Many students know that the building next to the CRC is the place to go when you’re sick. What students might not know, however, is the extent of all that Stamps has to offer.

Stamps Health Services provides healthcare to students and their spouses or domestic partners. The building itself is named the Joseph Brown Whitehead Building and was dedicated on November 13, 1911.

It has grown from being able to accommodate 27 patients at a time when it first opened to now treating 30,000 patients per year.

The building itself holds Tech Dentistry, Psychiatry, Women’s Health, Pharmacy, Health Promotion, Sports Medicine, Nutrition, Immunization and Allergy, Radiology, Laboratory Tests and three primary care teams.

There are also classrooms, conference rooms and a Medical Records desk.

Most students are familiar with the online appointment portal. This can be used to make an appointment with a primary care physician if you need to see a doctor for a fever, a persistent tender muscle or a sore throat.

Health Promotion has recently introduced LiveHealth Online, which is a kiosk in the Student Center Healthy Space. To use it, you simply have to sign up and you’re connected to currently available doctors who can help you by giving medical advice or a prescription.

The Women’s Health Center provides routine annual exams and STI screening. This is also the place to go if you’re looking for birth control or if you are simply interested in talking about birth control options with a licensed professional. This center also offers consultations on pregnancy, eating disorders, sexual health, and breast health to name a few. You can call to schedule an appointment or update their system with your chosen name or the pronoun you use.

If you’re looking for nutrition information, you can meet for a 50-minute consultation for $5. Their dietitian will help you analyze your current diet and can give advice for losing or gaining weight or eating healthy on the meal plan.

Inside Stamps you can also get your prescription filled at their pharmacy. The prescription can be from a Stamps doctor or from an outside doctor or pharmacy. The pharmacy accepts most insurance plans and provides prescription and over-the-counter medications to students, staff and faculty.

Another service that Stamps Health Services provides is laboratory testing. Between in-house testing and Quest Diagnostics, their reference laboratory partner, Stamps is able to conduct all necessary tests. In-house, Stamps can perform blood and urine tests along with rapid strep tests and mononucleosis tests along with several others.

Stamps also houses a radiology team that offers diagnostic x-rays from their two x-ray rooms. Most x-rays are provided at no charge if your student health fee has been paid. However if you would like a copy of your x-ray, you can request one for a minimal fee.

While Stamps is located on the edge of campus, they can help meet most, if not all, of your healthcare needs.

Next time you need a doctors appointment for any reason from lab tests to nutrition assistance, don’t forget about Stamps, located right down the street.

On a cloudy Thursday morning at Tech, the a concrete canoe was loaded into a Penske rental truck and last minute preparations were frantically made for the Steel Bridge competition.

The Georgia Tech chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) was bustling with excitement  in anticipation of the annual ASCE Carolinas Conference at UNC Charlotte from Thursday, March 30, to Sunday, April 2.

This year, GT ASCE won third-place overall in ASCE’s annual regional conference, competing in several competitions including Steel Bridge, Concrete Canoe, Hydraulics, Transportation and Mead Paper. GT ASCE received first-place in Transportation and Steel Bridge. They will be attending Nationals in Oregon for Steel Bridge in June.

“All eyes were on our Steel Bridge team at conference since this was the first time in two years that we had been able to complete the project and bring a bridge ready to compete,” said Caroline Stanton, third-year CE, upcoming 2017–2018 GT ASCE President. “Once in Charlotte, those of us on the bridge build team practiced construction tirelessly, for a day and a half until the competition. But all our practice paid off as we built our bridge in eighteen minutes and the bridge passed the 2,500 pound load test with flying colors!” Georgia Tech and NC State were the only two schools whose bridges passed all tests without breaking.”

GT ASCE starts the preparation for the Carolinas Conference as early as the beginning of the school year.

