Opinions, Column

Feb. 27 Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down

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Spring Break – Ah, it’s so close we can almost taste it. Spring Break is truly a wonderful thing. Here we are at a frigid 42 degrees of latitude, so there is really nothing more appealing than the idea of heading southward and sun-bound. After this stressful week of midterms, papers, presentations, etc., the idea of lying around and doing nothing is quite appealing. Wherever you are going and whenever you are leaving-whether that be an earlier flight out tonight or one after classes are over tomorrow-we at TU/TD wish you safe and happy travels. Now, we just have to make it through these last two days….

<strong>Buried Treasure</strong> - Recently, a Californian couple happened upon an old rusty can in their backyard that happened to contain a cache of old coins. Those coins turned out to be made of gold and worth close to $10 million. Now, if that doesn't make you want to hitch up your wagon, grab your pickax and shovel, and go out West in the hope of striking it rich, we don't know what would.

<strong>Texts from Mom</strong> - Despite the initial eye-roll the word "Mom" may provoke when it pops up on the screen of your phone, texts from Mom are the best. They can be sweet "thinking of you"s amusing anecdotes about your siblings, pictures of your dogs, or even just mistaken acronyms ("wait, you mean LOL doesn't stand for lots of love?"). It also opens the potential negotiations for care packages, which is always a plus. Mom, we may not always text you back, but we promise your texts always at least make us smile.</p><h4 style="padding:5px;">   Thumbs Down</h4><p> <strong>Office Hours Lines</strong> - Right up until it's time for an exam, most professors' offices are ghost towns during office hours. Seriously we think we once saw a tumbleweed roll through the econ department on a Friday at the beginning of the semester. All of sudden, though, when exam time comes around, students flock to office hours like a pack of hyenas to a deer convention. It's a fierce competition for access to the limited resource that is the professor's time, and only the most determined students will make it into the professor's office. While we understand how it is often only in studying for an exam that one finds the questions one has about the material, really, folks, there has to be a better way of doing this.

Too Much Coffee – You are going to have to bear with us here for a second because we think very highly of coffee and could not get through most of our days without the coffee equivalent of a caffeine drip straight into our veins. There are some times, however, when things just go too far. All of a sudden, it’s time to go to your 9 a.m. class, you haven’t slept in the last 25 hours, and you know that if you don’t get that quintuple espresso on ice you won’t make it through your first two classes, much less the ones thereafter. But you don’t have time to eat and, all of a sudden, you start violently shaking, your heart starts beating at a million beats per minute, you are sweating, and you think you might die. You feel sick to your stomach. Yeah, as much as we are dependent on coffee, we don’t like this at all.

February 26, 2014