NBN Magazine Fall 2018

Over shot.

How student-athletes struggle to juggle rigorous academics and Big Ten athletics

contents 15 05

dance floor

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Life advice Been there, bun that Best food forward Campus critters Catch my thrift Top 10 top 10s

16-17 18-19 20-21 22-23 24-25 26-28 29-31 32-33 34-35 36

Ahead of the game On call Smitten in the mitten Caring through comics Go U Northwestern, I forget this line Who’s your caddie?

Disaster at a distance This is fine Chicago bucket list Four student start-ups you’ve never heard of

37 features

37-40 When you can’t afford to work for free 41-45 Bienen blues 46-49 Imperfect but imperative 50-54 Tackling the hyphen

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hangover 56-57 How to lose a guy in 10 weeks 58 Which Northwestern stereotypical career are you?

59-61 Stuck in the Mudd 62 The good, the BDE and the ugly 63 CTEC Mad Libs

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE SPOT IN CHICAGO?

follow me @thefoodiefriend on Instagram to find out

Wicker Park thrift stores along Milwaukee

NORTH BY NORTHWESTERN print managing editor Meg Pisarczyk creative director Lucy Dwyer senior features editors Paola de Varona, Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff senior section editors Duncan Agnew, Emma Kumer, Milan Polk associate editors Elizabeth Guthrie, Mila Jasper assistant editor Daniel Fernandez designers Claire Bugos, Emily Cerf, Fullerton Beach Savannah Christensen, Aine Dougherty, Andie Linker, Audrey Valbuena, Sarah Zhang art director Rachel Hawley artists Savannah Christensen, Rachel Hawley, Emma Kumer, Rita Liu, Audrey Valbuena, Sarah Zhang photo director Sakke Overlund assistant photo director Emily Cerf photographers Nikita Amir, Emily Cerf, Savannah Christensen, Aine Dougherty, Sakke Overlund, Stephanie J. Shin Flaco’s Tacos web liaison Audrey DeBruine researchers Andres Correa, David Deloso, Sophia Lo, Kalen Luciano, Carlyn Kranking, Jess Mordacq, Hannah Ni’Shuillea, Arielle Schwartz, Aaron Wang, Clarissa Wong, Emily Wong, Stephanie Zhu, Abbey Zhu

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM editor-in-chief Maggie Harden executive editor David Gleisner managing editors Elissa Gray, Priyanka Godbole, Mia Mamone assistant managing editors Karli Goldenberg, Elly Rivera senior news editor Carlyn Kranking senior features editor Katie Rothstein life & style editors Rita Liu, Zoe Grossinger entertainment editor Jordan Moreau The Art Institute of sports editors Shreyas Iyer, Jono Zarrilli Chicago politics editor Maggie Kates writing editor Brennen Bariso opinion editor Augusta Saraiva assistant opinion editor Courtney Lewis science and tech editor Ryan Wagner photo and video editor Kathryn Mohr The Winter Garden in the Harold Washington Library interactive editor Audrey DeBruine graphics Rachel Hawley audio editor Madison Dong audio assistant Kiara Joseph identities editors Cayla Clements, Adam Mahoney, Nadine Daher

NORTH BY NORTHWESTERN, CORPORATE publisher Victoria Alfred-Levow director of ad sales Lilli Boice director of recruitment Lila Reynolds director of development Morgan Smith wellness chair Alex Groenendaal-Jones social media coordinator Rachel Frazin webmaster Maxine Whitely

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Record Breakers in Logan Square

COVER DESIGN LUCY DWYER | COVER PHOTO SAKKE OVERLUND

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Life advice with Gerry Chiaro Been there, bun that Best food forward Campus critters Catch my thrift Top 10 top 10s FALL 2018 5

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BY DAN ROSENZWEIGZIFF DESIGNED BY EMILY CERF

G

erry Chiaro found his way to Northwestern after the 2008 recession left him questioning his career in the marketing industry. Now in an educational role he says he was always destined for, Chiaro leads IMC’s immersion quarter, where graduate students get paired with companies in a marketing role to get hands-on work in their desired fields. Having experienced his share of hardships, including the death of his father and a health scare that left him questioning if he would live past 40, Chiaro finds peace in baseball, which links four generations of his family together. Through lessons learned while working at nationally-recognized brands PepsiCo and McDonalds, Chiaro preaches to his students the idea of taking risks and tackling big issues through positive energy.

On students who are struggling: “You don’t realize how special and gifted you are because everyone around you is that. So you compete against the cream of the crop, the top one or two percent in your age group in the entire world. And it’s just not going to be like that when you get out. It won’t be as intense or competitive as you’re putting on yourselves. So take care of yourself.

Go a little bit easy on yourself and realize where you are, what you’ve accomplished and achieved already, and take that to heart.”

Keys to success: “The first one is effort. You have to give everything you’ve got and more sometimes. That’s true in sports, that’s true in life, that’s true in relationships. The second is energy. There’s a bunch of different kinds of energy out there and you want to represent the positive energy. You want to be the one who adds energy to the room, not takes it away. The last one is empathy. You really have to care about what you do and the people you do it with. And if you can just embrace those three things when you’re down and not really feeling like you got it, push a little further.”

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On baseball: “It meant a lot to me in my life. This is the most valuable baseball in the world, because [my son] Michael gave it to me. [Picks up a baseball from his desk.] This was the last game he pitched. He came off the field and gave me the ball and said, ‘This is for you.’ A week before, he had pitched another really good game in West Virginia and then came home to see my father who was very ill. We went and saw my dad and my dad passed away that same night. He almost waited to see Michael. He went back to finish up his season and I went to the final game and he came off the field and gave me this. He had my dad’s initials on his hat. He said, ‘This is for Grandpa Alex.’

And then I think about how I got this passion for the game. All of that is symbolized in this one little baseball.”

On listening to advice: “Back when I was with PepsiCo, one of the reports on me came back that said my skills were better set for teaching, and I didn’t believe it. I thought, ‘I’m on track to be an executive in this company, and why would it be different?

What did I miss?’ It took years to internalize that I was wrong. You get these different signals in your life and career that you need to do something, whether it’s switch your job or ask someone to marry you or decide to have a family. I guess this just came at the right time for me.

If the recession didn’t hit and I was continuing to be as successful at securing clients and earning a living for my family, I probably would have never opened this up.” *This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

ILLUSTRATION BY RITA LIU

Before there was Postmates, late-night or Burger King, there was The Sandwich Man. WRITTEN BY AUGUSTA VICTORIA SARAIVA DESIGNED BY CLAIRE BUGOS

A

fter returning from serving in the Navy during World War II, William “Bill” Froehlig enrolled at Northwestern, along with other soldiers in the postwar boom. His dorm was one of the many military-style tents installed on Deering Meadow to house all the veteran students coming back from the war. That’s where Bill, tall and strong from his days in the Navy but also softspoken and kind, started the first studentrun business on campus and began his legacy as “The Sandwich Man.” Bill, who passed away at the age of 92 this fall, was always an entrepreneur.

At age 10, he started a business selling and delivering bread and angel food cakes on his bicycle. His industrious spirit continued when he enrolled at Northwestern to study biology. In 1946, he started selling grilled peanut butter and jelly and grilled cheese sandwiches to his neighbors on Deering Meadow to make extra money. He became famous for his sandwiches, which fed Northwestern students for more than four decades.

In 1947, while still an undergrad at Northwestern, Bill married his wife Donna, and the two began their family, which would eventually grow to include six children. His business quickly became lucrative, and he saw in the sandwich market an opportunity to pay for school while supporting his family. By selling sandwiches from his cart on Deering Meadow and delivering to fraternity houses and dorms, he was able to build his family’s house in Northbrook and pay for both his undergraduate degree and graduate studies at Northwestern’s School of Education. After receiving his MA, Bill became a math and science high school teacher – though he kept his sandwich-selling side hustle.

After five years of teaching, he quit his job to dedicate his career fully to his business. He and Donna would make nearly 20 different types of sandwiches, including tuna, chicken salad, peanut butter and jelly and the most popular, ham and cheese. Bill delivered the sandwiches

on his 100-pound cart and blew his signature whistle to alert the students that he had arrived.

Sometimes a workforce composed of his six children accompanied him, and in later years, his dog Champ tagged along.

His daughter Jane Walsh remembers going with him during one “cold and exhausting” winter when she was 11.

Although Bill was a campus superstar for decades, he still faced some enmity from Northwestern’s administration.

In 1959, the Northwestern deans accused him of solicitation and prohibited him from selling sandwiches on campus. The fraternities took out standing orders for his sandwiches each night, which allowed him to continue his business.

Students threatened to boycott other campus food services and gathered over 700 signatures for a petition to keep Bill in business. The University reversed the policy five years later, allowing his business to run for nearly 30 more years. For Terrence Beverly (Weinberg ‘88), Bill and his sandwiches are “a very fond memory at NU.” “His interactions with the students was always warm and genuine,” Terrence says. “And that whistle! When we heard that whistle, it was a signal to take a break from studies and grab a snack … I thought buying food from his cart was a little odd at first, but I soon got with the program. It quickly grew from being odd, to looking forward to his whistle with great anticipation.”

Now, as new student-run businesses and start-ups are frequently created at Northwestern, the memory of their indirect patron lives on. The Sandwich Man, who took late-night orders before Subway and Burger King existed, and delivered to every campus corner long before Postmates and Grubhub, left a legacy through both his business and his kindness. Jane described his sense of humor as “wonderfully odd,” and said that he loved to laugh. Many photos of him in his later years show a happy man with a white beard, a black top hat and a cheerful grin. After Bill passed away, James Moore wrote in his online guestbook, “I practically lived on those sandwiches as an undergraduate in Evanston. Bill worked as hard as any one I knew and is the only person I can think of who seemed to be liked by every single person he touched.”

Been there, bun that

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY RACHEL HAWLEY

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Best food forward These three new Evanston eateries will fill the Cheesie’s-shaped hole in your heart.

WRITTEN BY ZOE GROSSINGER // DESIGNED BY AINE DOUGHERTY

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f you remember anything from your Northwestern tour, the words “Dining capital of the North Shore” might ring a bell. It may be hard to believe that this refers to Evanston, given the tragic goodbyes we said to Cheesie’s and Lyfe Kitchen last year.

But it’s time to move on from mourning and embrace the new spots for munchies and mingling that have opened up across town.

Matcha soft serve with oreo from 10Q Korean BBQ bowl from 10Q

10Q Chicken The decor of 10Q is simple — metal tables and white walls are accentuated with a neon “10Q Chicken” sign and trendy letter board menus that look like they are asking to be featured on someone's Instagram feed. But this simplicity is what gives 10Q a perfect college town vibe. The restaurant's lofty acoustics make it the kind of place where you can talk and laugh in the company of close friends without worrying about being too loud or annoying to the people next to you. As its name suggests, 10Q's menu is centered around chicken: panko tenders, flavorful bowls with meat and rice, sandwiches and wings. Most of these options are priced between $7 and $8, offering a competitively-priced alternative to the average meal at Chipotle. If you're looking for a trendy treat, 10Q also serves matcha ice cream for less than $4.

The first time I went to 10Q, I was slightly disappointed with the Katsu bowl I ordered.

The bowl was filled with pankofried chicken breast pieces, katsu aioli, white rice and greens, but the rice took up too much real estate in the bowl and the dish initially seemed bland. Drizzling the white aioli sauce made an ordinary dish feel more substantial, and the creamy sauce paired with the panko-crusted chicken created a new twist on comfort food. I visited again and got the Korean BBQ bowl, which features barbecue chicken and the same accoutrements as the Katsu bowl, and was pleasantly surprised by its unique kick of flavor. I preferred the Korean BBQ bowl to the Katsu, but the matcha soft-serve with Oreo powder was my favorite part.

What's missing from Evanston's food scene?

“Places that are open late.

Like, Insomnia and Burger King are the only places that are open late. Everything closes at like 9 p.m. When you’re studying you’re like ‘Wow, can’t go to get food!

Gotta go to Sargent!’”

– Britt Bommer, Weinberg sophomore

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“Evanston is missing some dank Hawaiian food. I’m from San Diego, so you got Hawaiian food all around. We need some spam musubis and, like, some barbecue chicken and some short ribs and stuff."

