Author Archive

Don’t forget to dream

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 | Jill Strominger

At this point in your life, you’re receiving lots of practical advice about honing your expectations as well as perfecting both your studying and partying skills. I’m sure people will throw around plenty of different opinions about how many extra-curricular activities you should be involved in, what majors make the most sense and whether or not it’s possible to stay with your high school boyfriend or girlfriend. And while taking in and considering all of these issues is important, I think it’s incredibly easy to lose track of your dreams during the process. This is why my advice is simply to wish. Wish on stars, wish at both 11:11s and wish before you go to sleep.

College will be an experience of practicalities-you need to study, do your own laundry, take care of your expenses, register for classes and keep appointments with your advisers. You cannot have your head in the clouds. But at the same time, if you only keep your feet firmly planted on the ground, you will not achieve at your highest ability or have the experiences that will affect you the most. A practical major, practical courses, practical relationship moves, practical future plans and attempting to gain only practical and likely summer internships will close you off to the opportunities that give you a shot at making your dreams come true.

You’re about to start college, so I’m sure people having been telling you that this is your chance to do anything. Listen to them. A lot of times we feel like we have set limits in life when we are completely capable of exceeding them. Before you start college and as you continue the experience, keep looking deep within yourself. Is your impossible dream attending John Hopkins Medical School? Do you have a real interest in an obscure field that has limited job opportunities? Do you want to keep dating your high school sweetheart? You need to ask yourself these questions every now and then instead of focusing exclusively on the type of questions we ask more often, which are something along the lines of: Where do I think I’ll be able to attend medical school? What classes make the most sense for me to take in order to have a well-established, safe profession? What are the odds of this relationship working out? The practical questions are certainly important, but please don’t let them set the limits of your college experience. Doing this will only be a disservice to yourself and to our society.

Right now, you likely can do almost anything with your life. And if you set out to achieve your dreams rather than simply achieving something practical, if you take the crazy-sounding course that you’re interested in, keep working on that novel in between homework assignments, and seriously aim to attend the top graduate schools in the country, you’ll end up doing something you never thought possible. Instead of focusing on what you have to do to not fail out of college and to keep a balanced resume, focus on all of the things you could do if you had limitless intelligence, ability and charisma. If you always go after opportunities that seem impossible and impractical, every now and then one of those amazing opportunities will work out and you’ll be setting yourself up practically for the future you once only wished you could achieve.

Jill Strominger is a senior in the College of Arts & Sciences and Senior Forum Editor. She can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Just the Facts

Friday, April 25th, 2008 | Jill Strominger

Washington University’s athletic program has recently been recognized, earning a 7th-place ranking in the annual Hall of Fame Magazine (competing against Div. I, II, III and NAIA). The athletic program is also first-place in the United States Academy Directors’ Cup Div. III standings. In order to promote its athletic accomplishments Washington University could.

1. Rename Graham Chapel after Troy Ruths (re-engrave University signs and add new flags)

2. Place a giant volleyball atop the Brookings towers

3. Change the name of the school to Div. III National Champion Washington University in St. Louis

4. Change General Chemistry curriculum to developing secret legal steroids and challenge Notre Dame to a football game

War on Iraq still real

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 | Jill Strominger

Yesterday, I learned via a Facebook message that one of my friends serving in Iraq had been shot in his leg. I was completely stunned because I rarely experience the realities of the war on Iraq directly. I thought it was awful and completely scary. My friend, on the other hand, was ecstatic because, at least for a while, he won’t have to spend his days wondering if he will be blown up. I can’t imagine what it must be like over there. I can’t imagine what conditions I would have to be under to be happy to experience that kind of pain.

But, what struck me most about this event was not the specifics of my friend’s situation or the smashing reality that people could be harmed by this war. I know that people die everyday in Iraq. I know this, but I’m not sure I was ever able to really feel it. I’m not sure I actually feel the urgency, the seriousness, the magnitude of what is going on over there, because on a day-to-day basis, I’m not accustomed to really thinking about what people’s deaths mean.

When I think of soldiers in danger, I think of some general person in uniform but not of the friends I went to high school with and who follow the Nebraska Cornhuskers online from around the world and play the same Facebook trivia games that I do. When I think about the deaths of Iraqis, I’m lost. I disconnect. I hear the facts, and I have a general innate “that’s horrible” response. I think, “death is horrible,” but I’m not fully understanding or completely feeling what it means that people are dying everyday. I’m not sure it’s even possible to fully “get” war, even if you’re fighting in one. Would you be able to keep living your life during a war if you were able to fully comprehend what goes on in wars? I doubt that’s possible. I don’t think societies could both sustain wars and sustain themselves if people fully comprehended everything that’s lost in war, all the death involved.

In many ways, this seems to just be a natural fact. We don’t understand death. We sort of understand it a little bit when someone close to us dies, but in order to keep living, we have to push it out of our minds. This seems like the way it has to be. But when it comes to war, we both push the reality out of minds and at the same time vote in presidential elections that will decide the course of that war. And most of us in this country will only spend a nominal amount of time researching and thinking about for which candidate we will vote. This is a problem.

