The bars and coffee shops near the University tend to remain busy during the semester. When I first started attending UNM, I wondered why the businesses around Central Avenue seemed so busy.
As finals start and the fall semester ends, some of you are likely to be contemplating graduate school, both because you’re interested in further study and because of the greater salary additional schooling can confer on you.
I think almost all the TAs I know get the same expression when a student asks why they can’t use a random website as a source for a paper.
Ever see a movie where the camera is placed in front of a runaway truck? The careening hunk of metal swerves right and left as your heart hammers in your chest and ends up hitting and covering the camera, with a horrific crunch and squeal, bouncing to a rest while you take a breath. For graduate students, that’s the pace of a semester. This is the part of the semester where I, and probably many other graduate students, have to grit our teeth and think about something else.
Despite the fact that graduate students are in competition with each other, and despite the fact that funding sources at the public level are disappearing, in some departments a curious phenomenon occurs: We manage to be courteous, kind and helpful to one another.
Now that I’ve been in graduate classes and on both sides of an undergraduate classroom, I want to apologize to most of my undergraduate professors.
Spend time in any online chat room or try to have a conversation about social change and a common trait of our species becomes evident. Pessimistic comments on our shared political and economic disaster dominate the interaction: nothing can change, we’re headed inevitably toward some sort of corporate state, welcome to the machine, resistance is useless, the list goes on. People get on their soapboxes at that point to tell everyone they saw it coming.
The Internet, despite the vague conception that events on it do not affect real life, has taken on an influence in political life which is unmistakable, and defies continued attempts to relegate interactions on social media to triviality. The events now called “Arab Spring” — the protests in Egypt, Libya and the Middle East — have proven that social media has started to play a central role in political protest, organization and motivation.
Two-inch margins. 13-point font. Your fifth dead grandmother in three months. Plagiarism so obvious that you didn’t bother to change the font or diction when pasting it in.
For more than a week a group of demonstrators has been occupying the areas around Wall Street in New York, bearing signs with slogans such as “They only call it class war when we fight back,” and “Just because you can’t see us, doesn’t mean this isn’t happening.” The second sign refers to the media silence surrounding the protests.
Solutions by The State News