– Brandon Kulik, Weinberg first-year

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Falcon Eddy's When I walked into Falcon Eddy’s Texas Barbeque, I was transported to a saloon in the Wild West. Cowboy boots and hats, American flags and a collection of patriotic posters decorate the space, and the red, white and blue color scheme creates a quintessentially American environment to complement the menu. Falcon Eddy’s offers sandwiches and plates of brisket, ribs, pork, chicken and sausage. Prices typically range from $9 to $12, but some entrees are significantly more expensive, and adding sides like mac and cheese, coleslaw and beans quickly adds up.

I ordered the pulled chicken sandwich with a side of large

fries. The sandwich was piled high with smoked chicken between two pillow-like Hawaiian style buns. There were several unique sauces on each table, and I doused the chicken with at least half of them to get a large sampling.

My favorite was the Original Falcon Eddy’s BBQ sauce, because it gave the chicken a sweet and tempting burst of flavor – my mouth is watering just thinking about it. The fries were piping hot, layered with oregano, salt and a mix of other mysterious spices, and well worth the extra $4.

My appetite was completely satisfied by the end of the meal — I got a great bang for my buck at Falcon Eddy's.

Pulled chicken sandwich from Falcon Eddy’s

Soban Korea Just west of campus, situated

by D&D Finer Foods, is Soban Korea. The restaurant's rustic brick walls, stained glass light fixtures and wooden, roomy booths create an atmosphere more formal than the other two spots I visited. Additionally, the comfortable booths provide an energy that is simultaneously relaxing and therapeutic; Soban Korea is perfect for rewarding yourself after a long week of classes. The menu offers appetizers like dumplings and small dishes of noodles, a comprehensive selection of soups, fried food, rice, barbecue and stir fry. Price-wise, almost everything is under $15.

I ordered a “Refreshing Milk & Yogurt Flavor” carbonated drink called Milkis to start the night, and then a chicken

dolsot bibimbap and mandu gook soup. The bibimbap came in an audibly sizzling stone bowl and was filled with rice, vegetables, chicken and a fried egg. The savory and salty flavors in the bowl mingled perfectly and made every bite feel distinct yet complete. I wasn’t ready for how large the serving of mandu gook soup was, though. In a giant bowl of chicken broth, there were half a dozen beef dumplings, a cooked egg and green onions. I was full after eating a majority of the bibimbap and half of the steaming soup. The food comes in surprisingly large servings and is comforting as well as flavorful and substantial, making this my favorite spot out of the three restaurants I tried.

Japchae from Soban Korea

PHOTOS BY AINE DOUGHERTY

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Campus An ode to the creatures we’re fawning over.

J

onathan David didn’t know what to think when he returned to his dorm last spring and found a group of people standing near the entrance, staring at something hidden by the greenery.

“I look over, and suddenly I see this little head poking out and lo and behold, it’s a newborn fawn,” says the RTVF sophomore. “Just, a deer. Just standing in the bushes.”

David says it’s not out of the ordinary to see an assortment of animals around West Fairchild.

He listed off the various squirrels, skunks, opossums, raccoons, chipmunks and rabbits he’s seen within the year he’s been at school.

But he was still surprised when a family of five deer took up temporary residence outside the dorm after the mother gave birth to two fawns.

Another bystander called NUPD out of concern for the deer, and the police stopped traffic on Sheridan

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Road so the animals could cross safely. One student carried one of the reluctant fawns across the street.

David wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but eventually it followed its family.

Other students chimed in with their critter sightings, from skunks in the sorority quad and beavers on the Lakefill to stepping on squirrels or (accidentally) punting skunks.

“It felt like I had kicked plastic, but plastic that was also somehow furry?” School of Communications sophomore James Tsuchiya says. “I looked down and realized that a skunk had been digging around inside of a plastic cup … But I guess the skunk was so confused that it forgot to spray me, and I escaped unscathed.”

How do these animals live — and seemingly thrive — in such a developed area? Dr. Eli Suzukovich III, an environmental policy and culture professor at Northwestern, says that the campus is really an urban forest.

“Northwestern, I believe, has something like 80 different gardens on campus,” Suzukovich says. “And as a result, there is quite a bit of habitat and greenspace for wildlife to thrive.”

Aside from typical animals students and staff frequently see, there are many creatures that go unnoticed, according to Suzukovich, who also serves on the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council and teaches Northwestern’s famed maple tapping class, Ethnobiology of Maple Syrup.

Northwestern is home to a mink, a fox, a coyote, a family of beavers and various fish and birds, Suzukovich says.

“I think also just because people largely ignore the wildlife, [the animals] tend to do fairly well,” he says.

Climate change may contribute to the high presence of animals on campus. Suzukovich noted the urban geese that are always on the Lakefill don’t migrate south for the winter anymore; they no longer need to

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critters

WRITTEN BY MIA MAMONE // DESIGNED BY ANDIE LINKER

because milder winters contribute to a higher availability of food.

The troublingly large presence of dead birds seen on campus also points to Northwestern’s position as a haven within a developed area. Though much of the bird death is due to exhaustion and flying into glass buildings (cough, new Kellogg and Segal Visitors Center, cough), the fact that they’re here in the first place says a lot.

“One reason [birds] come here is because there’s a lot of habitat for them to actually recoup,” Suzukovich says. “There’s food, there’s everything they need.”

Suzukovich also works closely with Northwestern’s groundskeepers, a collaboration between faculty and facilities he says is uncommon, given their usual separation in the university sphere. Together, they manage the “campus forest” and keep tabs on changes or problems with

ILLUSTRATIONS BY AUDREY VALBUENA

the wildlife. Along with his own research, Suzukovich uses student observations taken from his maple tapping class to alert facilities if something is out of the ordinary.

Steve Camburn, Supervisor of Grounds at Northwestern, says his partnership with Suzukovich has helped his department solve some of the environmental issues on campus. He noted the professor’s study of gypsy moths on campus trees. Suzukovich notified Camburn of moth larva on trees, and groundskeepers were then able to treat the affected plants.

Camburn says their different areas of expertise are complementary.

“I’m very often looking at whether the trees are in need of pruning ... or whether the grass has been maintained correctly,” Camburn says.

“He’s noticing individual migratory birds and identifying them. It was

enlightening to me, because they were all around me.”

Members of the Northwestern community typically coexist peacefully with the campus critters. Camburn says situations when the wildlife gets a little more disruptive, like a family of deer hanging around West Fairchild, are actually few and far between.

“If you really had to deal with an issue like that, you’d have to go through an animal control sort of local service, but very often it takes care of itself,” he says. “If it’s just cutting through campus, you don’t have to do anything.”

So it seems David and his dormmates made the right move in letting the deer just go about their lives.

“Eventually they made their way down Hinman and presumably lived happily ever after in urban Evanston,” David says.

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PHOTOS BY SAKKE OVERLUND & EMILY CERF

Catch my thrift Only got $20 in your pocket?

Avoid Crossroads and hit up these Chicago spots instead.

W

WRITTEN BY RITA LIU // DESIGNED BY AUDREY VALBUENA

e live in an age where thrifting is portrayed in mainstream media by a fur-clad Macklemore coasting on a tiny bike.

While Macklemore glamorizes thrifting, he fails to represent its other virtues: it offers an affordable alternative to the marked-up prices of retail stores, often helps fund charities and is both economically and environmentally conscious.

That said, thrifting has always been a passion of mine. I call it economical fashion, my mom calls it ugly – potato-potahto.

Unfortunately, this hobby has been brought to a screeching halt not only by my utter lack of need for new clothes but also by the shortage of thrift shops in downtown Evanston (Crossroads, due to its carefully curated selections and high prices, does not count). But in the spirit of the new school year, I decided to try out three thrift stores in Chicago. Here’s the verdict:

1 2 3 Village Discount Outlet

Green Element Resale

Goodwill

4898 N Clark St, Chicago, IL 60640 Mondays-Saturdays: 9 a.m. – 9 p.m.

Sundays: 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.

Travel time from the Arch by public transit: 50 min

6241 N Broadway, Chicago, IL 60660 Mondays-Saturdays: 11 a.m. - 7 p.m.

Sunday: 12 p.m. - 7 p.m.

Travel time from the Arch by public transit: 38 min

1916 Dempster Street, Evanston, IL 60202 Mondays-Saturdays: 9 a.m. - 9 p.m.

Sunday: 10 a.m. - 8 p.m.

Travel time from the Arch by public transit: 18 min

On the Northside of Chicago is Andersonville, the city’s former Swedish neighborhood known for its collection of art galleries, quirky boutiques and abundant collection of thrift shops. Village Discount, in true thrift shop tradition, is a monstrosity of a concrete building located on the outskirts of the neighborhood.

On Saturday, it is filled to the brim with clothes and people — and offers special half-price discounts on certain tag colors.

Because of the sheer size of the store, I decided to enlist some help: Nate, Luis and Ruby, who self identify as “yuppies” and rarely thrift. Surprisingly, they immediately gravitated toward some of the store’s more outlandish items and managed to find a couple that they liked. Fair warning: there are no dressing rooms (which makes no sense — sizing is rather arbitrary in thrift stores) and very limited space among the aisles, so if you want to try anything on, you are forced to covertly change in the crowded aisle. This led to at least one instance of a horrified family trying to squeeze past our group as we got stuck in our clothes. We emerged an hour and a half later, with a grand total of four sweaters, a skirt, jumpsuit and an orange child’s vest for Luis’s dog, Squash (she was a pumpkin for Halloween). The total came out to under $40 for all of our purchases, which, in my opinion, qualifies as a win.

Green Element is a resale store situated a block or two away from Loyola. Besides clearly taking pride in the environmental benefits of thrift shopping, they also boast a wider variety of items that are up for purchase. While many thrift stores emphasize their stock of used clothes, more than half of this store is devoted to an extensive and diverse collection of furniture, records and every single homeware item that you could possibly think of — from VCR players to ladders to old charging cables. As a side note, the red statue in the window is $400 for anyone interested — it’s unclear if the Spiderman mask is an additional charge.

The furniture is surprisingly expensive — $200 for a couch, which seems pricey when you still have to spend considerable effort trying to clean it. Their sizable clothing selection had a lack of price tags, but did feature an impressively large amount of Northwestern gear. With some further investigation — aka Google Reviews — it seems that the clothes range from $1-15, although some reviewers complain about price gouging. Overall, this doesn’t seem to be the best place to swipe a bargain, although it feels like an extremely unorganized version of what I imagine the Room of Requirement to be.

If you need anything obscure or random, you could probably find it here.

Of course, no thrift haul would be complete without the mother of all thrift shops — Goodwill. With their emphasis on philanthropy and their presence in just about every community of the country, Goodwill is the most traditional thrift store on this list. It also happens to be my thrift store of choice when I’m home. This particular one is tucked into a corner of a strip mall on the outskirts of Evanston, a mere 18 minute bus ride away from campus. It’s pretty sizable, but more airy and less intimidating than Village Discount. One of my favorite things is to see how the population and style of a certain area is reflected in the selection available at a thrift store, and that effect is apparent at the Evanston Goodwill. The items were a bit preppier than I’m used to — I spotted a couple Vineyard Vines shirts, which are usually (for obvious reasons) a rarity in resale stores. I seem to have gone on a bad day, because the pickings were a bit sparse, but there is never a shortage of outrageously sparkly and voluminous prom dresses, so we tried on a couple for the fun of it. I left with a $5 black duster coat, mildly disappointed at the selection. Despite this, I will probably still be coming back when I am in dire need for a “business casual” outfit — bless Evanston area soccer moms for donating their slacks.

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WORST LOOKING GUYS

According to the incredibly trustworthy College Confidential, you’re more likely to swipe left than right on Tinder when searching for hot guys within a 5-mile radius.

If you’re really committed to finding the perfect 10, you’re better off making the trek to Loyola or DePaul.

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TOP TEN

TOP TENS With Northwestern’s new and improved U.S. News ranking, it’s hard not to feel proud that you go to a Top 10 school. Of course, academic ranking certainly merits recognition, but Northwestern excels in more than just education. Here’s a list of the best (and worst) our school has to offer.

WRITTEN BY CLARISSA WONG DESIGNED BY SAVANNAH CHRISTENSEN

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BEST (MOST DIFFICULT) CHEM DEPARTMENT

If there’s one thing that unites every college in the U.S. it’s pre-med kids who whine about their rigorous course load. Northwestern is especially notorious for its challenging STEM classes, particularly in the chemistry department.

When conversing with pre-med students, avoid the following trigger words: orgo, physio, GPA and MCAT.

