Favorite dining hall

Of all the poor choices of food on campus I would say the dining hall is the best.  It is true that I eat nine out of ten times in campus center but that is only because of convenience.  Were the terrace dining hall and campus center switched campus center would soon be deserted.  To start with is simply a wider variety of foods at terraces, they have everything campus center has and more.  Many will say that towers has different food which is true, but only if you want a chicken sandwich or hamburger that all look identical to each other(which supports my theory that they breed when no one is watching). Line wise terraces is also the best choice.  For lunch there is always a line a mile long outside of campus center that stretches into the pub, and if you have ever tried to go eat at towers, the way the food is placed causes lines to wind around making it annoying to get anything.  In terraces everything is spaced out nicely with each place forming its own neat line.  And of course the most important part of terraces is their wraps.  Nowhere else can you get the wraps at terraces.  the towers does not make them and the choices at campus center are terrible.  The wraps at terraces actually have real meat.  Not the weird turkey paper strip things that they throw on your bread at campus center but real chicken and bacon (or if for some reason you want it weird turkey paper strip things).  You can get a wrap that actually has a taste to it and smuggle one more out to have as a late night snack.  Cereal is also better at terraces.  You can get reese pieces cereal which must have been created by a god its so good.  At campus center and towers you get total or raisin brain or if you have a strong immune system granola and sketchy yogurt.  Stealing wise(important for any college students survival) terraces is also the easiest.  Just load up your trays and head to the second floor.  There you can easily fill each tupperware container before strolling out.  Whats that?  Don't own tupperware?  Have no fear because on the second floor there is a door that no one watches that you can walk right out of with tray, plate and food.  Try to take a grilled cheese sandwich from campus center and they will stop you like its the cold war and your delivering the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Russians.  Never have I see people more angry then when I make the mistake of trying to get a second soda at grab and go.  If I was eating inside I could have taken ten glasses of sprite and a whole pizza and dumped them down the drain and nobody would have cared; but try to get a second can or one more peanut butter and jelly sandwich and they ask for slips of paper and examine them like your crossing a boarder.  Terraces no are no people trying to catch you at ever turn just fellow students trying to earn a little bit of money in their free time.  If you ever are bringing people here to eat go to terraces.  Unless of course, you are trying to scare the crap out of illegal immigrants or communist sympathizers in which case I recommend campus center grab and try to get extra food.

Two terms vs. three

At colleges there are normally either two or three semesters depending on which school you attend.  In my opinion each has its own benefits and downfalls.  Three terms with fewer classes in each might seem like a better idea for a number of reasons.  First, it allows students to focus on fewer classes.  If you only have to worry about two or three classes you can devote more time to the lessons and therefore understand the material better.  If you are taking five classes you are forced to juggle assignments and work on multiple papers at once which may become overwhelming.  However, Because the terms are shorter when there are three papers come at students faster.  As opposed to having one week to complete an assignment you might have a day.  While this might appeal to some students as it keeps them working others who prefer time to plan and consider assignments could easily become frustrated.  Readings are another area that we must look at.  In a two semester college readings at the beginning of the year are often forgotten.  This can result in critical information being lost during finals.  However, in a three semester college with less time readings can pile up for classes.  In one of my history classes I am expected to read form 20-40 pages for each class(Tuesdays and Thursdays).  This is a manageable amount but if the workload was doubled I doubt I would be able to remember everything that I read.  In defense of school with two semesters I have often heard professors complain that you could spend an entire four years of college studying their class and still not be done.  Three term schools attempt to compress the same amount of knowledge in a shorter amount of time.  This means more classes per week or longer classes.  I enjoy my classes but to be honest I don't want to spend even more time in one class.  There is only so much I can learn before I begin to lose patience and get distracted.  Diversity works for me while focusing in might work for others.  In the end I believe that students must decide which type of school suits them better.