I think we’ve got to try to understand what’s going on, even though we’re probably ultimately doomed to fail at completely understanding the meaning of the war. We’re responsible for authorizing this war, and we’re responsible for all of the consequences if we don’t authorize the war. It’s not just the president or the Congress who decide what we do. It’s also us, as voters. We’re helping direct this initiative, and it’s our friends and fellow national and global citizens who are out there dying. So, we may not be able to individually affect the course of the war or fully grasp the meaning of it, but we’ve got to at least try to understand the real impact-the full meaning-of the death associated with the war on Iraq because it’s real.

Jill is a junior in Arts & Sciences and Senior Forum Editor. She can be reached at [email protected].

Letter to the Editor

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 | Jill Strominger

Dear Editor,

I am encouraged by the quick and appropriate response from the Phi Delta Theta fraternity regarding the homophobic comments made by a few of its members. However, I would like to respond to the comments posted online in response to your original story reporting the issue. Several students have argued that college students should be able to handle such insults, and one even suggested that the verbally-assaulted students “grow a pair.” This reflects the stereotype that men should not have feelings and should definitely not report verbal abuse, which is a significant problem in our society.

I see this thinking as an extension of the idea that using the word “gay” as an insult is not problematic. Some people who even claim to be allies of the LGBT community will use “gay” negatively because they say that they do not mean it in reference to people who identify as homosexual. What these “allies” and the writers of the online responses have in common is that they do not know the consequences of their words. Given that they have not lived as homosexuals in our society, speakers who use the word “gay” negatively cannot fully understand the thoughts of people who identify as “gay,” which has a negative meaning because of their poor word choice.

The process of coming out is already incredibly difficult. It is especially rough when friends use “gay” as an insult. It is hard enough to emerge as part of a group against which it is still legal to discriminate. Having to use the word “gay,” which is often used to mean “stupid,” can make this process even more humiliating for some who comes out.

Please be conscious of the words that you use, and the unnecessary hardship you may be imposing on others.

-Daniel Riff
Class of 2010

Column: Take time to remember the dead

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 | Jill Strominger

Tuesday, Wash. U. Amnesty International and the Wash. U. Peace Coalition will host a candlelight vigil on the swamp to honor the deaths of American soldiers, allied soldiers and Iraqis who have died as a result of the war on Iraq. As the war on Iraq becomes a regular story that has often faded to the point where people don’t consider it news anymore, vigils, actions, and meditations serve to remind us about the seriousness of our situation. And this seriousness is worth taking time out of our day to think about.

The war on Iraq seems like a given, and the longer it continues, the more it becomes a fixed part of our realities as opposed to what it is-a shocking act, a war. We largely don’t feel the war at home the same way we felt wars in the past and it seems like we can continue our everyday lives without even noticing the mounting death tolls. It’s easier to pretend the war isn’t going on than to spend time focusing on it because it’s emotionally difficult to think about the realities of death, especially when we feel largely helpless to do anything to change the situation.

But, it’s still important to think about. In fact, it’s something we owe to our friends, family and fellow citizens who are spending their days patrolling a county and being shot at. We also should think about the people just trying to live their lives who are dying because of the war.

This vigil has been advertised as a remembrance rather than a political discussion about the role of the United States. It’s a time for us to reflect on the sacrifices people are making because of decisions made by different leaders around the world. People are sacrificing their very lives so that we can have a choice whether we want to think about the events happening on the other side of the world. That sacrifice is something deeper than I could ever hope to describe. It’s a sacrifice so significant that we should make sure we take time out of our days, whether we can attend the vigil or not, to reflect on all of the lives that have been lost as a result of this conflict. It’s the least we can do.

The benefits of not going to Harvard

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 | Jill Strominger

With April Welcome and the emergence of potential freshmen on our campus, the question of which college is the best to attend always crops up.

As many of us take part in selling our school to our visitors, we constantly find ourselves comparing ourselves to Harvard (we’re the Harvard of the Midwest) and other schools that have higher U.S. News & World Report rankings.

We say things like, “Well, we have the third-ranked medical school and our pre-med program is one of the best,” or “We recently hired some big shot economics professors, so we’re going to be on par with better-known programs.”

We’re right to praise our academic strengths, but often times we stop there when thinking about the benefits of attending our particular institution. Yet, there are educational benefits to the Wash. U. experience that come from not being the top-ranked academic university in the country. We tend to ignore the educational advantages we gain from not being Harvard, Princeton, Yale and all of the schools that we constantly imply are better than Wash. U.

Let me backtrack a moment.

A few months ago, I was talking with a member of the school improvement team from my high school, Millard South. We were trying to figure out how to renovate the Advanced Placement (AP) program in order to set the brightest students up for greater success.

I said that in my experience it seemed like schools that had more successful AP programs implemented some sort of tracking, either by being private and only admitting students of a certain caliber or through tracking students into different levels of classes through their high school experience.