“A lot of the first semester is taken up with design work,” said Tyler Bishop, fourth-year CE and current GT ASCE president. “For Concrete Canoe it means testing material over and over, making sure you get the strongest, lightest concrete. Then for Steel Bridge, it’s using a computer program to design the bridge and do a structural analysis on it.”

However, the conference was not met without challenges.

“The morning before we were to leave Atlanta for Conference in North Carolina, the bridge team found an issue with how we planned to construct the bridge in competition, and we were forced to stay behind to try to come up with a solution,” Stanton said. “Luckily we fixed the problem quickly and headed out a few hours later, getting out just before the major I-85 collapse.”

During the Concrete Canoe competition, the teams were met with bad weather on the lake creating unsafe conditions, which was a let down for GT ASCE, who had put in so much time working on the project over the past year.

Not only did Tech perform well in their Civil Engineering feats, but also in their general presence participating in the competition, winning the Sportsmanship award for the chapter.

According to the Steel Bridge regulations, students competing in Steel Bridge must have a hard hat, safety goggles, and boots.

“Our faculty advisor is David Scott, a professor in the School of Civil Engineering,” Bishop said. “Leading up to the competition, one of the students was missing a pair of boots, so Dr. Scott left, went to the store, bought a pair of boots, and came back so that they could have a pair of boots for the competition to build a bridge.”

Along with the Steel Bridge and Sportsmanship award, GT ASCE also won first place in Mead Paper, a research paper written and presented by graduate student, Maya Goldman, who will be continuing to Nationals for the paper.

Within the region, Georgia Tech competed against Clemson, Duke, UNC Charlotte, NC State, Horry Georgetown, NC A&T State University, University of South Carolina, UGA and The Citadel, along with international chapters, including VIT University from India and Khalifa University from Abu Dhabi.

GT ASCE hopes to improve their conference performance through increased preparation, beginning projects earlier and recruiting more people to be a part of each team.

I have taken birth control pills since I was 13 years old. I have also taken several statistics classes. Recently, those two facets of my life collided rather unpleasantly.

I went to Stamps in mid-February to get a new prescription for my current supply of combination birth control pills, which I use and have used for seven years now to control the normal hormonal fluxes which for me lead to migraines. Lots of other things — hot weather, fluorescent lights and stress among them — are triggers for my “migraine-with-aura” episodes, which are the typical crippling pain and nausea of migraines preceded by partial or complete blindness. Sometimes they even happen out of nowhere. However, on birth control I can ensure that I am not out of commission for days at a time at my ovaries’ behest.

Stamps, as it turned out, would not prescribe me the combination pills. The CDC, on a colorful matrix of medications and medical conditions, ranks “migraine-with-aura” coupled with “combination contraceptive pills” as a level four risk on a scale of four. That box on the matrix is bright red. “Unacceptable health risk, method not to be used.” Between the neurological dysfunction that leads to migraine-with-aura and the synthetic estrogen present in combination pills, my risk of having a stroke is elevated beyond the point that the CDC, the WHO and most medical professionals think is justified.

The average woman, according to the most commonly cited data, has a 1.3 in 100,000 chance of having a stroke in any given year. For women with migraine-with-aura, that chance more than quadruples, putting the stroke risk on par with the risk of dying in a motor vehicle accident. Women with that condition who take the combination pill nearly quadruple their risk again, coming out to a 28 in 100,000 chance of having a stroke. Anyone with an understanding of numbers can confirm that a 0.028 percent chance of anything is essentially negligible, but the unnecessary elevation is not worth the potential benefits in the minds of prominent doctors.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, the link between these three things seemed familiar, but seeing and hearing the facts in-person was harrowing. No pediatrician or gynecologist at any point in my life had seen fit to mention this or abide by it, though whether for lack of knowledge or lack of concern it is unclear. As a young woman who is otherwise healthy and does not smoke, my other risk factors for stroke may have been low enough that the increased threat feels negotiable. Even now, in talking to three separate doctors, it has been made clear to me that I can elect to pursue the combination pills if I (ideally in conjunction with a neurologist) feel that other options would drastically decrease my quality of life.