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BEST VALUE COLLEGE IN THE CHICAGO AREA Good news — your $75k tuition isn’t going to waste! According to Niche, out of 38 schools in the Chicago area, Northwestern is worth the most for its price tag. Though you’ve probably experienced your fair share of quarter-life crises, sobbed about the absence of ice rinks and contemplated dropping out to flip burgers instead, you can rest easy knowing that your money is well spent.

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BEST STUDENT VOTER TURNOUT

Northwestern’s impressive alumni list includes Hollywood big shots like Stephen Colbert, Julia LouisDreyfus and David Schwimmer.

According to Niche, we’re ranked the no. 1 school for communications and the no.

3 school for performing arts.

Who would have guessed that Ross from “Friends” received the best college education out of the group?

Despite the relatively low voter turnout in the 18-24 age range, Northwestern students are doing their civic duty. Let’s keep it up – maybe by 2020, we’ll no longer have a president who sends angry tweets for a living.

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MOST LIKELY TO BECOME ROYALTY

BEST COLLEGE FOR COMM MAJORS

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Meghan Markle is the first American to marry into the British royal family. Her alma mater? Northwestern, of course.

It won’t be long before Prince George will be looking for a fianceé, so now that Markle has impressed the British public and even the Queen herself, who knows? Maybe the next brideto-be will also be a Wildcat.

BEST SCHOOL PRIDE

There are football games, and then there are Big 10 football games, and then there are Northwestern vs. Notre Dame games. Anyone who’s ever been to a home game has witnessed the sea of purple pride and heard the Fight Song enough times to know it by heart. Even if the extent of your sports knowledge doesn’t go past Wii bowling, be sure to attend at least one game during your time here.

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BEST DRUNK FOOD

Anyone who’s ever been to Fran’s past 1 a.m. knows that grilled cheese and waffle fries are objectively the best foods to eat while in a less-than-sober state.

With unparalleled customer service and a menu that lives up to its hype, Fran’s never disappoints.

Still, it’s a shame that Cheesie’s is no longer with us. RIP.

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BEST SPORTS COMPLEX

Accessible to all! Budgetcrisis friendly! Put to good use!

These are things that the Ryan Fieldhouse is definitely not, but it doesn’t matter because our very own Morty Schapiro claims that it’s the best sports complex of its kind. Even though you can’t get into the building, you sure can admire its swanky facade from the outskirts. Then, knowing that you’ll never have the physical ability to qualify as a studentathlete, you can sadly walk to SPAC and bench press while listening to The Fray.

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BEST COLLEGE MUSIC FESTIVAL

With Dillo Day artists like Chance the Rapper, Kendrick Lamar and the iconic Smash Mouth, it’s no surprise that Northwestern’s annual student-run music festival is one of the biggest and best among colleges in the U.S. Disclaimer: no real armadillos have ever been spotted on Northwestern’s campus.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY SAVANNAH CHRISTENSEN AND EMMA KUMER

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Ahead of the game On call Smitten in the mitten Caring through comics Go U Northwestern, I forget this line Who’s your caddie?

Disaster at a distance This is fine Chicago bucket list Four student start-ups you’ve never heard of

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Ahead of the game These students created a board game to combat climate change before it’s too late.

WRITTEN BY ELLY RIVERA // DESIGNED BY ANDIE LINKER AND EMMA KUMER

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magine your favorite apocalyptic movie, with its withered Earth, demolished by disaster and plagued by famine. This seems to be a worst-case scenario: you can watch the movie and move on, forgetting that, in a few years’ time, we could be living in a world tantamount to the ones pictured on the silver screen. Weinberg senior Rebecca Fudge and SESP junior Ronni Hayden wondered if there was a way to emulate that same message, yet make it last, when they created their board game Road to 2030.

In the current version, each player is a United Nations representative for their imaginary country. Instead of trying to complete the tasks alone, all the players must work together to maneuver through the board by hitting checkpoints, trading solution cards with each other and collecting Lego bricks to keep track of progress.

Getting her game on While Fudge was studying abroad in Copenhagen, she found herself inspired in a class about Sustainable Development in Northern Europe. A lifelong proponent of sustainability, Fudge discovered that a group activity on making environmentally focused decisions was something she wanted to take home with her.

The activity asked students to create a game centered around the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), something Fudge feels most Americans aren’t familiar 16 FALL 2018

with. She says that everyone was excited about the activity, but she was the only one who went to an optional day of class to work on it.

“People from my class would play it and helped me work on it and stuff, so it was definitely not an individual effort,” Fudge says. “But I was definitely the only one who wanted to turn this into something big. It was always my goal that in Copenhagen I would find some way to build some project around sustainability.”

Testing the waters Fudge worked with Emmanuel Gentil, an assistant director and lecturer for the Danish Institute for Study Abroad, to set up testing times in Copenhagen this past summer. Gentil, who Fudge describes as “a pool of knowledge about sustainability,” aided her by supervising the testing and giving feedback on how to improve the game. He initially thought he would be the one developing the game to use with his students, but after mentioning the idea to Fudge, she decided to make it happen.

“I have realized that teaching a topic using a game format was a very effective way to engage with students and to get a high level of learning retention,” Gentil says. “This has proved true with younger students in high school, where their level of focus remained high for an extended period of time.”

In Denmark, students are taught the

importance of sustainability from K-12, but American students often don’t learn this information until college. Gentil says he hopes Road to 2030, which is targeted toward educating middle and high schoolers, will help bridge the gap in teaching sustainability in the U.S. “It is essential to teach about sustainability and to learn about it, to shape our world view values and make better choices, whether it is how we consume, how we eat, how we travel, or which job we decide,” Gentil says. “At the end of the day, learning about sustainability is essential because it can enhance overall wellbeing and happiness.”

Designing the project Hayden, a friend of Fudge’s, joined the project after transferring to SESP to study learning sciences. Fudge knew that Hayden had a strong design background, and she needed someone who could complement her research and revise the original prototype. This summer, it took her roughly ten hours to finish the playing cards, and she spent another three hours per week readjusting the game after testing. Hayden expressed frustration with working within the limits of the UN’s color palette, but she was still able to stick with their original idea by using Illustrator, Photoshop and a website called Coolors.

“I had to work within those guidelines, and then just make it as easy to follow along with as possible because we want it to be

DANCE FLOOR

able to be played in classrooms,” Hayden says. “So you should be able to pick it up really quickly, which is why we played around with having icons versus just doing color-based.”

One of the inspirations for Road to 2030 was Evolution, a board game about adapting to a

changing climate. Fudge and Hayden said they wanted a game that was more complex than Candyland, but not one that people didn’t want to play, which was how they felt after reading the extensive instructions for Evolution.

Hayden, an avid board game enthusiast herself — her mom buys their family a board game every Christmas — redesigned the game path from a spiral to a rainbow colored trail of spaces, keeping in mind that the game is for a youthful audience.

Feedback The SDGs target specific areas of need that the UN would like to improve by 2030. Among these issues are poverty, gender equality and climate action, which are each represented in the board game by colors and icons the UN had already incorporated. Players are also required to write their own legislation, which is a common complaint Fudge and Hayden have received while testing it.

“The younger kids definitely complained that it was too hard,” Fudge

says. “I was thinking, ‘That’s great! You were challenged.’”

Roughly 300 people have tested the game, and Gentil says that not a single person has disliked it so far. In Copenhagen, about 20-25 high school students in each test group played the game in a classroom.

It was actually during one of these testing sessions that the name Road to 2030 was suggested, and they’ve used it ever since.

Fudge and Hayden were accepted in late September to the Garage, NU’s

may seem far away, but the effects of issues reflected in the SDGs are currently present. The U.S. alone counts for roughly a quarter of the negative SDG spillovers, the consequences of one country that affect economic, environmental and societal outcomes in another country.

“I just think that if people are exposed

incubator for student entrepreneurship and innovation.

They are hoping to manufacture the game in a way that will “align with the sustainable mission.” The game is currently

Next steps made of bleached paper and plastic materials. Fudge says that using sustainable and recyclable materials like wood or metal would be ideal. Another goal is making the game more accessible to teachers, who they hope will incorporate the game into their curriculum.

In terms of the bigger picture, Hayden says she hopes students learn that the sustainability goals exist, and that there are tangible solutions, both on a personal and governmental level, that they can implement to reach these goals. 2030

to ideas about sustainability when they are young and thinking about the career they want, and kind of forming their own ideas about the world, that will make the biggest difference,” Fudge says.

FALL 2018 17

ILLUSTRATED BY AUDREY VALBUENA

On Call On call

Being an RA comes with free room, board, dining, and a $500 stipend. So why is it the worst job on campus?

PHOTO BY SAKKE OVERLUND

Being an RA comes with free room, board, dining and a $1500 stipend.

So why is it the worst job on campus?

W

WRITTEN BY ELIZABETH GUTHRIE // DESIGNED BY AUDREY VALBUENA

hen McCormick junior and former Resident Assistant (RA) Noah Alvarado decided to go on an Alternative Student Break trip last winter break, he let his Resident Director (RD) know immediately. Although the trip was months away, he needed permission from his RD to leave during finals week rather than stay the extra three days required for RAs to do room checks. His RD approved his request to leave early, so he was shocked to learn at the end of the quarter that he was on probation due to the early departure.

But probation wasn’t the end of it – when Alvarado returned for winter quarter, he was let go from the position entirely.

Resident Directors had conducted room checks of the RAs’ rooms over the break and found beer in his closet. They claimed they could see alcohol from his open closet door, but Alvarado is confident they searched through his room, which is against the University’s policy. However, before being fired, Alvarado already decided not to continue his job as an RA. “I was planning on just finishing the year out and not applying again,” he says.

“I wasn’t really getting any benefit.”

An RA’s duties are extensive – they have to take care of residents’ issues, deal with maintenance problems like broken water fountains, decorate bulletin boards each month, attend weekly meetings and do shifts at the RA desk and as the RA on duty, which means they must be available in the building. In return, they receive a stipend of $500 per quarter and free room and board. Free housing was the main reason Alvarado applied for the job, but it came with a catch: the financial aid office treated the free room and board like an outside scholarship, which means it was deducted from his financial aid.

“There basically wasn’t really any change in how much I was paying for school,” he says. “So that was really unfortunate.”

Alvarado’s relationship with his RD was another reason he didn’t mind leaving the RA job. “There was a lot of tension between me and my boss,” he says. “None of us really had a great relationship with [her].”

He also felt that the Residential Services administration was mostly talk and no action. For example, they expected

RAs to hold more events so that residents could have fun in the dorms. But they didn’t give them any extra funding, and also didn’t seem to consider how extra duties would impact the RAs. “There’s only so much that an RA can do from a time perspective. I don’t have time to host an event every week,” he says.

Associate Director of Residential Life Paul Hubinsky understands that the duties can be overwhelming for students. “It’s a job and a leadership position. It’s demanding,” he says. “I think the reality of getting into that job could be a little different for some folks, and it’s a little harder to balance than they thought it might be.”

When RAs feel overwhelmed with their duties, they should be able to turn to their RD, their direct supervisor, for help. Each RA has bi-weekly meetings with their supervisor so they can bring up issues they may have with the job. “That person’s role is really to help support them through those difficult times when it might become a little bit too much for them, or they might feel overwhelmed by responsibilities,” says Nikki Dunham, Assistant Director of Residential Life.

DANCE FLOOR But Weinberg senior and former RA Yesh Vempati says there was little understanding of students’ busy schedules.

“Residential Life is incredibly inefficient, and they don’t really take into account students’ time or schedules,” Vempati says. He felt unsupported by his supervisor. They seemed understanding at first, but in performance reviews they left negative comments about him not spending enough time in the building.

“They would be like, ‘Oh, let me know if you need help,’ but at the same time, their actions contradicted what they would say.”

Former RA and Weinberg junior Yuxi Han’s experience was more ideal. “I consider the one-on-ones more as a session that I can just like maybe complain about something that I’m not happy with, or just a regular catch-up,” she says.

There are many avenues for RAs to give feedback on their supervisors and issues with the RA position – they’re encouraged to give feedback in one-on-one sessions, they fill out anonymous surveys at the end of every fall quarter, and the Director of Residential Life facilitates an RA advisory board. Hubinsky says the board has used the feedback, such as adjusting the hours for RA desk duty.

However, Vempati didn’t see any change. “You could always give feedback, but it was pretty much never heard,” he says. “So you just kind of have to deal with it, which is why a lot of RAs that I know quit.”

Ultimately, it led Vempati to quit as well. “I didn’t think I could do one more year of that,” he says. “It’s kind of condescending the way they treat RAs, and I didn’t want to be a part of that.”

