to flourish. Languages give you the opportunity to transcend borders with your words and ideas. I highly recommend you pick one up.

“Color is the first thing people see,” parrots every advertising and business presenter whose lectures I ever had the pleasure of sitting through.

They invariably point to McDonald’s and try to attribute color scheme to their success. They claim the soothing yellow and the bold red complement each other so well that the brand was bound to leave its competitors in the dust and rise to the international stage. Giving so much weight to one side of such a complex topic always rings false for me, but the idea that colors could have some influence was intriguing.

It made me think: Why are some colors considered masculine or rugged while others feel more feminine or transient? Where do we draw these associations and why do we keep them?

It probably begins with associations from a young age. Brown has a certain ruggedness, bringing to mind hard-packed earth and old leather. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that the dirt and leather are generally brown so brown must be rugged by association. If Clint Eastwood mosied down the main street of a town to get into a gunfight wearing a pink vest, would he bring the same gravitas to the situation? Looking at it this way, it could be that color schemes work only as far as we, the consumers, think that they are appropriate.

When people remark that someone looks good in a certain color, is it because the color matches a physical trait like their eyes or hair or is it that it seems appropriate to their personality? The key to sartorial success could just be rectifying all of yourself and properly reflecting it in your attire. I guess that means that while beauty is skin deep, fashion may not be so shallow.

What is seen as proper has about as much weight. You don’t wear white to a wedding when you are a guest, just as much as you don’t wear it to a funeral.

When designing posters or other visual pieces, do some colors have more weight than others? A garish display of bright colors on a scientifically oriented poster could be enough to dispel any interest. Maybe if this article was printed in a deep navy blue, you would find it deeper and more meaningful. The black and white newspaper style could be even more trustworthy on its own because it has always been regarded as a good source of the news so it therefore always will be. A bright color could be eye catching for a moment, but lack that clarity and sense of purpose after the initial view.

Some people hold that wearing a certain color tie to an interview will guarantee a job offer. They think that if the interviewer sees the interviewee in a blue tie, they are receiving an underlying message that they are a calm individual and deserve to be hired. It is not hard to see how minor a factor this is when deciding on potential candidates. Perhaps it is all in the person’s head. They believe they are going to be hired so they have the confidence to brand themselves as a necessary asset. Perhaps it does give the interviewer a mental nudge, just enough to get them across the finish line.

Perhaps this article seems like mere conjecture. It is to a certain degree, but it will hopefully force you to look at the world a little differently and keep your eyes wide open as you dress for that interview. Next time you look at childrens’ toys or the paint that will be your world for the next several years, take a moment to truly look at it, and wonder why out of all the colors the artist picked those ones.

Every story starts with a journey of some sort. Whether it be mental or physical, there is some development, some movement, that forces one to change either their position or their mindset.

Well, my story has ties to SEPTA so you can probably imagine that this excursion was about as dynamic as the night life in Kansas.

I was travelling with my roommate who was new to the area and had never experienced the wonder that is Philadelphia public transportation. By the time we’d dragged our bags up the broken escalator (or stairs as they could be quaintly nicknamed) we were informed that there was an express train going to the exact same area that would get us there six minutes faster. We decided that six minutes was not nearly enough time to justify another two flights of “stairs,” so we remained.

For those of you who are blissfully unaware, SEPTA has found faults in all of their newer cars and had to decommission them  — forced to replace them with the older, more “experienced” model. They naturally had less of these cars because they were outdated and seemed only useful for sitting in junkyards by the hundreds. The fewer numbers meant that the schedules were adjusted so that the trains ran half as often, were twice as crowded and felt four times as frustrating.

The journey started innocuously enough, the train was delayed by its traditional five minutes before we even managed to board the pinnacle of 1900s travel. We managed to get seats right by the door that were facing each other so we could put our bags up and not face backwards while the train moved and were immediately pleased to learn that at every stop the door would swing open just inches from our faces.

The train stayed at the station for about five minutes before moving off at a speed that will heretofore be known as reluctant shuffling. Almost immediately, before even getting to Suburban Station, the train slowed to a stop, dragging its carcass along the tracks until it slowed by pure exhaustion. For 15 minutes we waited for a sign from the higher powers of SEPTA that there was some reason for the delay, that they had everything in hand and knew what they were doing — but to no avail. Finally, the ancient speakers crackled to life to announce that the air conditioning in the third car did not work and that they were attempting to fix the issue. Generally when there is a problem with something on the cars that is not exactly life threatening (air conditioning) they simply move people around, pull the car after the ride is over and fix the issue. In this instance, they simply proceeded to Suburban Station and let their engineers get on (who by the way managed to not only be completely unsuccessful in their attempts at alleviating the situation, but also managed to delay us by another ten minutes).