I know a woman who died in a car crash and rationally understand that her death does not mean I am “beating the odds” or overdue for an ischemic episode. But the fleeting thought, especially as I continue taking the pills as an interim measure, continues to find me. In considering other options, I am not convinced that something without supplemental estrogen could provide the control and predictability that I have grown used to. However, I am also not convinced that the level of control is worth it, much less that it will be sustainable as I enter my twenties and thirties.

I am not yet sure how my approach to migraine treatment will change, if at all, though the plan this summer is to consult with more doctors and experiment with alternatives. In any other facet of my life, I would hardly consider a .028 percent chance of something bad happening as noteworthy.

However, maybe as a result of the gravity placed on that number by professionals, and maybe out of the very human desire to not die, this number feels different.

Kyle and I each had a bottle of wine in our hands as we were sitting on the MARTA. I was friends with Mary from high school and Kyle was roommates with Sam. Mary and Sam’s meet cute started off not so cute with Mary drinking too much at a New Year’s Eve Party Kyle had hosted and threw up in Kyle’s bed. Nevertheless smitten by her charm, Sam pursued Mary. Fast forward a year and half later and we have a googley-eyed couple inviting Kyle and me over for dinner at Sam’s Buckhead apartment.

We were sitting around a table eating and drinking when Sam mentioned that Kyle and I should “totally date.” I brushed it off and pretended not to hear, but he didn’t stop with that one comment. He brought it up several times throughout the night, and Kyle and I just rolled our eyes and laughed it away each time he brought it up.

But I don’t know why I laughed because it was never funny to begin with. And while the comments may have been well-intended, I was unable to appreciate them.

I wish I could say that this was an isolated incident of someone intruding on my romantic life, but it wasn’t.

For as long as I can remember, since my school days of running around in a playground for our 30-minute sanctioned recess time, I have always had to partake in a conversation with someone about their deluded perceptions about love and relationships. These conversation went something like this:

“Oh my gosh! You and [some random guy] would make such a cute couple. You should ‘totally date.’” To which I would respond, “Uh no. I ‘totally’ don’t want to.” This conversation would continue to marriage, kids and a happily ever after. And if a fifth grader could follow a line leader, how difficult could it be to follow these steps for eternal happiness?

Obviously these conversations tended to be more juvenile in 5th grade. While they’ve gotten more complex as I’ve gotten older, I don’t know if I can say that people have more insight on this concept because the conversation typically concludes in believing that happiness is contingent upon being in love or at the very least being in a relationship.

The idea isn’t novel, and romantic comedies are not to blame. It’s a mindset that has prevailed for generations. Even my parents and other family friends feed into it. Just the other day, I was with my parents when my mother brought up how I should be thinking of and be open to the idea of marriage. My father chimed in saying the ideal age at which one should get married is in their mid-20’s.

How’d they arrive at this age? The same way most other people do — through reverse planning. In order to have kids by your late 20s – early 30s, one needs to get married, spend a couple years in your honeymoon phase and plan for kids. This takes about three or four years culminating in marriage in your mid-to-late 20s. But why is there this push to follow this pre-determined path when it isn’t what is best for everyone? And more importantly, why isn’t there an emphasis on ensuring you choose to be with the right person as opposed to settling for any person to pursue this path towards a nuclear family?

By placing doubt in someone’s singledom, it instills the need to be wanted rather than focusing on their own individual wants and needs. This results in people giving up parts of themselves. This could mean in a complete change in personality or more commonly, making many small but significant sacrifices in one’s personal life.

I’ve observed it countless times. His friends become her friends, and her friends become forgotten. She treats him poorly, and he becomes tired of the arguments, but they remain together because maintaining the passionless company of each other is preferable to bearing the pain of heartbreak. She is torn about what to do after college because he’s moving away and the distance will strain their relationship. She stays with him because she’s afraid of being lonely even though he tends to be selfish.