Another aspect of the job that bothered Alvarado was the inconsistency. “If your boss doesn’t like you, you’re kind of screwed,” he says. “But if you stay on her good side or whatever, you can probably

get away with anything.”

Alvarado and Vempati both saw this in action when RAs accused with allegations of sexual assault and misconduct were allowed to remain on staff. During her sophomore year, Noelle Ike, a fifth-year dual degree student in Bienen and Medill, found out that an RA sexually assaulted one of her friends, who was also an RA. After her friend came forward, Ike heard other stories of

“I didn’t think I could do one more year of that. It’s kind of condescending the way they treat RAs, and I didn’t want to be a part of that.”

- Yesh Vempati sexual misconduct involving this RA. As these events unfolded, Ike led her first group of PA kids through their first year. She thought about her PA students who lived in this RA’s residence hall and took action to ensure her students and her community would be safe. She and five other students reported his behavior to the Title IX office.

Ultimately, nothing came of these complaints – the RA remained on staff and no action was taken. According to Hubinsky, Res Services follows a specific protocol when Title IX complaints are filed against RAs, and they decide

whether to fire the RA based on the result of the investigation.

But the RA was rehired for the next year, along with the woman he assaulted. She had a restraining order against him, and they had to be in separate rooms during training.

According to an anonymous student, some of the women on his staff were uncomfortable working with him.

He made advances toward them and wouldn’t let up when they said no. Ike and Vempati were both disappointed that the student remained on staff despite the many allegations against him.

“It was so appalling that nothing could happen, because being an RA is a privilege,” Ike says. “We weren’t looking for legal action. We were just asking that he doesn’t have privileges above what any student would have.”

The University is conducting an Undergraduate Residential Experience Initiative, a plan to transform student housing and the residential experience. Res Services is figuring out what that means for the RA job, an essential question as Res Services plans the upcoming initiative. “It’s very very important to us to get the RA role right,” Dunham says. “To make it feasible to integrate with the very fast-paced, high academic achieving environment of Northwestern, so that we can support our student leaders as people, as students and as RAs.” However, it seems that there is a disparity between the transformation Res Services envisions and the former RAs expectations. Han, Alvarado and Vempati all feel that no real change will be made with the initiative.

“They’ll read it, but the chances that they change it is pretty low,” Vempati says. “But maybe they have to keep hearing it until something clicks.”

FALL 2018 19

NBN TRAVELS

Smitten in the Mitten

Check out Northern Michigan for local eats, cherries and small town shops.

WRITTEN AND DESIGNED BY SAVANNAH CHRISTENSEN

PHOTOS BY SAVANNAH CHRISTENSEN

N

orthern Michigan is close to my heart. My parents bought our lake house in Glen Arbor only 10 months after I was born, and it’s where I’ve spent almost every summer since. The quaint little town, part of the greater Sleeping Bear Dunes Lakeshore area, was voted “most beautiful place in America” in an ABC Good Morning America poll in 2011. Even though this part of the state is known for its summer sights, traveling during the fall and winter also offers plenty of unique stops and sights. But don’t just take my word for it — see for yourself.

Getting there: The drive from Evanston is just over six hours, and double that by train. I got there by taking an hour flight from O’Hare into Traverse City; if you’re lucky, you can nab a round trip for around $165.

FRIDAY NIGHT After my dad and I arrived at Cherry Capital Airport (cherries are a big deal up there – we’ll get to that later), about a half hour from Glen Arbor, we decided to grab dinner at Funistrada, a small Italian restaurant on the east side of Glen Lake. The building itself is over 90 years old, and the restaurant has been around since 2000. We said hello to the owner Holly, who’s basically family, and plopped down into the corner booth. If you’re able to visit, order the Anniversary Chicken: it has 20 FALL 2018

a zesty lemon flavor and comes with prosciutto-wrapped asparagus and a side of pasta.

After dinner, we drove up the road to Laker Shakes for dessert, a tiny ice cream parlor that serves Moomer’s Ice Cream, which is made by a familyowned creamery in Traverse City.

year, they close down for a few days just to clean them all and put them back up in a different place. Lately, my favorite thing to do when I visit is to try to find the Northwestern pennant. This time, it took me a few minutes, but I finally found it when

SATURDAY MORNING The next morning, we headed downtown to grab breakfast at Art’s Tavern, which has been open for almost 75 years. When my dad and I walked in at 9 a.m., it was already packed. Art’s is well known to locals for its “burgers and big personality.”

It has that classic diner feel of coziness and comfort. Art’s is also known for its unique collection of college pennants. The entire ceiling of the diner is covered in them. Every A Northwestern pennant on the ceiling of Art’s Tavern.

DANCE FLOOR another patron of the diner, who was a Kellogg grad himself, pointed it out.

After breakfast, we stopped by The Cottage Book Shop, a charming bookstore in a historic log cabin, just next door to Art’s. The owner, Sue Boucher, actually lived in Evanston at one point, and bought The Cottage Book Shop five years ago when she sold her bookstore in Lake Forest and retired to Northern Michigan with her husband. The store sells an array of books about Northern Michigan, including ones on its the history, wildlife, and more.

Our next stop was Evolve, a small shop down the street. Before the current owner bought the place a few years ago, it was called Tiny Treasures, which I believe was a much more appropriate name – the store is filled with a wide assortment of Michiganthemed knick knacks, games and toys.

My parents used to have to drag me out of that place kicking and screaming when I was a kid.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON For lunch we headed to Boonedocks, a rustic restaurant with a truly all-American atmosphere.

Their mac and cheese is one of my favorite things in life – I order it every time I visit. Pro-tip: sit outside under the gazebo, which overlooks downtown Glen Arbor.

After wandering around for awhile, we walked over to Cherry Republic, another Northern Michigan hotspot.

As I mentioned, cherries are a big deal in Michigan. The state produces nearly 75 percent of the tart cherries in the country, and Traverse City, known as the Cherry Capital of the World, is home to the annual National Cherry Festival. Cherry Republic is where you can find any and all things cherry: cherry

Some yummy ice cream and some less yummy relish from Cherry Republic.

barbecue sauce, cherry relish, cherry salsa, you name it. If you consider yourself a cherry connoisseur, check out “Midnight in the Orchard,” which features cherryswirled chocolate ice cream decked out with cherry bits on top.

After lunch, we headed over to the Sleeping Bear Dunes. In addition to Good Morning America’s poll, the Dunes were also listed as one of the most beautiful beaches in the world

by National Geographic. And they are: their sweeping views of Lake Michigan and the Manitou Islands are absolutely breathtaking. It’s even a great spot to visit in the winter, when you can sled down the dunes.

SATURDAY NIGHT To cap off the night, we went back into Glen Arbor for dinner at Blu, a restaurant at Le Bear Resort, and watched the sunset from our table. While Blu is fairly pricey, its amazing menu of seafood and steak, put together by Chef Randy Chamberlain and infused with local ingredients, makes the cost well worth it. Drop in for the food and stick around for the, panoramic lake views.

The view of the sunset on Lake Michigan outside Blu restaurant.

Caring through comics

F

or five weeks this fall, eight medical school students gathered in a small classroom inside of Northwestern Memorial Hospital. They were there for a seminar called “Drawing Medicine.” It’s intended as an interlude, a break from memorizing the features of organ systems, the intricacies of gene expression and the diagnostic protocols for all manner of maladies.

The instructor for the class, MK Czerwiec, has cropped blond hair, soft blue eyes and the sort of open and warm face that you’d expect of someone who has dedicated her life to taking care of others. Czerwiec is a nurse, and a highly unusual one at that: For almost two decades she’s run a website under the pseudonym the “Comic Nurse,” where she illustrates the twists and turns that accompany health care in America.

This afternoon, Czerwiec asks the students to take a pack of crayons – one of her favorite tools as an artist – and create a fourpanel comic. Students have to work collaboratively, and after

filling in their first panel, they must trade off and pick up the story where another began. One comic by Dan Im, a second-year Feinberg student, begins with Im standing outside a patient’s door during his first day as an attending physician. In the next panel, Im stumbles over his introduction with his patient and is immediately consumed by nervous doubt. The next panel reads: “WHAT DO I DO / WHAT DO I DO / WHAT DO I DOOOOOO.” Other comics detail the tedium of waiting for samples to finish in an anatomy lab, what a “good death” might look like and how to advise a patient on improving their diet (“counseling ≠ commanding”, it notes). For students like Im, it’s a way to discuss issues that might not get much traction in their other classes, particularly the anxiety and fear that can so often seem off-limits in the hallowed halls of science.

“Nobody in the class is very good at drawing,” Im says. “But we have a lot of fun – there’s no judgment involved.”

It’s also an exercise in thinking about perspective: How close are the students to a patient when they make a diagnosis? Do they keep their

distance or loom overhead? What do they remember about the room they’re working in? Does it seem like a nice place to be?

For Czerwiec, it’s about reminding the students about the details, to help them think about how their perceptions might affect the way they take care of others. In many respects, it’s about attending to the story of the patient and provider, to think about how what they’re learning in the classroom applies to the world at large.

“They don’t practice technical skills on technical objects,” Czerwiec explains after the class. “They’re practicing on people.”

The name for what Czerwiec teaches the students is “graphic medicine.” But it’s something that humans have done for a long time – trying to make sense of the beguiling experience of illness, death and dying.

The ancient Egyptians wrote howto instructions for mummification; Buddhists detailed the cycles of life, death and rebirth in the Book of the Dead. More utilitarian practitioners include the U.S. Army, who created comics that explained the dangers of mosquitos and showed examples

Panels from Czerwiec’s book, “Taking Turns,” depict how art helps her to make sense of loss. Illustrations of stars are a “guiding light.”

22 FALL 2018

DANCE FLOOR

Feinberg’s Artist-in-Residence is using comic books to help us think about illness and death in new ways.

WRITTEN BY DANIEL FERNANDEZ // DESIGNED BY EMILY CERF

of how to effectively treat combat wounds during World War II. Today, things are a bit different, if only because there’s more interest in graphic medicine than ever before. A few weeks ago, Czerwiec was at ReImagine, a festival in New York that explores questions around life and death, and hosted a pop-up magazine at the New York Public Library.

The National Institutes of Health now holds thousands of comics about health and illness. Leading medical journals publish comics from doctors, nurses, and patients in their pages. The New York Times even reviewed a book Czerwiec contributed to last year.

One of Czerwiec’s collaborators is Alex Thomas, an allergist in Chicago.

He studied art theory and practice at Northwestern, and today is part of Booster Shot Media, a company that helps educate people about the complexities of health topics through stories. He says graphic medicine is all about awareness.

“Perceptiveness is not something that was ever taught to us as physicians. We’d get feedback if we

were doing good or bad on a rotation, but they were never teaching us more empathetic or more understanding,” Thomas says. “And who knows if there’s a more formal way of doing that – but I think that comics can help to encourage that introspection that can lead to greater empathy.”

Educating people on complex topics doesn’t mean making them easy or approachable. It’s on full-display as you read through “Taking Turns,” a comic that chronicles Czerwiec’s time working on Unit 371, Chicago’s first AIDS ward.

In one scene, she’s seated with a patient, Tim, at a restaurant in Chicago, who asks her quite directly: “What’s it like when we die?” Czerwiec tries to answer. She’s tempted to base her answer on her experience working with other patients. But in the end, she elects for something more ambiguous.

It depends on what you’re dying from and it depends on where you’re dying, and who is taking care of you and how badly you want to fight.

Okay, the patient says, that makes sense. But how can I know when it’s time to stop? And can you be there to tell me when it’s time to let go?

Czerwiec responds in the

affirmative, but she’s also uncertain about how to make sense of his questions – she spends the night driving around trying to make sense of what to say.

In the end, Tim does die, and it is not pretty, poignant or graceful.

Tim has a horrific panic attack, a nurse administers a dose of Ativan, and he never wakes up, though he stays on a ventilator for 10 days. It’s not the kind of death you wish for someone you care about deeply.

Still, there’s something beautiful about the way Czerwiec explains these events. You might not see the bright colors and bombastic interventions of the superheroes you expect from a comic, but the visuals are an emollient for difficult conversations, the sort of discussions that we might not like to have in our day-to-day lives. It’s not safe or uplifting, but it is very, painfully real.

“We’re all patients and there’s always danger,” Czerwiec says. “But comics are safe ... They are great at degstimigizing stigmatized things.”

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MK CZERWIEC

FALL 2018 23

DANCE FLOOR

Go U Northwestern,

I forget this line The Wildcat Welcome staff can sleep soundly tonight.

