Amanda Jiang ’20 | Jandon Center Student Fellow
Hanne Gaukel ’19 participated in the Springfield Bound during her sophomore year at Smith. She came across the opportunity through an introductory course with the community engagement department. For Gaukel, the most memorable part of the Bound was getting to know Gardening the Community, a food justice organization.
Emma Kemp ’20 | Assistant News Editor
Divest Smith hosted a panel discussion titled “Climate Justice and Migration” last Friday afternoon in the Campus Center, led by Gabriella Della Croce ’11 and Andrea Schmid ’17 from the Pioneer Valley Workers Center and Professor Rick Lopez from Amherst College. Friends greeted each other as more chairs were pulled out to seat a full audience from both the Five College and greater Northampton communities. Conversation centered on the enormous effects of climate change on marginalized groups.
Claudia Olson ’22 | Features Editor
This weekend, I went to UMass Amherst and attended Hack(H)er 2019, the first hackathon exclusively for women and non-binary students in Western Massachusetts. For those unfamiliar, a “hackathon” is what it sounds like: a computation marathon. Teams are expected to create something from scratch using computers, whether their creation takes the shape of hardware, software or a website. The teams are given 24 hours to get their project done, and often teams use all 24 of those hours. Over 300 students attended the hackathon, a signal that the tech world could be becoming more equitable in terms of gender.
Emma Stewart ’19 | Contributing Writer
At the Kensington International School in Springfield, Mass., 23 Smith tutors are working with children from nine different countries. Around the classroom you can hear students and tutors speaking several different languages. Tutors are encouraged to learn some basic phrases in Kiswahili and Arabic, such as “osha mikono” (“wash your hands” in Kiswahili) or “ma asmak?” (“what’s your name?” in Arabic).
Simran Altar ’21 | Features Staff Writer
As we enter the fourth week of classes, I can only assume that most of us are prematurely beginning to feel the mid-semester slump that inevitably affects us all at one point or another. We’ve sailed through syllabus week and are now faced with the the reality of endless readings and essays and presentations.
Happy Valentine’s Day. This is a happy day, isn’t it? It’s a day about love, after all. However, this day, like most other holidays, has become commercialized and all about what society thinks love should be. Every relationship is different, but under the banner of Valentine’s Day, the measure of a good relationship is how much money you spend on extravagant gifts.
When you walk around campus and see lovebirds holding hands all around you, you realize it’s that time of the year: Valentine’s Day. Everyone has their own favorite ways of celebrating this special occasion. Here are a few options for enjoying this year’s V-Day with (or without) your loved ones.
Chantelle Leswell ‘20J | Staff Writer
We’re getting to that point in the semester where the first round of big assignments are hitting, the melting snow is leaving slush piles and black ice is everywhere. And is it just me, or is the big hole in the middle of campus getting bigger? For some of us, resolve may already be slipping. That doesn’t mean we can’t push through, but wouldn’t it be sweet if the semester wasn’t just about surviving? Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of “The How of Happiness,” puts it bluntly: “It’s equally important to investigate wellness as it is to study misery.” That’s worth pausing over. Holding both of these parts of the human condition with equal importance forces us to confront our self-concepts and how we act in our daily lives. My theory is that, generally, we wallow a little too much in the “misery” camp when we ought to be erring on the side of wellness, and leaning into moments of joy can really start to optimize our wellbeing.
After two years of hard work, the experiences of this year’s cohort of candidates for the MFA in Choreography and Performance culminated in a thesis concert presented Thursday, Feb. 7, Friday, Feb. 8 and Saturday, Feb. 9, in Theatre 14, Mendenhall Center for the Performing Arts. Centered around the theme of “We,” each candidate’s piece examined the concept in a myriad of unique and captivating ways.
Walking through SCMA’s newest exhibit, I couldn’t get the chorus of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” out of my head: “Don’t cry / don’t raise your eye / it’s only teenage wasteland.” The song’s otherworldly warning seems to be woven throughout the artwork in “Plastic Entanglements: Ecology, Aesthetics, Materials,” an exhibit that documents the past, present and future of plastics and human existence. The 20th century got to enjoy the thrilling innovations of plastic, inadvertently creating an archive of the costly convenience of daily life. Now, the upcoming waves of youth will inherit what is left of this material’s legacy: an impending wasteland. “Entanglements” confronts the viewer with the medium’s metamorphosis, asking whether the possibilities of plastic can ever make up for the destruction it wreaks.