And whenever I ask these friends why they are still with their partners, their response tends to be the same — the bad times are really bad, but the good times are really good.

I’m no life guru, but holding on to the memories of the good ol’ times doesn’t sound healthy. I am aware that sacrifices are necessary to sustain a healthy relationship and that the going can get tough, but being on an emotional roller coaster sounds exhausting.

I believe that love is boundless and that people can and should love as many people as they can. But just because you love someone, does not necessarily mean that you are meant to be together. That’s falsely assuming that love equates to happiness. The confounding variable to finding happiness in love is compatibility.

Determining compatibility is one of those underrated qualifications that people seem to brush off. I think it’s because the answer isn’t always what the heart wants in the moment. But it is a fundamental aspect to having a lasting and harmonious relationship. It’s why arranged marriages are believed to result in being together longer. However, they seem to lack the passion that love marriages thrive on. Which is why combining the two characteristics seems like the winning combination.

But finding this combination in a partner takes time. It’s frustrating when those around you seem to think that taking more time to find the right person to be with is the wrong move. Not everyone’s story is going to start off like a romantic comedy, but everyone’s story can end with a happily ever after, if we all just allow each other to go at our own pace in our own direction.

Small-business coffee shop owners can oversee the coffee process from start to finish: visiting the farms, overseeing the roasteries, grinding and brewing the coffee and placing it in the hands of a customer. In doing so, small businesses ensure sustainable and ethical sourcing and loyal clientele. On the contrary, large corporations don’t prioritize coffee sourcing, which is key for long-term sustainability.

Local coffee shop owners seek out and build relationships with individual, family-owned coffee farms. They become loyal customers and allow farmers to grow their own businesses. Because owners trade with farmers they know personally, they pay them well enough to grow and process coffee sustainably — with ethical practices, natural fertilizers and shaded areas. Consequently, growing coffee in shaded areas ensures conservation of the ecosystem that surrounds coffee farms. Large corporations, like Starbucks, only meet the bare minimum ethical and environmental requirements of the industry.

BRASH Coffee maintains relationships with coffee farmers from El Salvador and Honduras. On its online store, BRASH posts short descriptions of their coffee farmers. Octane sources its beans from Central and South America and Africa and also posts descriptions of their farmers. Revelator rotates its sources seasonally and currently sources from South America and Africa. These coffee shops offer single-origin coffee beans, each batch from just one region or country.

Starbucks sources beans from Central America and Africa, but many of its coffees are multi-origin, or “blends,” which are not as uniquely flavored. Starbucks also owns and operates a coffee farm in Costa Rica for R&D, which prevents the farmers from maintaining their farms to suit their needs best.

In regards to customer service, in local shops, we’re reminded that baristas are people too. Yesterday, a Revelator barista greeted me immediately, and we talked for thirty minutes. How often can we stop to chat with Starbucks baristas? We can’t, because the line is so long that the barista takes your order, asks for your name and then asks how you are paying. Before your transaction is even completed, they move on to the next person.

Local coffee shops are also typically more aesthetically pleasing and foster a more pleasant atmosphere than corporate-chain coffee shops. While Starbucks generates more traffic, it is overcrowded and struggles to keep up with incoming orders. You’ll never wait more than five minutes for your drink at a small coffee shop, and each shop has its own unique environment.

Walk up to BRASH Coffee’s shipping container shop and find succulents lining the wall behind the espresso machine. Or walk into Octane at Grant Park and find movie quotes printed on the large pane windows. You’ll sit next to a fashion photographer editing photos or across from a software developer working on a startup venture. Local coffee shops are a hub for creatives, entrepreneurs, students and young professionals, and they cultivate a place perfect for being productive or meeting someone new.