Everybody knows the first three words of the fight song: “Go U Northwestern.”

100

80

70

The second verse of the song, beginning with “Fight for Victory” was on average about 10 percent less well-known than the first verse.

60 KEY SENIOR

50

JUNIOR SOPHOMORE

One surveyed student was under the impression that the second verse began “Fight for Liberty.” But nay, we are merely playing sports, not starting a revolution.

FIRST-YEARS

G o U N or Br thw ea es Ri k ter gh n Th t ro Th ug a h Li t ne W ith O u Co r lo Fl rs yi W ng e W ill Ch e Yo er u Al l Th e Ti m U e Ra h Ra h G o U N or Fi thw gh e Fo t ste rn r Vi ct Sp ory re Fa ad r Th e Fa m O e f O u Fa r ir

Percentage of Students Who Got the Lyric Correct

90

40

Do you actually know the Fight Song? Don’t worry ­—­ nobody else does either.

WRITTEN BY GABE SCHMITTLEIN DESIGNED BY SARAH ZHANG

YEAR-BY-YEAR BREAKDOWN Seniors are consistently the worst. They hit just 71.3 percent of the words on average, a real slap in the face to all of us Fight Song enthusiasts.

71.3%

83%

86%

81%

WHY WE DID THIS One of the most popular mistakes came during the bridge, where people were wholly unclear on whether the football team should “hit ‘em hard” or “hit ‘em high.”

Of course, the right lyric is “hit ‘em hard, hit ‘em low” – whoever wrote the fight song was a staunch proponent of forcefully attacking the knees, like the Mudd library turnstiles.

The Northwestern Fight Song is purportedly a song that the entire campus knows and loves. A beacon of Wildcat pride. A vessel through which Northwestern’s students display their undying love for the University. Right?

Right ...

Sure, there are people who boldly belt the Fight Song after every touchdown – but there are also people who mumble their way through the Fight Song like it’s one of the verses to “Mambo No. 5.” There are those who clap especially loud, hoping that this might mask their silence, a clear signal that they have no school pride, and thus, no dignity. Believe it or not, there are even people who don’t go to the football games, people who might never have the experience of hearing the Fight Song blasted into their ears!

These people exist. I’m sure of it. And now I have the data to expose them.

N am G e o N or t W hw in es te Th rn at G am G e o N or G thw o e st G er o n N or G thw o e st H er it n ‘E m H ar d H it ‘E m Lo w G o N or G thw o e st er n

DATA COLLECTION I had exactly 97 Northwestern students recite the fight song: 14 seniors, 18 juniors, 49 sophomores, 15 first-years. Six of these participants submitted a voice memo, but everyone else typed out a submission.

I then marked every word of their submission as correct or incorrect based on the official Northwestern Fight Song lyrics (as found on nusports.com), divided the responses by year at Northwestern, and visualized that analysis with the following graph.

Because the responses were recorded on a survey, there’s no way to verify that people didn’t cheat. I can say, though, that about 60 percent of all respondents got at least one word wrong, so it’s unlikely that we have a huge cheating scandal on our hands.

FALL 2018 25

Each year, the Evans Scholars host a mini golf fundraiser called ES Open.

Who’s your caddie?

NBN follows Evans Scholars from the golf course to Northwestern’s campus.

A

WRITTEN BY SYLVIA GOODMAN // DESIGNED BY AINE DOUGHERTY

fter driving 45 minutes to the Westmoor Country Club in Brookfield, Wisconsin, Nathan Schimpf waited nervously on the podium.

He stood before a crowd of about 60 Western Golf Association (WGA) directors, staff members, donors and supporters who read Schimpf's application aloud. After that, they launched into a series of questions on everything from his athletic career as a hockey player to his ability to overcome adversity. This lasted for 15 minutes. He was in the final stage of the application process to become an Evans Scholar.

“It felt like five seconds, and it’s extremely scary, but I got through it,” Schimpf says.

26 FALL 2018

Schimpf and roughly 275 other students from around the country were picked to receive the Evans Scholarship during the 2017-18 school year. It includes free on-campus housing, a growing alumni network, social connections and, most notably, a full-ride scholarship to participating universities for four years.

But the primary requirement is that all applicants for the Evans Scholarship must have worked for at least two years as a golf caddie.

That’s right – the people who carry the golf clubs for professional and amateur golfers alike. Apart from being excellent students with outstanding character and demonstrated financial need according

to the FAFSA and CSS Profile, all Evans Scholars must have strong caddie records, meaning they caddied regularly and successfully without complaint from the golfers for whom they worked.

Though it seems oddly specific, the scholarship was started in 1928 by a caddie-turned-amateur golfer named Charles “Chick” Evans Jr. Evans himself had to drop out of Northwestern due to financial hardship during his first year, but he later became one of the greatest amateur golfers of his time, winning both the U.S. Open and the U.S. Amateur. To maintain his amateur status, Evans placed any winnings he garnered in a fund with the intent of awarding it to caddies with

DANCE FLOOR academic promise. Finally, in 1928 he convinced the WGA to oversee the fund, and the Evans Scholarship was born.

In 1930, Harold Fink and Jim McGinni became the first two recipients of the award, graduating from Northwestern University in 1934. In fact, through the late 1930s, all Evans Scholars went to Northwestern until the WGA began parceling out scholarships to students going to other schools as well. Now, the scholarship extends to over 25 universities across the country.

So far, there are specifically-designated Evans Scholarship Houses at 16 universities. Northwestern’s Scholarship House was the first, established in 1940.

Living in the Scholarship House for all four undergraduate years is a mandatory part of receiving the Evans Scholarship, which was originally cause for hesitation for School of Communication sophomore Mackenzie Lim. “My mom wanted me to apply for it, but at first I actually didn’t want to apply for it.

I was like, ‘I don’t want to live in a house full of caddies,’” Lim says, laughing. “But it’s definitely one of the best experiences. My Northwestern experience has been shaped totally by this.”

According to Schimpf, living together and seeing each other every day makes the Evans Scholars House a close-knit community.

The faculty advisor for NU’s Evans Scholars, Martina Bode, attributed much of the Evans Scholar House atmosphere to the unique nature of the housing.

“I don't think you can find any other residence on the entire campus quite like it. It's really a family. It's a house where you have freshmen through seniors,” she says. “Staying in the house for four years really helps to build community.”

Northwestern’s Evans Scholar chapter also holds events throughout the year, many of which are golf-themed. Every year, they organize the Evans Scholars Open, their biggest philanthropic event, and raise money for different charities by setting up a mini golf course around the Scholarship House.

“A group of scholars put together each hole, and it’s really quite fun because it’s kind of a competition too,” Bode says.

“Last year, one hole had little goldfish

swimming around. I accidentally brought my doggies to the house. I wasn't looking, and they started drinking the water. It was just really fun.”

This year’s event was held on Nov. 11 and raised almost $2,000 for the Special Olympics of Illinois, according to Melina Scofield, the Northwestern Evans Scholar philanthropy co-chair. Scofield also says that this year’s event far exceeded their goal of $1,445, which was the amount raised from the 2017 ES Open.

One drawback of the scholarship, however, is that it does not provide food to its recipients. Instead of having to fend for themselves, students have the option to get “meal jobs” on or near campus. In a meal job, a scholar helps out in the kitchens of a Greek association, local restaurant or sometimes even a school dining hall in exchange for meals.

Sam Maciejewski, the Evans Scholars Foundation Manager of Education and Caddie Academies, says that while meal jobs are traditionally available for Evans Scholars, they are not mandatory and are not officially operated by the program.

PHOTOS BY AINE DOUGHERTY

Caddieturnedamateur golfer, former NU student Charles "Chick" Evans started the scholarship in 1928 after he won both the U.S. Open and the U.S. Amateur golf tournaments.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

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DANCE FLOOR At Northwestern, many scholars work in sororities because their house is located in the sorority quad.

According to Amy Fuller, the WGA and Evans Scholars Foundation Vice President of Communications, the scholarship is definitely in “growth mode.” The Board of Governors set a goal several years ago that will soon reach fruition: a thousand scholars by 2020. Currently, there are 985 scholars at 18 universities across the country.

“We’re certainly on track to meet that goal,” Fuller says. “Not only are we increasing scholars, but we’re increasing the number of scholarship houses that we’re opening across the country. We’re expanding our program from coast-to-coast.”

Fuller says that the committee that reviews applicants receives more and more applications every year. According to Fuller, the effort to expand the

scholarship is made in order to keep up with the need for an affordable education.

While the number of applicants is going up, Schimpf says that many of the high school students he has spoken with are unaware that caddieing for a few years in high school could lead to a major scholarship.

“I tell people all the time, ‘I basically go to school for free because I caddied in high school.’ And they’re like, ‘Ah, I wish I would’ve known that,’” Schimpf says. “I wish they would have known it too.”

First-year college students can also apply for the Evans Scholarship, but it is much less common and remains primarily reserved for graduating high schoolers.

However, college-level applicants must still have caddied in high school.

Ultimately, the goal of the Evans Scholar program is to grant academic and

career-oriented opportunities. Schimpf, now a sophomore at Northwestern, says that he owes a lot to the Evans Scholarship.

“There is no way that I would be able to go here if I didn’t have this scholarship, because I just wouldn’t be able to afford it,” he says.

Recipients at Northwestern emphasize that the scholarship reaches far beyond the four years of college to future internships and careers, available through the extensive alumni network of over 10,000 men and women.

“Everybody looks out for each other, and if anybody’s looking for a job or an internship, usually somebody knows somebody else and things usually just fall into place,” Bode says. “So it’s usually not just four years of school. It’s a life-long friendship.”

This year, the Evans Scholars raised almost $2,000 at their annual philanthropy event, the ES Open. Proceeds went to the Special Olympics of Illinois.

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DANCE FLOOR

Disaster at a distance Long after the storm passes and the fire dies, students watch their hometowns rebuild.

WRITTEN BY PAOLA DE VARONA DESIGNED BY CLAIRE BUGOS

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A

s Nicolas Tamborrel peered out of his brother’s windshield, the caravan of cars strapped with mismatched belongings, U-Haul trailers full of knick knacks and memories and trucks brimming with furniture had come to a standstill after hours of driving at 20 mph. Just outside of Tallahassee, Florida, all that met the eye, straight to the horizon, were red brake lights, flooding the road. In two days, Hurricane Irma was set to level South Florida.

Nicolas, who moved to Miami when he was three years old, is a Northwestern junior with a dark brown shock of hair and the kind of nonchalant aura only a South Floridian can possess. He set out on the trek from his home to Atlanta, Georgia on a Friday in September just two days before the storm, along with the 5.6 million others fleeing the state: they were heeding the largest evacuation orders since Hurricane Wilma in 2005.

The hurricane would make landfall in the Florida Keys as a Category 4 that Sunday.

So while his mom and younger brother, a Northwestern first-year student, flew to O’Hare for Wildcat Welcome, Nicolas and his older brother hopped into the black Tiguan with their black lab cowering and bichon frise sunbathing in the back seat. They trailed their dad who drove a silver Tahoe, with a mini U-Haul trailer latched on to the back. The U-Haul was half empty, carrying only irreplaceable momentos; all Nicolas had packed for school was a suitcase.

“Guess we’re not gonna have a house later,” he thought as they shuttered up their home and drove away. Yet the U-Haul was cluttered only with yearbook pictures, pieces of art and his grandmother’s silver tea set. His elementary school trophies still lay in his room. His turtle and bird had a 50/50 chance of making it. He watched as his Waze traffic app slowly ticked up their arrival time: a trip that would normally take 11 hours stretched out to 23 on the never ending road.

With an increase in global temperatures, the warm waters in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans have increasingly become breeding grounds for catastrophic hurricanes. Hurricanes Michael, Florence, Maria, Irma and Harvey have all ravaged coasts and islands in the past three years. While Nicolas’ 30 FALL 2018

home barely curbed destruction this time around, scientists say these storms will only get worse. Forest fires in California break out with more fury and breadth as environmental pollution increases global warming. And the warming of the oceans will increase the moisture in the atmosphere, which will likely lead to stronger blizzards in the winter.

For students who live in these disasterprone regions, sometimes life has to be packed into a suitcase and shipped off to school. Their homes become carryons, and in finding solace in Evanston, they leave everything – family, community, the tangible and intangible tokens of home – behind.

Miami” sign down the lone road out of the island, all she could think was, “this is the last time I’ll see this sign again.”

