When Uber was founded in 2009, its prospects for global recognition looked slim. It was a high-end cab service — on-demand black car rides for the Bay Area’s more ostentatious residents. In the ensuing years, however, as the company grew, it became not merely an innovative transportation technology, ...
Alcohol use and abuse is a noted problem for undergraduate students, but in my experience, it becomes an accepted and expected part of the culture in grad school. In grad school, alcohol is worryingly intertwined with academic activities in a way that can be exclusive and damaging. We should re-evaluate ...
In high school, I played three sports: cross country, swimming and track. Being a multi-sport athlete could be tough; at the beginning of each season, I would struggle to keep up with my teammates who trained year-round. I almost certainly would have been a faster swimmer or runner if I had chosen to ...
I have this weird ritual at the end of every year. Instead of packing clothes for home as many folks do, I fill my suitcase with books and course packets, napkins and brochures, letters received and written — piles of printed material that I collected over the academic year. There’s the Orgo midterm ...
On Earth Day this year, my friends and I stood on the Main Green for a few hours and asked passersby to guess the age of our planet. Our team of undergrad geology students had laid out a timeline of Earth’s history that spanned the Green: The formation of Earth was under Faunce Arch, the oxygenation ...
When Mayor Pete Buttigieg announced his presidential candidacy, few knew where to turn for in-depth analysis of his political philosophy or personal beliefs. The New York Times struck gold when the editors dusted off the opinions columns Buttigieg had written 16 years prior for the Harvard Crimson. According ...
I have spent this semester counting my lasts — granola bowls, John Street basement concerts, all-nighters in the Rock. At each occasion of arithmetical gymnastics, one question inevitably arose: Would I do it all again the same way? Each time, I would think back to a memory from my senior year of ...
Part of graduating is accepting unpredictability. Our graduating class will be forced to reckon with an emerging source of uncertainty: our changing climate and subsequent impacts upon societies, populations and individuals. The existence of climate change has been known for decades, but specific effects ...
Gertrude Stein has watched over me for the past four years. Or more specifically, her words, etched into the English department building at 70 Brown St., have: “And then there is using everything.” They’ve watched me run to Smith-Buonanno Hall on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Shabbat dinners on Fridays. ...
I joined The Brown Daily Herald because I wanted to be Rory Gilmore. It was as simple as that. I was a small-town-girl from Southern California, and I knew no one who had navigated the brick-patterned halls of the Ivy League beside my dear friend Rory. I thought there would be an interview. My school ...
You’re supposed to learn all sorts of things in college: how to read more critically, solve for a p-value, live on your own, manage your time efficiently or maybe even shotgun a beer. Brown tries to prepare its students to “discharge the offices of life with usefulness and reputation.” Its liberal ...
A seatbelt soaked by tears; a bright yellow Penske truck packed full of things; two days of driving into the heart of the Midwest from the bayous of Louisiana. These are my memories of moving away from the first place I called home. Since then, I’ve gotten used to the motions of cramming everything ...
In 2015, New Jersey’s Star-Ledger published an obituary for Vishal Bokka Reddy ’12, “a software engineer, a neuroscientist, a linguist who spoke four languages, a flutist and a humanist.” Reddy’s life came to an end when he was "hit by a car while jogging," just three years after graduating ...
I used to have a blue lunch box. I can’t remember the exact shade of blue, but I remember the coarseness of its fabric as I opened it on the first day of senior kindergarten. It had enough space for a Ziploc bag and a stainless steel, or as my mother would say, ever-silver thermos. Inside it was a ...
When I first walked through the Van Wickle Gates three years ago, it was in the company of a much smaller, and perhaps more eclectic, group. As a transfer student, I crossed the threshold with folks who had called other universities their home, had served in the armed forces and had even worked as circus ...
We’ve spent four years (or maybe a little more) wandering around in the open curriculum. For some of us, the course has been relatively straightforward. But I think for most of us, these precious years at Brown have brought about a great deal of questioning and a generous helping of difficult choices. ...
On the sweltering evening of last year’s Campus Dance, as the Class of 2018 prepared to take the stage for their Senior Sing, I found myself in conversation with an alum visiting Brown for his 30th reunion. We talked about the many ways that this place had changed and stayed the same, and he shared ...
When we think about climate change, we should think about the Younger Dryas. You probably haven’t heard of the Younger Dryas, a cold period that started 12,900 years ago — at the end of the last glacial period — with a 10˚C cooling over two centuries, and ended 1,200 years later with a 15˚C ...
Last week, I read a column in The Herald titled “Brown is hard. It should be harder,” which advocated for intensified grading practices on campus. The argument was premised on the belief that too many students skate by, taking classes that do not require much work; they are enabled to have it all, ...
I’m in the late innings of the last start of my career, and the manager is coming out to get me. I’m done, he says, and I can hit the clubhouse and start preparing for graduation while some rookie takes over where I left off. It’s been four years for me at Brown and at The Brown Daily Herald, ...
Solutions by The State News