Local coffee shops are also designed for people to stay at until they have finished their coffee — the baristas serve your coffee in glasses or mugs unless you specifically ask for your
coffee to-go. This significantly reduces the waste produced by the consumer-end of the
coffee industry, compared to Starbucks’ disposable cups.

In terms of the coffee itself, small coffee shops specialize in  highlighting the actual notes, or flavors, of the coffee. In the roasting process, single-origin beans allow the roasters to have more control over the notes based on the region where the beans come from. The benefit of Starbucks blends is that they offer a well-rounded flavor and pair better with cream, syrups and sweeteners. This “benefit,” however, is insignificant because good coffee does not need additional sweeteners.

Additionally, Starbucks only offers a drip coffee for all of their roasts. Other coffee shops provide many other methods for brewing coffee, including pour-over methods, such as Chemex, V60, Kalita Wave, and press methods, such as French press and Aeropress. You can get a fuller, more flavorful cup of coffee by brewing the coffee via these handheld methods than through a machine. And when local coffee shops do use machines, it is to make smooth, creamy espresso that will make for beautiful, hand-crafted espresso art. If nothing else, support local coffee shops in return for the pretty Instagram photo you can post of your latte.

So why pick small-business coffee shops? You get better coffee, better customer service, and a better environment. Your role as a consumer of ethically sourced coffee benefits the environment, farmers, and local businesses. And if none of these reasons are enough to convince you to support local shops, think of all the times that Starbucks baristas have misspelled your name on cups. That will never happen at a small-business coffee shop.

In the fall of 2015, President G.P.  “Bud” Peterson put in motion two efforts to address diversity issues on Tech’s campus. The first was the creation of a Black Student Experience (BSE) Task Force to examine issues facing the black community at Tech, and to suggest solutions to make campus welcoming, inclusive and supportive.

Then, President Peterson hosted a series of “listening sessions” to address inclusivity and gender equity issues with a focus on evaluating biases in employment practices and increasing visibility of achievements by women. The BSE Task Force and the gender equity listening sessions each resulted in 11 initiatives to move towards their goals. President Peterson accepted all 22.

Last week, committees headed by faculty and students representing multiple executive offices at Tech announced the first updates on implementing these policies.

The BSE implementation committee broke down suggestions into four categories: programs, trainings, physical spaces and planning and assessments. Among the most notable achievements are the expansion of OMED’s Challenge program enrollment from 75 to 105, the creation of a reporting system for students and faculty to anonymously submit experiences they have with discrimination and the introduction of diversity education programs to be included in Tech’s orientation process.

The committee also created a series of training programs for general students and Greek members and developed the Multicultural Center. The task force additionally created a series of initiatives to showcase accomplishments by faculty and students.

The gender equity implementation committee identified four areas of focus for improvement: hiring, promotion and tenure; professional and leadership development; leadership appointments; and recognition and increased visibility.

In hiring, promotion and tenure, the committee created programs centered on introspectiveness; implicit bias testing and guidelines for hiring and promotion were offered and created for administrators, respectively.

Additionally, Tech conducted salary equity studies for faculty and staff, created multiple leadership programs for tenured faculty and women staff leaders and, similar to the BSE policies, introduced programs to promote successes by women at Tech and events relating to gender equity.

The committee is also working on developing the same discrimination reporting system as the BSE committee, which will be available as a Tech portal when complete.

This year’s Student Government Association (SGA) elections for undergraduate and graduate executive positions have ended, with the president- and vice president-elects now beginning their transition periods.

Sujay Peramanu and Richard Wang will be next year’s undergraduate student body president and executive vice president, officially entering office on the first day of finals.

“I’m just extremely excited because SGA has given so much to me and I love giving back to the organization,” Wang said after results were announced on March 30.

“I’m ecstatic. This one month has been an amazing experience thanks to Leanne, Apollo, Lizzie and Connor. They were amazing competitors,” Peramanu said. “I’m just excited to get this year started. All of those students who voted for us, who believed in us, who supported us, we thank you so much. This is an incredible opportunity for us to really give back to a community that’s given us so much.”