Two days later, Irma would ravage the Florida Keys, leaving families homeless, without power and scrambling to get back on even footing. Fortunately, Hannah’s home was spared, but she wouldn’t return to see it until December. She flew directly from Orlando to Chicago with her dad as her family waited out the three weeks that would pass before they could return to Key West.

“A lot of my friends in the Upper Keys are … still living in hotels or in temporary housing,” she says. “I had several friends that were going to school in Florida that had to come home for a semester because Before the storm In finding solace their parents couldn’t in Evanston, they Two days afford the tuition with the leave everything – before the expenses of fixing their family, community, hurricane and houses … or even just to the tangible and just over 100 support their family.” intangible tokens of miles away from Hannah was essentially home – behind.

Nicolas, junior “lucky.” The storm shortHannah Brown circuited her fridge, and her was lying on her grandparents’ home needed bed in her home in the some plumbing repairs, but her southernmost tip of the life seemed to be back to normal. Yet Florida Keys: Key West. She was jolted only a few days prior, she was sitting in a awake by her distressed mother telling powerless living room in Orlando. her, “we have to evacuate.” Not a morning “I’m sitting on my aunt’s couch, my person, Hannah begrudgingly got out of aunt’s dog is losing its shit. It’s actually bed and started to take in the growing shaking in fear, and I’m looking at this anxiety surrounding the incoming storm, dog and I’m like, ‘that’s how I feel right as it played out on television sets across now,’” she says. Would her parents have a the island. Her family piled into two cars place to stay? Would they be able to afford and raced against Irma to Orlando, Florida. tuition at Northwestern? Would she have Hannah prefaced this story by matter to come home from school to give them of factly stating she isn’t a sentimental time to get the money together to repair or material person. She instead looks the house? She couldn’t shake these to the landscape and vegetation of the questions from her mind. island as tokens of her memories. And While Northwestern students were these hurricanes usually blow over. Her going about their daily responsibilities, friends typically opted for watching the students like Hannah were throwing storm unfold from her front porch or themselves into work and routine to the occasional “hurricane party.” During try to shroud the guilt they were feeling Hurricane Katrina, she casually stood with from seeing their communities work to a towel up to the crack of her front door rebuild, while they remained a plane where water was dripping through. But ride away, holding on to a home they no as the fear settled in, Hannah reached for longer recognized. her great-grandmother’s hand-me-down Rebuilding from away pearls, the ones she never took to school Lillian Aff, a sophomore with clunky because she was too afraid of losing them, and packed her childhood chapter books glasses and a tendency to laugh before she into her suitcase. This time it was different. says something dismal, had to watch as As they drove past the “100 miles until her county in California burned to ashes ILLUSTRATIONS BY CLAIRE BUGOS

during her first month at Northwestern.

The Tubbs fire was the second most destructive fire in California history, and 23 days passed before the flames were contained. The fire’s toll was the largest in Sonoma, where Lillian is from, with 24 people killed and 5,300 homes lost. Across Northern California, insured losses from the fires reached $15 billion. At the start of October, classes were just picking up.

While she sat in courses like Introduction to Reporting and Writing, her friends’ homes were ablaze over 2,000 miles away.

“After one month at college, my hometown is burning,” she says, laughing uncomfortably before she continues. “It was pretty sad for me. And I tried to help, but since I was so far away I couldn’t really do anything for anybody.”

Her family was safe out of the fire zone, but her friends texted her daily updates about which part of Sonoma County was burning down next. She didn’t know how to cope, and kept falling into a depressive state thinking, “I’m going to come back and there’s going to be nothing.” So she sought out CAPS for the first time.

Lillian went up to her reporting and writing professor in the middle of class and told her, “I have to leave, I can’t be here today.” She couldn’t bring herself to attend classes for over a week.

“It was just a really intense, painful experience for me because I felt guilty, even though there was nothing I could’ve done,” she says.

Hannah felt culpable too. When she pulled up to her dorm after her flight from Orlando and carried her overstuffed suitcase up the stairs, she felt like she could breathe for the first time since leaving the Keys. She settled down and thought: “Okay. I know what to expect here. I know what I can do here. I can put this out of my mind. And I know that the routines here and the day to day pace is something that will distract me.”

She found comfort in knowing she had class on Monday, and could come home to homework and problem sets due on Friday. It was something she could break down. There was no uncertainty in a rhythm like that. All the unpredictability was left on the island.

All it took was reading an article or hearing a comment from someone about the storm and she would pause.

“There was always that undercurrent:

I should be texting someone making sure that they’re okay, that they got back, that they come home, that they were doing alright, could I do anything for them?”

Hannah says. “I don’t think I realized until I got home that I had really been avoiding thinking about it on my own.”

Home revisited Neither Lillian nor Hannah would return back to their towns until winter break in December that year.

Lillian drove down Mendocino Avenue her first time back in Sonoma, a road lined with an assortment of shops and age-old establishments. Everything was “burned to a crisp.” There was nothing.

Everywhere she turned for familiarity she only found ashes. Right when she got back, she tried to head to Kohls, but there was a sign that said “closed for renovations.” There was no physical store to renovate. “I guess I’ll turn around and go home,” was all she could think.

Hannah flew straight into the Key West airport, missing the drive down the island to see the destruction of the Upper Keys.

Across from her house, there’s a park where a colossal tree once stood, with long dangling leaves that would rustle on cool nights. She remembers climbing its trunk and branches as a child. Once she returned, it was ripped up by its roots. All that stood in its place was a stump.

“They planted new trees around it, which I think is a great metaphor for how people are trying to rebuild, but it’s not the same,” she says.

Even now, it’s the little moments that serve as painful reminders that Hannah wasn’t in the Keys to experience the collective horror those in her community had to live through. The main movie theater’s roof is still caved in. One of the grocery stores still hasn’t opened its doors.

When she walks around Sears, the one department store, the lights randomly shut off, a result of electrical damage. Her friends in the Upper Keys are still living in hotels and temporary housing.

She says returning home was like watching your best friend undergo a

dramatic makeover, changing their facial features and all. The looming palm trees in her backyard that used to slant one way all her life, where she propped her water skis, were suddenly dragged in the opposite direction. Everything she knew about her home was distorted.

For Hannah, returning home on breaks and driving her family’s boat around the coral reefs of her island was a way to reconnect with the place she only visits once or twice a year. She used to know the bends and ins of the water and the landscape like one knows how the drive back home after a long night. But now, the complete makeup of the island is dramatically restructured.

“In college, you get really distant from your hometown because you’re probably going somewhere else, you’re learning new things,” she says. “I really miss being so comfortable at home in the water, when now I don’t even recognize it at all.”

As the impact of these disasters continues to grow, Hannah’s family is looking to move from the Keys. The uncertainty of the storms has made the only lifestyle they’ve ever known too volatile. Now, every time she returns to the greenland that vaguely looks like an old friend who’s name she can’t quite remember, it could be the last moment she shares with the place she grew up.

Meanwhile, the local TV stations in Evanston play the images of destruction in places like California, the Keys and South Florida. Students are forced to watch their homes flood, burn and crumble from miles away.

“I don’t know if I’ve really accepted that it happened to me,” Hannah says. “I don’t think I’ve fully accepted that the island’s been replaced.”

How do we grapple with unhappiness within a student body that considers it a foregone conclusion?

WRITTEN, DESIGNED AND ILLUSTRATED BY RACHEL HAWLEY

L

eonard Bernstein dropped dead from a heart attack five days after retiring from his career as the most celebrated conductor of the twentieth century. He had grown erratic and melancholy in the later years of his life, racked with grief and guilt from the death of his wife more than a decade earlier. But to the public, and even many of his close friends, he betrayed little sign of inner turmoil.

I thought about this as I warmed up onstage last winter amid the thrum of an orchestra, waiting for the conductor to enter from offstage — the opening to our concert program was the famous overture from Bernstein’s Candide. I thought about it throughout the concert, and again later that evening, when I called my mother to tell her that I wouldn’t be returning to Northwestern in the spring.

A year ago, I joined a public Facebook group called “Northwestern places i’ve cried.” At the time, it had several hundred members, and now has a membership of 2,665. It’s part of the subcultural renaissance of 32 FALL 2018

college-centric Weird Facebook groups that have popped up over the past few years. Yale, Stanford, Oberlin and Rice all have “Places I’ve Cried” groups, where students post the locations they’ve cried on campus as a tongue-in-cheek, commiseratory joke.

Northwestern’s iteration began with similar posts —“Norbucks,” “lost in Tech,” “crossing Sheridan,” “sober at Cheesie’s.” But as fall became winter, and winter dragged on, the tenor of “Northwestern places i’ve cried” changed. The lighthearted entries were replaced by paragraphs of urgent confessions about the constant barrage of academic and extracurricular stress, isolating loneliness, social anxiety and mental health issues.

The comments on these posts filled up quickly with support

and affirmation from friends and strangers alike. I kept finding myself typing out comments that I would delete before hitting ‘send,’ uncertain of how to offer comfort to a stranger over the internet.

Productivity culture.

The phrase has been used to describe the pervasive pressure to be overcommitted and overworked that seeps into every exposed corner of our lives. It was highlighted by name in The Daily Northwestern last March, when students complained about professors’ unwillingness to cancel class or postpone assessments immediately following the active gunman scare, after students had spent over an hour on lockdown fearing for their lives. In its less egregious form, productivity culture manifests in fifth classes

DANCE FLOOR taken to stave off guilt about not “challenging yourself,” in the innumerable constellations of mind-bending dual degree/triple major/double minor/certificate combinations, and in arm-length lists of extracurricular affiliations and leadership positions. And it’s all laughed off with a smile and a “well, that’s Northwestern for you!”

Yet a not-insignificant portion of our student body is, on a dayto-day level, genuinely unhappy.

On Facebook, it’s close to the surface; outside of the internet, the burden of shared sadness reveals itself in little, everyday things, like conversations with friends, or split seconds of eye contact with a stranger who has clearly been crying as you cross paths on the sidewalk.

There was never a question of whether my older brother would attend college, and at first, a degree seemed inevitable for me too. But by the time I was a high school senior mulling over applications, “if ” began to insert itself into conversations, standing forebodingly in the shadow of “where.” For decades, my parents sacrificed for our education, every penny dedicated to the priority that their children attend excellent schools. But I was not well-positioned for academic success; I had poorly-managed mental illness and a learning disability, and generally found the experience of school to be pedantic and frustrating. I submitted one application and let deadlines for the others pass by, unable to find an answer to “Why ____?”

The letter from Northwestern arrived, and I accepted. I had ostensibly studied SAT vocabulary, but couldn’t find the words to express to my family, friends, and teachers that I wasn’t ready for college, that I might never be ready.

In the three and a half years

since, I have changed degree programs and majors, dropped countless classes, joined clubs and moved into an apartment the size of a small storage unit. And I have only recently been able to articulate what I think I’ve known on some level since the beginning — college, at least for me, was probably a mistake.

A big part of what prevented me from articulating this knowledge was a force of culture, one that made itself increasingly clear to me as I scrolled through “Northwestern places i’ve cried” posts. It’s more than productivity culture. Let’s call it misery culture — one that normalizes the idea that de facto unhappiness and stress is the necessary cost of getting through college. That constant frustration in our academic, extracurricular, and social lives shouldn’t compel us to make major changes, because we don’t deserve more than to be sad and frustrated.

Maybe this is true at elite institutions more generally. The stakes are higher than ever before, and plenty of people you know are even more miserable than you and press on with their daily grind regardless. So the available options that might actually improve your quality of life — changing your major, leaving behind extracurricular commitments that don’t bring you fulfillment, dropping that goddamn class, maybe transferring altogether — seem unthinkable.

Whether those options are readily available to you is in many ways a matter of privilege; for students from low-income backgrounds, first-generation college students, non-citizens, and the like, there is often little room for error or change of heart.

But even if you do have the option — to prioritize your quality of life over your accomplishments, to strip some of that odious “AND” from your DNA — you’ll still find yourself swimming upstream of a social current.

Misery culture thrives on the moralization of our shared sadness. We’ve been asked to believe, subconsciously or not, that being deeply unhappy during college (and deeply in debt for a decade or two afterwards) is a form of paying dues toward a better future. Without that belief, the jig would be up, the exploitation laid bare. So, naturally, what follows is an unspoken judgment of those who aren’t willing to partake in elective agony via precipitously high achievement standards: don’t they know that in ten years, I’ll be rewarded for this suffering, and they’ll be left behind?

This is bullshit, of course — a line of magical thinking that inevitably leads to disappointment. But hell, if it isn’t enticing.