Every single stop was the same story, five minutes of nothing followed by a half-hearted apology and a brief glimpse into the motion that the train could achieve when in its prime: the early ’40s. By the time we pulled into the Lansdale train station, my roommate looked at me with desperate, almost heartbroken eyes, “Why in the world do you do this to yourself every other week?”

I looked into his eyes and mirrored his hopelessness, but didn’t answer. I  just told him that we had two stops left.

Flickr: MsSaraKelly

As Drexel once again makes a concerted effort to expand pieces of the campus, pushing ever northward (and westward), it is useful to not only look at the direct causes of such undertakings like Summit, but also analyse the indirect impact on the surrounding area. The keyword to this new form of urban sprawl is, of course, gentrification, a word that inspires many different feelings in many different people. For some it is a beacon of light that they will soon be able to live safely and peacefully in a neighborhood where they are but a few blocks from all of the trendy stores. For others though, the long-time residents of this historic area, the new buildings and interest herald a more foreboding future.

Those that have kept faithful to this city for countless years despite economic turmoil and hardship see this new wave of gentrification as a driving force in the city; one that seems intent to drive them out. This population, which is majorly African American, sees the neighborhoods devolving into new condos that go to the highest bidder, not the traditional type of residents that have lived there for years. Historical areas that have existed as a melting pot for culture and heritage for so long seem to be overpowered by a concentration of wealthy, upper class individuals that are more content to view themselves as above the people who have poured their souls into the very stones over which others so imperiously tread. The city of brotherly love seems to be aptly named as all the newcomers come from the same family of people. It is impossible not to notice trends and for some, it is impossible not to resent them.

On the flip side, some of the innovations have benefitted everyone as more businesses move in to cater to the new crowd, bringing jobs and money back into the city. For too long the city has suffered from decreases in tax revenue, plunging it into a cycle of cutbacks in areas that are vital to long term sustainability. Hopefully with the rise in population and revenue, Philadelphia can give support to education, something that has been underfunded in past years. The infrastructure will have to be developed as the increased masses push it to the breaking point. More people will demand a better environment with a voice that has historically had an easier time being heard than many of the others that have cried for the same change.

Drexel has definitely participated in some gentrification and has been a leader in some areas. It seems that no matter the time period, Drexel is putting up a new building or renovating an old one to keep with the times. Businesses move in from all over to sit in the shadow of Summit and do a brisk trade to all the students and people flowing through the area. At the same time, housing programs for faculty and dependents push back the boundaries of the old communities, forcing the ingrained culture of the areas to be whittled away. Drexel should look to blend with the community and cultural identity, not destroy it in an attempt to reign supreme.

Culture is beautifully fluid. The introduction of new people should be welcomed with open arms as new worlds collide and something wonderful is formed. The attitudes of both parties should reflect an understanding and respect rather than remain aloof. It does not matter whether or not you have been there years or if they are just now moving to an established neighborhood, both should understand that the here and now is the most important and that they are in this together. Everyone is part of the same community, it would do them some good to realize it.

Flickr: Tom Ipri (Licensed under Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic)

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” seems to be the motto of Drexel University, although, to be honest, the second half of that statement seems increasingly pronounced when one gets to know the campus. On the surface, everything looks functional and beautiful; Millennium is a soaring structure of beauty that is reserved for the incoming, idyllic freshmen and the Summit is an affirmation of Drexel’s ability to put up buildings in brief windows of time.

When I first decided to come to Drexel, I knew that the biggest decision I made would be which dorm I chose to live in. It would be my home for the next three terms, where I ate, slept and worked. Many memories would be created there and for every mark that was left on the walls, a mark would be left on me. The experience would define my time at Drexel and I wanted the best that I could get. Millennium Hall was the obvious choice, but it filled up so quickly that I had no hope of possibly getting in. I chose Towers Hall instead just because I figured the oldest building on campus would have the smallest amount of kinks to work out.

After a brief adjustment period, Towers was fantastic. The people on the floor were amazing and the dorm itself had a lot of space to capitalize on. The lounge furniture was covered in every sort of stain you could imagine and some that you refused to acknowledge and the walls bulged in odd places. The heater smelled like burning people when it turned on and was only topped by a microwave that spit out noise and radiation in equal amounts.  The carpet made shoes a necessity and the shower curtains were not supposed to be black. Yet, despite all these oddities, Towers was home to me. The kitchen was big and functional and you learned to live with the broken things. It was an old building, after all, and it was thus entitled to the occasional broken pipe or chair.