The runoff election between Peramanu/Wang and Lizzie Lisenby/Connor Brogan ended in the winners taking 51 percent of the student vote. 1529 students voted for Peramanu/Wang versus 1431 for Lisenby/Brogan, resulting in a net 2,960 votes. In the initial race, 3,258 ballots were casted   with 1232 for Peramanu/Wang, 1,040 for Lisenby/Brogan and 985 for Leanne Francis/Apollo Liu; last year, turnout for the runoff election dropped off similarly, with 2,707 voting in the runoff versus 3,296 in the initial race.

Peramanu and Wang ran on a platform addressing numerous facets of the student experience, including community engagement, sustainability, academic affairs, diversity and wellness.

There were no serious elections code violations or sanctions placed on candidates during the runoff; reports of campaigning in the computer clusters, which could potentially violate the elections code if activity took place within 50 feet of the computers, were filed but unpublished.

Graduate SGA elections ended on March 31. For the contested position of Graduate SGA president, Skanda Prasad won with 129 votes to Muhammad Fahad Razzaq’s 112. Vineet Ravi Tiruvadi ran uncontested for the position of vice president and ended with 162 votes. No violations were reported.

Prasad, a third-year Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, ran on a three-pronged “vision” of advocacy on behalf of graduate students, resource improvements and collaboration with undergraduate SGA and departmental student organizations. He has served as a graduate student senator since Jan. 2015 and as vice president of Graduate Life since Sept. 2016.

Tiruvadi is a fourth-year MD/Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering in the joint program between Tech and Emory. He has served as a graduate student senator at Tech since Aug. 2016, and as an Emory University senator since Aug. 2015.

His platform aimed to ensure that graduate students are engaged, especially those whom “political uncertainties target,” and that services such as financial help, health care and academic assistance are readily available.

Students attending the annual Sting Break event on March 30 were briefly evacuated from Tech Square during what many thought was an active shooter incident.

According to a retroactive statement issued by GTPD, the police received a report of an armed person near the Georgia Tech Hotel at 8:13 p.m. during Sting Break. GTPD promptly detained the person and determined that he was not armed but just carrying a cell phone in “a manner that led others to believe it was a weapon.”

At roughly the same time, students began bolting out of the area, with shouts of “armed shooter” and “gun” travelling through the crowd. The area was quickly pedestrian-free, though it took more time to evacuate those who were on and in line for rides.

Word of the incident spread through social media, with reports ranging from an armed person being arrested to shots having been fired and bomb threats being made. Even as people rushed from Tech Square, it was unclear to many what was actually happening.

“I’m about to give my ticket to a vendor because I had gotten there a few minutes before all of this started, but I see people sprinting towards me and then I see two GTPD officers, who are making people run away and screaming at everyone to move towards campus,” said Urvi Narang, fifth-year EE. “I start running away and lose my friends, and then while I’m running, I hear people screaming ‘active shooter, active shooter!’ So I start running even faster and these scary thoughts ran through my mind.”

“I ran all the way to Van Leer and I guess by then everything had been resolved and the suspect had been [apprehended], but me and my friends had been too busy running for our lives to even look back to see the state of Sting Break,” Narang said. “I read [later] that Sting Break was back on but that they were checking cars for bombs or something. I don’t know if any of that was true but it was unnerving that anyone would think of going back there.”

The first official Institute comments were issued through GTPD’s Twitter account at 9:30 p.m., with a tweet indicating that reports of an armed person were unfounded but that a person of interest was in custody; a clarification tweeted at 10:37 p.m. stated that the person of interest was detained until video evidence confirmed that he was not armed.

Students on social media voiced concerns regarding the lack of a Georgia Tech Emergency Notification System (GTENS) alert, given the degree of misinformation and confusion surrounding the situation.