One of the most famous dogs on the internet is not a flesh-and-blood pupper, but rather, a cartoon enshrined in memery. “This is Fine,” as it has become known, is an iconic two-panel excerpt from a comic

by KC Green in which a dog sits in a room surrounded by flames and billowing smoke, and announces to himself, “This is fine.”

It’s hard to overstate the online ubiquity of “This is Fine,” particularly in the two years since the 2016 election. The feeling of pressing through a whirlwind of chaos is cathartically universal. The concluding panels of the comic, excluded from the meme version, show the dog being promptly burned to a crisp.

The issue, for us and for this ill-fated dog, is not the presence of misery, frustration, hopelessness, and chaos in our lives, but rather, the persistence of those things. Life without sadness would be impossible, but life with so much compounding sadness that we lose the perspective necessary to see it as anything other than ordinary and acceptable is disastrous.

I left school, briefly, but at the time, indefinitely.

When I told people, most assumed that I was in the throws of a mental health crisis of some kind (some even congratulating me, awkwardly, for “getting help”). In reality, I was within the upper bounds of regular-Northwestern sad, but that no longer seemed acceptable to me, not as a foregone conclusion, anyway. I found a job to hold me over for several months, and eventually, I re-enrolled for my senior year.

College, for me, was likely a mistake, but mistakes are probably a better entry route to one’s place in the world than meticulous execution, anyway. As of now, I don’t know if I’m going to graduate this spring, or if I’ll have to stay a little bit longer. That’s alright by me — I feel optimistic about the future for the first time in a long while. This is fine.

FALL 2018 33

CHICAGO Our editors put together a list of things to see before you Chi.

BUCKET LIST

PHOTOS BY AINE DOUGHERTY, STEPHANIE J. SHIN, SAKKE OVERLUND AND NIKITA AMIR // DESIGNED BY ANDIE LINKER

Eats

Chicago is a city that loves to indulge gastronomically, and Au Cheval’s (West Loop) infamous cheeseburger and Pequod’s (Lincoln Park) deep dish pizza are two of the most well-known dishes around town. Both restaurants take upscale twists on classics, making them must-have Windy City dishes.

34 FALL 2018

PHOTO STORY

Activities

Whether you’re looking to stroll outside, take in some art, or sip on an over-the-top cocktail, Chi-town has got what you need.

The 606 Trail (Bucktown) provides an aerial walk or bike ride around some of the city’s most famous neighborhoods. The Museum of Contemporary Art (Gold Coast) is free for Northwestern students and offers a constantly rotating gallery of modern art. And low-key tiki bar Lost Lake (Logan Square) was recently named Best American Cocktail Bar by the Tales of the Cocktail Foundation. Head there for the inventive cocktails, themed décor and fun banana dolphins.

Scenery

PHOTO BY EMMA KUMER

The Windy City has you covered whether you want to immerse yourself in the urban jungle or an indoor version of one. The Garfield Park Conservatory (East Garfield Park) offers a warm, plant-filled refuge year-round, and the Riverwalk (Loop) allows visitors to get up close and personal with the Chicago river while enjoying a snack or lounging in one of the many seating areas. Chinatown also has a ton of unique architecture, public art, park space and sites to see.

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4

DANCE FLOOR

student start-ups you’ve never heard of

Connect and Care: a platform for non-profits

WRITTEN BY AMY OUYANG DESIGNED BY EMILY CERF

Wildcat Naps: a mattress rental service

Living conditions in student dorms have become a central concern for Northwestern students with the requirement of two-year on-campus housing. This provided the opportunity for Wildcat Naps, a mattress rental service. Although Wildcat Naps launched in 2018, it has already successfully sold around 50 beds to Northwestern students — both on-campus and offcampus — according to co-founder Marisa Hattler.

For Hattler, Wildcat Naps offers something that she never expected running a mattress rental business: heavy labor.

“I have never realized that those beds are really heavy. I still remember after my first day lifting beds and moving them around, my whole body was extremely sore for the next few days,” HattlerW says.

36 FALL 2018

Opening the Garage doors to student businesses on campus that aren’t Brewbike.

Litterbox: a moving and storage helper Toward the end of spring quarter, USS and UPS are constantly fighting for potential customers as students walk by the Arch or Tech. This year, they’ll have a new contender: Litterbox. Founder Peter Dorward, a McCormick sophomore, has built a team to make the moving and storage process less stressful for Northwestern students by providing satisfactory customer service at a good value.

“Customers were able to save more than 50 percent on USS’s prices using our basic package, and up to 37.5 percent on USS’s prices using our concierge package last year,” Dorward says.

After choosing to store the boxes in a nearby warehouse facility, Dorward wanted to ensure that customers’ items were cared for and returned. He found a solution to customers being dissatisfied with high prices and mediocre service.

“We made an inventory of all the boxes,” he explains. “I also diagramed where each of them was stored.”

SESP sophomore Matthew Zients wanted to maximize the time that people spent on their phones, which sparked the creation of Connect and Care. Zients and his team designed a mobile app where users can browse, learn about and donate to non-profit organizations around the world.

Established for barely a year, the team has grown to include ten people in total. Connect and Care is based in Evanston and Washington, D.C., Zients’ hometown.

Strangely enough, this startup centered around non-profit organizations was first inspired by a Venmo sign. “I went to this protest event last year and on campus, and there was one student holding up a Venmo sign and the name for getting donations. I think that’s interesting.

Maybe we can use that, and then comes Connect and Care,” Zients says.

Free Flow: a bike rental service Getting from Fisk to Ford in 15 minutes is a lot easier when you have a bike, but not all students make the investment.

This led Communications senior Robert Babich and Weinberg junior John Gustafson to launch Free Flow, a cycle rental service they hoped to make more reliable than Facebook’s Free and For Sale or Craigslist.

After receiving three reports of missing bikes, however, Babich and Gustafson were met with a challenge. In response, Babich pursued a somewhat unconventional approach. He invited four Evanston bike thieves together for a talk.

“The interview we had with these bike thieves finally led to the design of our security system, which installs a tracking device to help us locate the bike when it is reported stolen,” Babich says.

These tracking devices that register tampering, cutting, and otherwise messing with hardware activate on their own when the bike is missing, which means the user’s privacy isn’t invaded.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY EMMA KUMER

S When you can’t afford to work for free | FEATURES

When you can’t afford to work for free While some students can front the cost of participating in unpaid internships due to their financial status, most can’t.

WRITTEN BY NAOMI ANDU // DESIGNED BY SAVANNAH CHRISTENSEN

L

iz Curtis was in over her head. She had just completed her first year at Northwestern and was working her first-ever internship at nonprofit Sigma Beta Xi in her hometown of Riverside, California. Though Curtis, a social policy major, had barely finished her first year of college, she found herself spearheading a complete overhaul of Sigma Beta Xi’s youth program with next to no oversight – despite being unpaid and part-time.

When Curtis asked her boss what the uniforms for the new program should look like, he responded, “well, that’s up to you.” Actually, this was his response to every question she asked regarding the project.

“He just completely absolved himself of any responsibility of working out the finer details and the technicalities of this program,” Curtis says.

Curtis was the sole person assigned to work on Rites of Passage, Sigma Beta Xi’s youth development program that helps Black youth transition from childhood to adulthood. It was being transformed from a one-year program for boys to a seven-year program for both boys and girls, and the goal was to implement it in schools. The workload was stressful, with Curtis juggling tasks like researching the Boy Scout model, developing a curriculum and putting together a presentation on the program to show the board for approval. Often, she ended up taking work home with her. Other times, she was asked to do work outside the scope of her role as an intern, like making sure the project

didn’t infringe on copyright law.

“I’m not a copyright attorney,” Curtis says. “I’m 19 years old. I was really getting stressed out trying to do all this work, and my family was like, ‘Liz, don’t get stressed out, they’re not even paying you.’”

Curtis outlined the seven-year program with defined goals, Boy Scoutstyle symbols and definitions for each stage. At the end of the summer, she Lorem handedipsum the project off to a newly-hired, full-time employee with professional project management experience.

Curtis’s unpaid internship experience left her feeling exploited, and she’s not alone. For college students, unpaid internships are often a necessary evil; they provide contacts, relevant work experience and, sometimes, even jobs.

For the 66 percent of Northwestern students who come from the top 20 percent of household income, this may not be a problem. But low-income students are left with a difficult choice: take an internship they can’t afford, or sacrifice a valuable experience to make money they need.

THE PERSISTENCE OF THE UNPAID INTERNSHIP

Internships have boomed in recent decades, with the share of college graduates who work as interns rising from less than 10 percent in the mid1980s to over 80 percent in the mid2000s, according to a report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. There are over a million people working as interns in the

United States at any one time, and Ross Perlin, author of “Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy,” estimates that about half of those interns are unpaid.

Northwestern Career Advancement’s post-graduation survey corroborates those estimates, finding that, of the 76 percent of 2015 graduates who had participated in at least one internship while at Northwestern, 49 percent had worked at least one unpaid internship.

Not only is the tendency toward unpaid internships over blue-collar or service jobs a generational thing, “it’s an affluent, generational thing,” says Susan Provenzano, a Pritzker School of Law professor who teaches employment law and employment discrimination courses. “Parents who are affluent have been successful in their industries, and they encourage their kids to do the same thing. I do think that they see it as an investment. They see it as a way to network, as a way to develop a keen understanding of the day-to-day, insand-outs of that kind of job.”

This boom experienced a hiccup in 2013 when a judge ruled in favor of two unpaid interns in a highprofile class action lawsuit against Fox Searchlight Pictures. The interns successfully sought pay and damages for their work on the film “Black Swan,” and a wave of similar suits followed from those who felt their unpaid internships violated the U.S. Department of Labor’s Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Some companies decided to pay interns to avoid a similar fate, and others shut

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FEATURES | When you can’t afford to work for free down their programs entirely after they were forced to settle.

But unpaid internships may be making a comeback. Fox Searchlight Pictures appealed, and the 2nd Circuit Court overturned the decision in 2015, ruling that the Labor Department’s interpretation of who counted as an intern under FLSA was unreasonably narrow. In January, the rigid six-part test was replaced by a more flexible metric: the “primary beneficiary test.” The test has seven factors, but failure to meet one of them is not disqualifying, as each case is evaluated on its own merits. This change allows companies to more easily avoid compensating interns and makes it difficult for interns to bring class action suits against firms.

“Given employers general reticence to anything that looks like a higher minimum wage ... It would be very unlikely that you’d see these positions continue if they were required to be paid at a minimum wage level,” Provenzano says.

SUMMER INTERNSHIPS & SIGP In total, Curtis worked four jobs this summer. On top of interning Monday to Thursday at Sigma Beta Xi, she racked up more hours on Fridays interning at the University of California Riverside’s Robert Presley Center for Crime and Justice Studies in order to meet the 250-hour minimum requirement for the Summer Internship Grant Program (SIGP). Curtis made money on the side by working for her mother, a consultant, and babysitting her niece.

Staying home for the summer wasn’t ideal, but Curtis’s plan to stay in Evanston and find a local SIGPcompliant internship hadn’t panned out.

“In order to sublet an apartment, I would’ve had to have my parents front that first month’s rent, which would not have been possible,” Curtis says.

“I went home so I wouldn’t have to pay for somewhere to live and so I’d be able to make money at the same time.”

When she arrived on campus this fall, her summer savings went toward school expenses like books and dorm supplies, and she returned to her 38 FALL 2018

work-study job at NUIT. For low-income students at Northwestern, juggling jobs and internships while trying to save for the school year is common place.

There are resources on campus dedicated to leveling the financial playing field, including SIGP, the grant Curtis received. Last year, to offset the burden of unpaid internships, the program awarded selected applicants $3000 (or $6000 for some international internships through the Buffett Institute). This upcoming year, the Buffet Institute decided not to move forward with this grant, so SIGP will only be awarding $3000 per recipient.

“Not every student is able to not make money over the summer,” SIGP coordinator Eleni Vartelas says. “SIGP was created so that it can take care of the living expenses for students so that they can take the time to really focus on that internship and not worry about doing a second or third job.”

While SIGP’s $3000 may be enough for some, low-income students like Curtis end up working overtime to make ends meet.

When it was founded in 2007, SIGP awarded 10 applicants out of 90. The number has grown exponentially since, with 449 out of 800 awarded last summer.

“If we could fund every single student, we would do it,” Vartelas says.

“We just don’t have the funding to.”

