Opinion Columns
Back before the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year, I happened to see a notice from the Iowa State Daily newspaper on Facebook. It noted that they were looking for opinion writers as the new school year began. At the time I considered myself "opinionated", but not too outspoken about them. Still, I figured "what the heck" and got in touch with the current opinion staff and started writing. I graduated in 2011 and closed my relationship with the Daily after making many friends, perhaps playing some role in the various ACP awards they won, and writing 46 different opinion columns with the paper. If you are looking at this page, I hope you can enjoy a few of these columns below and perhaps may enjoy any columns I write in the future.
We've hit the end of the fateful prelude to finals: Dead Week. I'm sure some students are given only a few normal assignments to accomplish during Dead Week and are able to spend the majority of their time studying their notes and textbooks. If I just described your week, I envy you.
My schedule for Dead Week involves finishing one major class project, giving two presentations, completing one major homework assignment, a quiz, a paper and two multi-hour labs; and I only have a light load of four classes. That's not to mention keeping up with the nonprofit group I help run and helping an engineering team preparing a robot for a competition in a month. If this sounds more like your week, I feel your pain.
Fifty years ago today, humans first flew into space, the vast frontier beyond our home planet. The first man in space was not an American, but a Soviet fighter pilot named Yuri Gagarin. He only flew one orbit of the Earth over about an hour and a half, but it was a giant leap for humanity and a feat that led to a great many technological advancements in the following years and decades.
If you have managed to live anywhere that is not on a college campus, you know that even high-speed cable Internet providers in the United States are not particularly "fast." Last week we found out that, sadly, Google didn't choose Ames as the location to test its 1 Gbps fiber network — though not for lack of trying, on Ames' part. Instead, they chose the city of Kansas City, Kan., to get 100 times faster Internet on a fast fiber-to-the-home network.
Even though Mother Nature keeps trying to dump snow on us in Ames, spring has begun to arrive. Many of us will soon start to think about our plans for the summer and begin to clean our houses and apartments in preparation for the end of the school semester. I want to remind you that your personal computer or laptop shouldn't be an exception from your spring cleaning, and I'd like to give you a few tips on things you should do regularly to keep your system running smoothly.
Before we left for Spring Break, if you recall, there was some controversy about the work done by ISU Ambassadors and students from other Iowa universities to discuss proposed budget cuts to Iowa's Regent universities.
The chairman of the ISU College Republicans, Mr. Logan Pals, asserted that the work by the Ambassadors to lobby representatives to stop the cuts was a partisan move by a supposedly non-partisan organization and was thus improper. I wrote a column addressing this point, which said the Ambassadors were simply seeking to work in the best interest of ISU students and not trying to lead a lobbying effort that sided with the Republican or Democratic agenda.
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