The school improvement team member asked whether I thought tracking students would provide an educational benefit that would make up for the experiences students would gain through being in completely mixed classes in a public high school. In the end, we nixed the idea of tracking students by intellectual ability.

Wash. U. is quite obviously not my public high school. We’re tracked ability-wise through the admissions process, so we don’t have the benefit of attending classes with a bunch of different people, many of whom are not focused on academics. But, we do have the advantage of studying on a campus that isn’t constantly invaded by tourists.

We have a reasonable expectation that if we want to start up a game of ultimate frisbee outside of Olin Library, we’ll be able to do so.

There’s something to be said for attending a school that can make at least some decisions about how it operates without having to consider how the national media will react.

There’s even something to be said for telling people you go to Wash. U. and having them ask you how you like living in the capital or the Northwest.

The benefit to the privacy, the ambiguous name and our position outside the center of the media is that this school can genuinely be about us.

I know sometimes it doesn’t seem like the Wash. U. experience is about students.

When the school hires researchers over lecturers and raises tuition, we feel like the school is only concerned with itself.

And sometimes that’s probably true. But a lot of times Wash. U. will make changes based on what students want. Wash. U. recently embraced mixed-gender housing largely because it was something students wanted, and we’ve been able to make this progress without worrying about the opinion of the rest of the country. (Students at Harvard are still pushing for this change.)

As students, we have a real ability to shape the policies and dynamic of our University; we can shape what it means to go to Wash. U.

And this is a type of empowerment we can’t quantify for magazine rankings.

Jill is a junior in Arts & Sciences and a Forum editor. She can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].

Letter to the Editor

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 | Jill Strominger

Dean Macias wrong choice for provost

Dear Editor:

Dean Macias is known to the faculty as a bullying autocrat whose word cannot be relied on. He has done Washington University much damage. We hope that after being kicked upstairs to the position of provost, he will be replaced by a new dean who understands the principles of collegiality and faculty autonomy. We wonder if the chancellor would hire or tolerate such a dean; the recent experience of the engineering school suggests that this is unlikely, but even he may be able to learn from a mistake.

-Jonathan Katz
Professor of Physics

Take inspiration from Towery’s campaign to get involved

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 | Jill Strominger

In our staff editorial this past Monday, Student Life endorsed Jeff Nelson for the vice president of administration within Student Union because of his energy and absolutely incredible, detailed, tangible ideas for the student body. And I completely agree with that endorsement because of the ideas and the impressive commitment that Nelson has shown to the student body.

But, even though I agree with endorsing Nelson, I’d like to take some time on this election day to praise Colin Towery for his campaign for vice president of administration.

Towery is the only student in the entire student body to run against the “YOU” slate. He is running by himself against an entire slate of people who have set up campaign events and worked out advertising as a slate.

The challenge that he has taken on in running alone against someone who is part of a slate is one that we should recognize as significant and admirable. Towery has set an example for what we should try to find within ourselves: the will to get involved even if it doesn’t seem like the easiest or most natural option.

This doesn’t mean that we have to stand up and run for office in order to follow Towery’s example (although, obviously, that’s a huge service to the student body). Getting involved can be as simple as talking to the people we elect about what we would like to see happen on this campus. These candidates all say they want to sit down with students and help us figure out how we can use the Student Union resources in order to make the changes we’d like to see on campus actually happen. After interviewing some of these candidates as a part of the Student Life endorsement process, I really get the impression that they are serious about this offer.

Our SU candidates are kind of like the professor who holds office hours every week in the hope that someone will show up because he loves his job and wants to take the time to help them accomplish their goals. But, just like some students never make it to office hours for various reasons, a lot of students don’t make it to the SU representatives. Let’s take their offer out for a spin.

I’m sure that if we all sat down, we could come up with at least one change that would make our experience at Wash. U. better. And I’m sure that if we all did this individually we would come up with a lot of great ideas about what we could do as a student body to make the Wash. U. experience better.

If we take sort of an Al Gore approach to making a difference at our school and if we all think of one concrete goal we can accomplish and work on actually doing that, who knows how we could transform the University? We’ve got a resource in our Student Union that can help us to accomplish these goals, so there’s not a significant reason why we aren’t all utilizing that resource and collectively improving the University.

I’ve been inspired enough by Towery’s will and decision to run against a “YOU” slate candidate that I’m willing to promise you that next time an issue comes up that I’m concerned about, I will make the effort to communicate with one of the SU execs about what I can do to make a difference. Join me.

Jill is a junior in Arts & Sciences and a Forum editor. She can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].

Editorial Cartoon

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 | Jill Strominger
Scott Bressler

Quotables

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 | Jill Strominger

“By the way, now that I have been named a St. Louis Citizen of the Year, should I say ‘Missourah?'”

-Chancellor Mark Wrighton, in his speech after being named St. Louis Citizen of the Year on Tuesday, March 25.