LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
It’s the jobs issue here at The Blue and White. Apparently, it’s December, which I just learned is meant to be internship application season, and that means your future is impending, because it isn’t impending at all other times.
In our features on the implications of the perilous visa lottery for internationals (page 20), and the relentless finance and consulting obsession permeating CCE (page 12), Julie Moon and Michelle Cheripka sketch out the pressures that influence our decisions come graduation— or, possibly, make those decisions for us. On page 26, we hear from some 1020 bartenders on the things they put up with for the cash.
Tips for working, working for tips … either way, there are compromises to be made, compromises little and frequent. Compromise, perhaps, is what Life—capital L to signal the traumatic rupture of undergrad/postgrad—is made of.
Yet we also see examples of something else, whether one of our bartender friends mining nights at 1020 for a gender studies ethnography; Dunni Oduyemi using media and art spaces to voice and combat experiences of institutionalized racism; or Donnie Banks using acting as an outlet in the army (see our campus characters, pages 8 and 9). Putting yourself into these projects makes them yours, and not someone else’s. It’s the difference between doing work and doing a job.
Especially when many of us, as one international intern puts it, are being “compensated in snacks,” doing work for and by ourselves must have its own value—be it art (see Zane Bhansali’s portrait of his interview subject Wayne Koestenbaum in The Conversation, page 28), poetry (see page 24), or an indulgent editor’s letter (page 4). This issue before you is one such case study.
It’s finals. Do your work—for you and what you believe in. Don’t compromise on that. This is where I leave you.
— Hallie Nell Swanson
TRANSACTIONS
ARRIVALS
Deluxe
Student Power Coalition
The James H. and Christine Turk Berick Center for Advising
Friends asking if you’ve donated to the Senior Fund
The Rough Guide to the Universe
Your family’s racist Facebook posts
The Museum of Feelings (sponsored by Glade)
DEPARTURES
Sunlight
Civil obedience
Free Bacchanal tickets
Politely RSVPing “Maybe” to your floormate’s wind ensemble recital
Frontiers of Science
Say What?!
“I often wish that I could go back to my childhood, because back when we were kids, having fun just seemed so effortless, you know? You could give us a pillow and a blanket and we’d build a fortress together.”