Freshman year, a professor introduced me to the idea of liminality—the sense of being between things. Such an idea felt pervasive, and for good reason. I was between home and school, high school and college, being a teenager and being an adult. At the end of college, it’s inevitable that liminality shows up again. When [...]

A couple of weeks ago, I (like many of you) watched Invisible Children’s “Kony 2012” video. Within a minute of viewing the video, I posted it on Facebook and shared it with several other friends. Based on my own newsfeed, I know I’m not alone in that.

If you’ve never seen “The Vagina Monologues,” go see them when they’re performed in Graham Chapel this weekend. If you’re planning on going: good. Keep reading if you want, but this column is mainly for those of you who haven’t yet made plans to go. Why don’t you want to go?

I heard a rumor that Ursa’s won’t be around next year. Regardless of whether or not this is the case—I doubt it is—the frequent rumor that another long-standing institution will no longer exist on campus feels symptomatic of something larger. We’ve had a lot of construction on our campus recently and many of the changes and additions have been incredible.

At the end of fall semester, I went with a couple of friends to a sandwich place called Blues City Deli in search of a soda made in my home state of North Carolina. We certainly enjoyed the Cheerwine, but as we left, we all realized we had been in the presence of something special. All of a sudden, questions filled my mind: How have I not been here before?

So you’re in a student group. You’re bringing an awesome speaker to talk on campus, you’re hosting a panel and serving some tasty ethnic food, you have a whole week planned where you’re promoting awareness of an interesting topic or your group is putting on a cool performance. Great! That sounds like something a whole lot of people would like to see!

I’ll start off by saying that I enjoy watching sports and that I have a basic fondness for three teams: the St. Louis Cardinals, the Carolina Panthers and the University of North Carolina Tar Heels. The first, obviously, is due to the fact that I go to school in St. Louis and never had a home baseball team before 2008 when I came here.

Earlier this week, I was talking to a friend about the future. (It’s senior year, and this is therefore a frequent topic of conversation.) He was lamenting the lack of conviction that many of our senior classmates have regarding future job prospects. “Why do so many people only want a job that pays well?” he asked.

As a student at Washington University, it’s kind of hard not to feel Dean James McLeod’s impact. His influence is everywhere—in our classrooms, in our administration and even in our residence halls.

Before I came back to school, I went to see the New York Times documentary “Page One.” The standout figure of the film was columnist David Carr, whose gravelly-voiced, eloquent opinions about Twitter made it clear to me that my decision to join earlier this year didn’t mean I had “succumbed” to tweeting.