When I heard that I would be moving to Millennium over the summer because of the housing arrangements for the STAR Scholars Program, you could imagine my excitement. A building that was built in this century? Yes please. Walking into Millennium for the first time was surreal, but not for the reason I had imagined. Everything was concrete, the walls felt like they were taken directly from the pages of a dystopian horror novel where everyone is locked in an underground vault together. It certainly felt that way because, surprise, every door locks behind you so good luck if you forgot your key while taking a shower. The front desk, during the summer, apparently cannot give you a spare without first calling the official person who informs you that it will be 20-30 minutes before they can be bothered to come over. The showers themselves are nothing to brag about as both the water temperature and pressure seem to be a lot lower than desired. Lukewarm has never had a positive connotation until you come here and have to beg for the faintest wisp of warmth.

The couches are actually worse than those at Towers, and  how they managed that, I haven’t the slightest. The chairs are, I wish I was kidding, about $330 each and have the distinct advantage of being made of cold metal so they have a beautifully vocal interaction with the tile floors. It makes it difficult to get along with your neighbors when they are up until 2:30 a.m. because at that point, so are you. Only the left side of the stovetop works so the 30 people on the floor attempting to cook at the same time have to share the two burners that take an eternity to turn on.

For a school of engineers, many of the buildings here seem to lack the forethought and planning that goes hand-in-hand with any sort of engineering. From the categories of form and function, Millennium seems to fall into neither. It is not expected that the school builds a palace to appease their incoming hopefuls, but a few common amenities would be nice. Perhaps, when they tear down this monument to man’s arrogance they can put up a building that will include some degree of insight into the possible problems. Until that day though, I guess we will just have to live with it.

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Wikipedia: Ben Schumin

Though swear words appear to be the most malicious insults, they no longer encompass much meaning since they are overused. Words that are typically deemed as less hurtful can hurt the most if they uncover an apparent insecurity.

Frustration and profanity go hand-in-hand. Swearing to vent is quite common; so common that swear words almost seem to lose their power. Because they are wildly overused, these words have also lost some of their meaning and gravity. Yet, when someone that normally chooses to avoid this slanderous vocabulary resorts to a curse word, it becomes more powerful. Simply put, the less curse words are used, the more meaning they have. If your grandmother drops the f-bomb at a Thanksgiving dinner, it would hold a hell of a lot more meaning than if your “thug” brother casually swears while he sits on the couch doing nothing particularly important with his life. When that previously untouched word is uttered for the first time, it is full of untapped potential and everyone is put slightly off their stride.

This umbrella of redundancy covers other, nontraditional profanity that are free to remain without a censor, but somehow manage to strike deeper than any other word can hope to. Words like “coward” strike a chord deep inside and are hurtful when uttered because there is an implication that there is a true grudge; one that is true enough for one to reach deep and find something so nastily uncommon. Being called a liar can hurt depending on who utters it, but being called a disgrace to the society you belong to or told you are absolutely worthless feels more like an attack on character. The slur “harlot” borders the line of curse word territory, yet that may be because such a word is dedicated to only the most dire circumstances. Many people would not even reach the level of insult required to dredge up such a vehement offense. The amount of hate and vitriol in these words makes them what they are. When used in conjunction with tone, these words evoke a deeper sense of pain, much stronger than what they originally intended to. A voice laced with scorn and layered with disgust drives home a point just as powerfully as word choice.

Of all the words that are in any way debilitating in nature, the ones that contain a ring of truth are the worst. Some words may seem worse to me than they do to you simply because on some deep, dark and secret level, I am terrified that they are true. The words prey on our insecurities and gently prick our secret fears until our very character is questioned. Not many wish to be called “average” when it comes to something that they are deeply passionate or secretly vain about. We fear that we truly are worthless and that our lives will not matter in the grand scheme of things. An unkind word underscored with the truth makes us question our abilities and is far worse than any profane language we may encounter.