“They probably should have used it to tell everyone that there was no danger since it became such a widespread rumor,” said /u/EForReal12 in a Reddit thread on the subject.

“We know now that there was no shooter, but there was a 10–20 minute lag (at least) between when masses of people were shooed out of Tech Square and when an official GTPD source publicly confirmed anything about the situation,” said /u/tictacker in the
same thread.

Several others in the thread, however, agreed that a GTENS alert would not have been required in this particular situation. GTPD, in its retroactive statement posted on social media, indicated that the lack of an armed person — and thus a present danger to campus — as well as the speed with which the incident was resolved rendered a GTENS alert unnecessary.

SCPC had worked with GTPD prior to the event to ensure that an emergency plan was in place.

“During the event, there were at least eight GTPD officers there for protection and to be there for emergency situations,” said Katie Hampton, third-year BA and Festivals Chair for SCPC. “As soon as GTPD contained the situation,  we waited for them to give the all clear for us to allow people back in, so as soon as GTPD told us we could let people back in we did. We waited to post on social media until GTPD posted their official post, as only GTPD actually knew what had happened.”

“We also had the evacuation plan for if severe weather were to occur, and we enacted that at the end of Sting Break,” Hampton said.

GTPD was unable to be reached for comment.

On April 22nd, thousands of citizens across Atlanta are scheduled to partake in a 2.2 mile march around Downtown Atlanta to spread knowledge and awareness about science and its advancements to people across the city. This movement was inspired by the Women’s March that took place in November of last year after the presidential election. The main reason for this march is to send a message to Trump’s administration about the importance of science and how facts should not be neglected in important cases that have the potential to impact everyone around the world.

This is one of the biggest grassroots demonstrations for science in American history, and what makes this even more shocking is that a Republican governor is endorsing a march that is aimed towards gaining the attention of a Republican president. It is true that the GOP has not been in the good graces of the public over the last few months, but because of the disapproval of the public along with other important factors, members of the GOP have divided even more in perspectives on what is better for the future of the country. According to their website, the March for Science is aiming to make science less of a partisan issue between politicians and more of a united front that we can all stand behind to further progress in our society.

So why is exactly is it a big deal that Governor Deal has endorsed the March to happen in Atlanta? The reason is that for several decades, there has been a certain sense of party loyalty among both Democrats and Republicans, and usually the ideas proposed by one member of a party should be endorsed by several other members of the party out of loyalty. This mentality has shifted drastically in the past 12 months because more Republicans have strongly disagreed with the goals of President Trump’s administration than any other Republican president in American history. For a governor in a solid red state to endorse a march that is aiming to send a message to the President of his own party speaks volumes on how much Governor Deal and other Republicans feel about the direction that the country is headed in.

The March for Science is designed to be a peaceful protest and does not condone acts of nonviolence in any manner. Their rallies and protests are simply designed to spread their opinions on the importance of science and technology and how it impacts the lives of everyone across the globe. For the march to happen on Earth Day is particularly symbolic because that is the one day of the year that is solely designated for spreading awareness of environmental concerns and dangers that could result if certain resources aren’t conserved or used sparingly. Earth Day has been more focused on protecting the environment and saving natural resources (water, electricity, etc.), but this is the first time where Americans are taking the narrow focus of just environmental concerns and looking at the broad picture of all science disciplines and how they all play important roles in our world today.

As students of Georgia Tech, we can all come to a general consensus that science does not dictate our state of being in the present, but can also be detrimental to what can happen in future generations as well. With Congress’ plans to terminate the Environmental Protection Agency in 2018, it is important now more than ever to voice the concerns that we, as STEM students, can foresee if there is no proper regulation on proper conservation of resources. The March of Science is definitely a way to send a message to Washington about a particular issue, but it is also a way for us to unite and show that science isn’t just important to a particular group of people, but it should be essential to everyone on the planet as well. There’s only one planet Earth; we can either save it or watch it crumble before our eyes.