Spring Break Assignments

In my opinion assignments given over spring break are like getting stale chocolate.  Its chocolate so you have to appreciate the effort but its stale so you will never eat no matter who gave it to you. My mid-terms over spring break are alot like that.  Im grateful that I do not have three tests and three papers due the week before I head home, but heading home with them really does not seem like a decision that really favors me in retrospect.  My mid-term week was not to hectic and I was able to put in a good cram session for each test.  The remainder were given in the form of take home assignments.  When I arrived home I threw my bags at a wall and ran off to see friends.  After a few days of that I began looking for summer jobs.  Spring break is supposed to be a time for relaxing without all of the pressures from college.  However, when I began looking through my assignments I realized how much work I had to do.  There were new primary sources to read and analyze and relate back to the classes the previous week.  My final days of break quickly became more panicked as I tried to finish papers.  Instead of returning to school refreshed I returned just as tired if not more so then when I left.  Now that I am back and have already stayed up a night working on a paper I would be quite happy to have just have had one more test.  Also, after franticly finishing papers I returned to school tired and dreading the outcome only to learn that due to the fact we had take home midterms the grades will not be factored into actual midterm scores.  If my mid-term grades supposedly counts for 20% of my total grade I very much want to see how it affects me right now and not when my final grade comes in.  In that instance the take home assignment seems more along the lines of the professor slaking off.  My grades are important both because they allow me to see how the professor thinks I'm doing but also because they allow me to make sure that i have a high enough GPA for my scholarships.  To a student this seems like my professors simply being lazy.  I am aware that they have other classes and that they have other work but it seems as though I am being ignored and they are now putting off their work.  In my opinion take home midterms are good only for the professor but are just as miserable for students.

Weaher problems

In my opinion Ithaca college has sound judgment when dealing with winter weather.  Though my first year at Ithaca I have seen it snow a number of times and have never been overly concerned about either my safety in getting to classes or missed a significant number of classes.  Over this semester it has snowed a number of times.  Each time it has snowed I have watched as people shoveled and plowed as the snow fell to prevent the snow from piling up.  The two times where this has not been so were on the weekend and at night.  On those nights I saw very little efforts and paths became wide enough for one or two people.  However, the college quickly made up for their lack of action the next day.  Before 7:00 there were plows clearing the roads.  Before classes the paths were once again manageable.  Of the two times classes were canceled i only disagree with one.  that day i could easily walk from my dorm in the lower quads to friends still wearing my shoes with gaping holes.  I am well aware that the reason for canceling classes in the morning was for students living off campus and faculty who were worried about driving in the snow.  Today is in fact where I have seen a real reason to cancel class.  I got up at seven out of habit and after learning that classes had been canceled went to the lounge to look out the window.  Outside I saw that the roads were completely covered in snow and watched as cars inched up the road.  The paths outside were not much better.  On the ground was maybe a foot of snow on the path and some of the dorms had not even been plowed.  Because of the roads the dining halls were closed and I could not eat.  Deciding to find out what the rest of the college was like i began walking towards towers.  The paths there were even worse.  There had obviously been not effort to clear the snow and paths were one person paths of trampled snow.  The steps were a combination of sliding and stumbling to get up and down.  Today is definitely a snow day and I am glad the college agrees with me.

SAT/ACT

I believe that the SAT/ACT or any standardized test cannot hope to gauge whether a student will preform well their first year of college.  Because I have only taken the SAT I will keep my discussion to that.  The SAT is a test and like any other test can be studied for.  I know of many friends who spend two years preparing for the SAT with review books, word a day programs and tutors.  They preformed phenomenally well on the test and went on to apply to reputable colleges with essays they spent a year working on.  However, their grades for much of high school were average and aside from the studying they did for the SAT they never really studied for their tests.  As a result many of them have had trouble their first year and have done poorly or in some cases transferred to easier colleges.  The SAT is not nearly as useful as high school records because consistency matters more then a single performance.  Students who show a willingness to study material and ask questions in class will most likely do far better of the course of a year then those who cram for a single test.  Another problem in the SAT is its use of sections.  Many colleges only look at the math and verbal sections and completely ignore the writing.  A poor performance in one of these categories can lead to a low score and writing which is so important in college is looked over because colleges have their own way they would like you to write.  Simply because you have a natural affinity for numbers could allow you to have a higher score even though you enter a major where very little math is required.  In addition a person can choose to retake the SAT as many times as they want and only their highest scores will be kept.  Scores a little lower then you expected them to be?  Study and take it again; and just to be sure ignore the other sections and focus your attention entirely on verbal.  while the idea of a single test that you cannot retake decides your future of college is equally idiotic the grade shopping prevents students from applying to a college that is appropriate for them and can lead to a poor performance.  The writing section of the SAT is also foolishly ignored.  Colleges instead draw upon high school grades and essays submitted to judge a applicants ability.  Unfortunately high school is much easier then college and you can hire tutors or consult teachers to improve you essay.  The essays that you are required to submit are often short so thousands of them can be more easily reviewed.  This is not the same expectation as in college where you are expected to write long essays.  School papers are also not up to the challenge of determining a students performance in the first year.  Papers in school often do not exceed a certain range and as a result when in college you can be surprised by new requirements of styles of writing.  Even to the Writing SAT cannot judge how a student will do on a paper that can take days or weeks to write but it can judge how well a student can think.  The SAT gives question and allows you to answer it in any way you see fit similarly to many midterms in college which is then ignored. In one of my classes last semester 40% of our grade came from our final which was a choice of questions based around American history.  This format was nearly the same as the SAT but a student who did poorly on the written section that was then ignored would very likely do poorly on it.  The SAT is a test that can gauge a students abilities but over the years has become easy to study and prepare for and as a result cannot be used to gauge a students performance in their first year of college.