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Drexel.edu

I’m not sure where the idea of taking someone hostage to coerce others to take action and meet the demands set forth first came from, but Drexel’s latest iteration of fundraising could not have felt more like being held over a barrel. I am, of course, speaking of Drexel 24, Drexel’s Day of Giving, which, before you get excited or proud, did not mean that the University was going to give back to its students in any way. In a bold, yet not entirely unexpected move, Drexel had asked for donations from alumni, faculty … and students? Yes, Drexel had asked students, already paying their life’s savings and more into getting an education, to contribute just a ‘little’ bit more from their pockets.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand the idea behind begging alumni for money; every university does it to some degree, but most at least have the decency to wait until their student loans are paid off. I suppose it is hard for Drexel to wait that long; 50 years takes quite a bit of patience. The students cannot handle yet another attempt to gouge out what little reserves that have managed to stay untapped all this time. Perhaps the University would like to beg the homeless for their last few pennies while they are at it, at least the homeless can claim to actually have a net positive. The emails made it out to be an inspiring thing, built around the greater good; to make history in the process of saving something that is held truly dear. Those emails failed to mention exactly what the donation was even for, an omission that does not speak well for a fundraising program. It seems that the idea of giving was pushed much more than the purpose and while noble in its simplicity, that is also the way the least effective charities in the world operate. I do get where the name comes from, this Drexel 24, because even Jack Bauer would be proud of the brutal, results-driven tactics.

Asking the professors for the same donation places a similar burden on them as they are now not only dedicating their time and energy into actually caring for the intellectual well-being of the future, but also give a portion of their hard-earned paychecks. This deplorable request is the equivalent of asking the professors if they would like to have their wages garnished or at least decide to work for free for a little while. The influx of emails had most feeling a bit beleaguered, but Drexel was secure in the knowledge that none would dare go on record complain of the unjust burden on themselves and their families. I am hesitant to cry fascism, but I call them how I see them.

I cannot even imagine who in their right mind would pitch an idea so forward in its nature, but they clearly did not think of the impact it would have on the students here, just the impact it would have on their bottom line. The people in charge seem to be thinking more of their wallets than preserving the tradition of learning that was the core of what this school was founded on. Perhaps one day, I will be able to give back to the school that took the time and expended the energy to build me into the person I am will become, but for now, I have nothing left to give.

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Wikimedia: Messedrocker

With this week’s Pennsylvania primaries bringing tensions over the looming political future to an all-time high, it is useful to take a step back to understand what exactly is going on behind the scenes when casting your vote. The topic of fraudulent elections is always hotly contested by the losing party, citing miscounts and rigged voting machines, but few take up the cry of gerrymandering. No, that is not in fact, a made-up word, but the biggest threat to our political system today. Gerrymandering entails the redrawing of the district boundaries by the incumbent party to resection the voters into a certain arrangement. This seemingly harmless expression of power has a darker side that goes a long way to keeping states solidly in either the red or blue, never in between, and never locked in a true power struggle that would forge a truly great reigning body.

The way that the electoral college works and why this is such an issue is that each of these districts vote and if the majority comes up republican, the entire state’s electoral college delegates go to the republican candidate. The party only needs the majority in this winner-takes-all system so winning just twenty-eight districts in the state of California guarantees the fifty-five delegates, despite the fact that twenty-seven districts are at odds with this decision. A deviously clever individual could see this and redraw the borders so that a couple of areas just happen to encompass the majority of the democrats in a state, while most of the districts are safely in republican hands. It does not even matter that 60 percent of the state voted for the Democratic Party, the republicans still get the entire state under the current system.

There are, of course, some rules that have to be followed when redrawing the lines, but these rules are essentially guidelines to necessitate the usage of the truly conniving mind of a politician. Each district must be continuous in some way and each must have roughly the same population to give the elections some gossamer threads of civility. At some points, to get around this rule, voting areas are connected by a single street to pack in as many people from the opposing party into one area. The ruling party will sacrifice one battle to win the ensuing war. All this time we tell people to vote and that their votes matter while the very system they vote for conspires against them to choke out the very life of democracy. I am not calling out any one party here. Both participate in this gerrymandering to rousing success. I guess what I am saying is that there is no honor among thieves, and I think stealing the election is sufficient to earn that moniker.

As far as solutions go, I find that there are two promising enough to warrant discussion. One would be to follow in the footsteps of Maine and Nebraska and allot delegates based on the amount of districts won, splitting them if necessary. This means that if three districts are won by republicans in Nebraska and two are won by democrats, the delegates are split so that three go to the Republican Party and two to the Democratic Party. Instead of all five going to the Republican Party like all the other forty-eight states where the electoral college delegates are tiled out. This would, however, not solve the gerrymandering issue. It would only mitigate the effects as the numbers can only be stretched so far.

Another idea would be to allow computers to draw each of the boundaries fairly and evenly distributing the different parties. Based off of the most recent census, a computer can make each district depend on every single vote to win giving every individual the power to change the course of the election. The parties have equal opportunity to win the region and, by extension, the state.

After it is all said and done though, the only way to change everything is to vote to ensure that your party is in power when it comes time to redistrict. Most people do not care about the legitimacy of the elections so long as their party comes out on top. Most will place victory over fairness and that, not gerrymandering, is the biggest political challenge that America faces as a country.

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