The last few weeks of each semester are laden with stress for everyone—more so than the already stressful, typical week in the life of a Washington University student.

Olin Business School hired five female tenuretrack professors to its ranks this fall, reflecting University-wide efforts to increase gender parity amongst its faculty.

The editorial board of Student Life urges the Wash. U. administration to put better policies into place that require professors and departments to list more detailed descriptions of how classes will be run, whether through previous syllabi or a document outlining what the class will be structured like (effectively a less finished syllabus).

It’s time to choose classes for the fall semester. Filling clusters and integrations aside, this is an exciting time and a chance to get outside of your academic comfort zone. Here are our picks for the best classes on campus: Sahil Patel, Editor-in-Chief: Beginning Hindi I The Hindi I and II sequence equals 10 total credits and a Language & the Arts cluster.

During the last couple of weeks, I have found myself battling a frustrating distraction that I take issue with: students talking during lectures. What upsets me is not that many students tend to talk during lectures; I don’t mind students conversing in low voices to help each other understand a lesson.

According to the May 2010 pay equity report, female professors at Washington University are paid less than their male counterparts. The report, which looked at the 2008-2009 salary information of both tenured and tenure-track faculty, concluded that female professors make less than male professors in every Danforth Campus school.

The cultivation of knowledge occurs right in the classroom when good professors are able to engage and connect with students. Simply put, a good or bad professor can make or break a subject for me.

Since 1975, according to the American Association of University Professors, there has been a continuous decline in the number of tenure and tenure-track positions at college and universities throughout the United States.

The only official pieces of information available to all students when choosing classes are a short course description that rarely changes from year to year and numerical course evaluation scores. Other information comes from unreliable sources such as friends who have taken a class (sometimes from a totally different professor) and websites like ratemyprofessor.com.

I think we can all agree that applying to college was stressful, with all of the application deadlines, fees, months of waiting and rejection notices. Professor Shane Seely knows this feeling all too well. While trying to get his first manuscript published, he sent it into countless poetry competitions, complete with those pesky deadlines and fees, and over four years of waiting and denials.