Perfect day

For me a perfect day is somewhere between 60-40 degrees Fahrenheit.  I hate sweating so anything that is near body temperature is far to high.  I also want to be able to wear a tee shirt so the range of 60-40 allows you to play sports comfortably.  The humidity would of course be zero.  There would be the smallest possible breeze, no huge gusts or any other wind.  Wind is terrible for sports like tennis or frisbee and can make just walking a huge annoyance especially if you have to walk directly into it.  A small breeze just allows the air to move but does nothing else; hats should not go flying and the trees should be silent.  On my perfect day the sun is completely out.  The sun is always a good thing.  It leaves a warm feeling on your skin, brings out color in everything it's light touches and just makes you want to go outside.  My perfect day is always in Fall.  Spring the flowers are blooming and the bees are out and it always seems to rain, Summer is always hot and humid and Winter no one ever wants to go outside.  Fall is a time to take walks for fun and see the leaves change color.  Any perfect day should of course be on a Saturday.  Saturdays are free they don't have any work like the weekdays and there is no sense of dread that you get on a Sunday.  My perfect day would never have any scedule to it.  It could be in the city, on the beach, in the woods for all I care.  It would be a day entirely devoted to finding stuff to do rather then planning for it to happen.

sports

Professional athletes are way overpaid in my opinion.  I am by no means saying that what they can do is not remarkable or that it is not entertaining to watch them occasionally but I believe that they receive to much money for the risk they are subject to and the amount they contribute to society.

The first matter I would like to discuss is the risk that professional athletes are subject to.  While I cannot deny that football players and hockey players can be seriously hurt, but at the same time the risk they run is comparatively small compared to policemen, firefighters and military personnel.  Why we glorify athletes who break laws and hurt people while underpay police and others who will forever be beyond me.  Firefighters who risk their lives every time they are called for should be able to live their lives in comfort when they retire and military personnel should not fear losing their livelihood because they are injured protecting their country.

Another reason I believe that athletes are overpaid is because of their contributions to society.  I spent a year doing public service and in all my time working in a school I encountered professional athletes twice; once when reading a book to a second grader and again when a kid compared himself to Lebron James in the schoolyard.  I am not saying that athletes are not valuable role models for children.  Sports are a good way to stay fit, meet new people and just have fun.  I can recall many times while I was in school when other kids named athletes as their hero for their hard work and determination.  But why do we not also recognize other figures who have can serve as role models for children.  A single good teacher can change a child's outlook in school for a whole year and encourage them to continue their education. But while education is on the minds of America teachers still are paid less then what many deserve and many schools struggle with funding.  I would much rather children receive the education they deserve, because teachers are not afraid to enter the profession because of low pay or if they decide to cannot do their best due to lack of resources.

Professional athletes should be drawn to the sport because they love it, not because they are drawn to the money.  They should be paid based on the risk they are exposed to, the time they must commit to say at their level and yes for being the best there are at what they do.  But in comparison they are truly overpaid to others who are more important to our society.