Typically, funding from the University remains the same or increases each year, but donations to SIGP fluctuate. Due to limited resources, the program must prioritize some applicants over others. The selection committee does this by scoring applications based on a rubric.

It looks at both financial circumstances and quality of application, including a demonstration of the internship’s relevance to a student’s studies or extracurricular activities and how the experience will lead to the development of career goals.

“We take a look at financial need and what students have going on,” Vartelas says. “Every year, we have a needier and needier class.”

This year is no different. In

an annual welcome back email, President Morton Schapiro touted the unprecedented socioeconomic diversity of the incoming class of 2022, which is 13.5 percent firstgeneration and 20 percent Pell Grant eligible. Although they got in the door, they won’t necessarily have access to the same opportunities as wealthier students like economics junior Kedar Satyanand.

“I’d say about 70 percent of my [summer] expenses were covered by my parents helping me out,” Satyanand says.

Last summer, he sublet an apartment in Evanston and commuted to his unpaid internship at NextGen Growth Partners, a private equity firm in Chicago. Satyanand, an international student from New Delhi, India, characterizes his socioeconomic status as “definitely well-off.”

“I’m not on a scholarship, not taking out any loans to be here,” Satyanand says. “My education is completely funded by my parents’ savings and income. [We’re] definitely up there in terms of wealth and household income.”

Though Satyanand applied for SIGP, he soon began to feel uneasy about taking resources from students who were less financially privileged.

“I realized that I didn’t need the money from SIGP for what I wanted to do, and I decided to withdraw my application,” he says.

JR & PRACTICUM Unpaid internships carry a heavier financial burden for some, but students can opt to work paying jobs instead. However, some schools require internships for students to graduate, like Medill’s journalism residency (JR) and SESP’s practicum.

JR, originally called Teaching Newspaper, began in 1972 as an optional program and was made compulsory in the 1980s. In 2013, a ProPublica article criticized Medill for offering “internships with prestige, but no paycheck.” According to the article, JR sites paid Medill $1250 per intern, but interns only received a stipend of $600 to $1200 from the school.

While Medill has made strides since then to make sure interns are compensated, “there are some JR sites – nonprofits, documentary filmmakers – which simply can’t afford to do so,” according to Interim Dean Charles Whitaker. Sites that can’t pay students an hourly wage, or choose not to, must provide a $1250 stipend.

For a student working full time for 11 weeks, that amounts to $2.84 an hour.

Meanwhile, students are still required to pay tuition during their JR quarter to receive academic credit.

“It’s universally understood that the federal minimum wage is not a living wage, and that’s significantly less than the federal minimum wage,” Medill graduate Louisa Wyatt says.

“You pay for two months of rent, and the stipend is gone.”

This is doubly the case in big cities like New York, Los Angeles and D.C., where many prestigious publications and media opportunities are located. The cost of living can be inhibitive, causing some JR students to opt for their second or third-choice internship so they can stay local. According to Whitaker, students who can’t or don’t want to do JR during the academic year can substitute in an outside internship to fulfill the JR requirement or take four additional journalism classes on campus.

Wyatt, who graduated last spring, received the stipend when she interned for Imagination Publishing, a Chicagobased content marketing firm, in the fall of her senior year.

“When you’re low-income and you have JR, you don’t even think about going anywhere else because of how expensive it is,” Wyatt says. “New York was never even an option.”

Wyatt continued to live in Evanston and took the Metra to her JR site Monday to Friday. Commuting was her biggest expense even though she saved $190 by purchasing the reduced-rate student monthly pass, which is technically only for students high school-aged or younger. Three monthly passes at full fare would have set her back $480 – more than a third of her stipend.

“There were a couple times where I got caught and they asked, ‘Can I see your student ID?’ and I would show my Northwestern one,” Wyatt says.

“I would play dumb and be like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know.’”

Because Wyatt was interning full time, she had to temporarily give up her work-study job at Norris Cashier’s Office, where she was a student supervisor. Though Wyatt didn’t apply for it, Medill’s Ben Baldwin Fund offers assistance to some students with demonstrated financial need; other scholarships are offered for students pursuing a fashion, video or broadcast JR. She was still able to cover her expenses, though, because she received a $3500 financial aid refund per quarter on top of the stipend.

“If the vast majority of the students are able to afford JR and do whatever the fuck they want, [Medill] may not be as concerned about it,” Wyatt says. “My attitude and the attitude of my friends was kind of like, ‘Oh, this is kind of a shitty thing we have to do.’ But none of us really ever made more noise about it than just complaining to each other.”

Similarly, all SESP students are required to complete a junior year practicum where they work in their field of study by interning 30 hours a week and attending a related seminar.

Like Medill, SESP doesn’t require employers to pay interns an hourly wage. And, because they’re usually at schools, non-profits and governmental organizations, most don’t. Unlike Medill, though, SESP doesn’t require a stipend.

“There are some paid opportunities, but they’re opportunities that I’m not interested in, so I didn’t bother applying to them,” says Samantha Buresch, a senior studying learning and organizational change.

Buresch interned at Evanston Township High School last winter, taking the 93 bus from her sorority house and back Monday through Thursday. After the Friday seminar, she squeezed in five hours at her work-study job at the SESP office in Annenberg, half of the hours she’d normally work. SESP’s Ventra Fund, a scholarship for students with

The Budget Breakdown Kedar Satyanand’s Monthly Expenses FOOD & DRINK $400

TRANSPORTATION $100

HOME & HEALTH $700

MONTHLY TOTAL SPENT

$1200

Louisa Wyatt’s Monthly Expenses FOOD & DRINK $160

TRANSPORTATION $96.25

HOME & HEALTH $625

MONTHLY TOTAL SPENT

$821.25

FEATURES | When you can’t afford to work for free demonstrated financial need, covered Buresch’s transportation costs and reimbursed her for the background check ETHS required.

During the academic year, internships take place in the Chicagoland area. However, students who complete practicum in the summer before or after their junior year have the option of going to San Francisco or Washington, D.C. “In theory it’s a good idea to give students hands-on experience,” Buresch says. “But at the same time, it does kind of perpetuate a cycle of college inequality in a sense, in that students with money are able to do it in the summer and have the opportunity to do it in San Francisco or Washington, D.C. Yes, students may be able to get paid during that time, but you’re also paying [tuition] for course credit, so are you really making money?”

ENGAGE CHICAGO & CHICAGO FIELD STUDIES

Silverstein encountered the same problem last summer when she worked as an unpaid intern for Chicago’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability.

She knew it was unlikely she’d get SIGP since she’s not on financial aid, but applied anyway, thinking she “might as well try and see what happens.” When Silverstein didn’t get the grant, she went ahead with the internship, opting to pick up shifts at Henry Crown Sports Pavilion on top of her usual Phonathon hours to make it work.

“Places like the City of Chicago just truly, really are not able to pay interns,” Silverstein says. “It’s annoying, but I’m just lucky to be privileged enough to be able to actually do it.”

Next summer, Curtis hopes to participate in the Global Engagement Summer Institute, a Northwesternaffiliated service learning study-abroad program worth two credits. While it’s $8,707, there are a number of GESI-sponsored and outside scholarships, some of which cover the full cost of participation. Otherwise, Curtis will apply to SIGP again and save up for the first month’s rent in order to stay in Evanston this time around.

No matter what form they take, unpaid internships present an obstacle for low-income students at Northwestern. While aspiring to diversity is an admirable pursuit, a diverse student body means little if students are still barred from certain experiences because of a price tag.

Given the recent deregulation of internships, Provenzano says the responsibility to make them accessible now falls to universities.

“I think it’s going to be up to these educational institutions to make it easier, either by reducing tuition or offering stipends,” she says. “To me, that’s the only solution that really makes sense because if you are not independently able to bear this cost, I don’t know how you find a benefactor.”

“DON’T GET STRESSED OUT, THEY’RE NOT EVEN PAYING YOU.”

Initially, Curtis wanted to participate in Engage Chicago, Northwestern’s summer program centered around an eight-week course and an internship at a government institution, social enterprise or nonprofit. However, the internship component is unpaid, and working another job simultaneously is difficult given the program’s Monday to Friday schedule. Without aid, registration, tuition and housing cost $9,726.

Chicago Field Studies, a similar program, sets students up with an internship at a Chicago firm along with a related weekly seminar. Unlike Engage Chicago, though, it’s offered every quarter and allows internships in all fields. According to the CFS website, most internships are unpaid, but students with demonstrated financial need are eligible for additional aid in the form of a stipend.

“I think I just had given in to the fact that, if this was the field that I was going to get an internship in, it 40 FALL 2018

wasn’t going to be paid,” says Rachel Silverstein, a Weinberg senior studying psychology and legal studies.

Silverstein is taking the civic engagement seminar for two credits to complement her internship at immigration law firm Davidson & Seseri LLC, where she works Monday to Wednesday. Because Silverstein only needs two more credits to graduate, she’s not taking any additional courses this quarter, but students taking fewer than four CFS credits often do.

“It’s not an internship where I copy things and get coffee,” Silverstein says. “I do everything from drafting affidavits, which are clients’ statements as to why they should remain in the United States. I prepare the application packages, so I put together evidence of

documentation, and I write cover letters for the application to actually be sent in.

Especially for people who are looking for asylum, I research country conditions in their country of origin to show why they couldn’t return.”

Despite doing substantive and necessary work, Silverstein doesn’t get paid hourly, though the law firm does provide a $200 monthly travel stipend. On the side, she works seven hours a week at Alumni Relations and Development’s Phonathon.

“It’s hard to justify doing work and not being paid for it,” Silverstein says.

“It’s also especially annoying that a lot of unpaid internships are in legal fields or public interest fields, nonprofits, places where people who want to make a difference are trying to work.

It’s discouraging sometimes to feel like you’re trying to do some good, but you’re not getting paid for it.”

As the jazz studies program celebrates its 20th anniversary, NBN takes a look back at its past.

WRITTEN BY DUNCAN AGNEW DESIGNED BY AINE DOUGHERTY

W

hen Adegoke Steve Colson came to Northwestern as an applied piano major over 50 years ago, he realized that his greatest passion — jazz — was a considerable problem. After arriving on campus in 1967 as the only African American undergraduate in the School of Music, Colson spent hours every day searching for an open practice room. Without the luxury of the recently built Ryan Center for the Musical Arts, Colson competed with other music majors for the limited number of rooms. When he finally found one, he would work through scales, exercises and classical pieces for his courses in the Northwestern School of Music. To treat himself at the end of a taxing practice session, Colson would crack open a jazz piece by one of the big-name artists like John Coltrane, Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie.

At the time, the music school didn’t include a jazz department, but Colson had been practicing the genre since he was 10.

Determined to bring jazz to Evanston at a time when Chicago sat at the top of the industry, he and fellow student-musician Chico Freeman started a jazz band called The Life and Death Situation.

The School of Music, though, wasn’t a fan of these extracurricular activities.

FALL 2018 41

FEATURES | Bienen Blues “I would find a room, and I’d start playing Bach Inventions — that’s what I was working on at the time. And if I switched off and started playing jazz, people would immediately pound on the door,” Colson says. “I mean, they would start pounding on the wall like ‘what are you doing?’ So, yeah, it was like a strict thing that that’s not what you do here.”

This fall, Bienen is celebrating 20 years of undergraduate jazz studies. In 1998, former Bienen Dean Bernard Dobroski and Professor Don Owens collaborated to set up a jazz curriculum. However, Northwestern jazz has faced its fair share of obstacles, including the disbandment of the program for two years in the mid-2000s.

In many ways, jazz is an oppressed African American tradition that struggled for decades to break into the curriculum at premier music schools like Bienen because of its reputation as night-club music, according to Vanessa Tonelli, a current Northwestern musicology PhD candidate.

Jazz and society

Why jazz wasn't considered academic

Between the 1920s and 1960s, jazz grew in popularity as music that was almost exclusively performed by Black artists, according to Dobroski. While people enjoyed the style, jazz remained taboo among academic elites.

“Media was not advertising it,” Dobroski says. “You know, people liked it. It was music of Black and non-white people.”

Tonelli says it’s important to consider factors like the history of Evanston and the way in which the Chicago jazz scene rose in popularity primarily as a type of entertainment influenced by the civil rights movement. “[Jazz] largely follows this progress narrative of being just an entertainment form, of being a dance hall, club kind of music,” Tonelli says. “That’s what jazz was, and therefore wasn’t taken seriously by the university system, by academia in general.”

42 FALL 2018

According to Dobroski, although jazz was consistently belittled because of this strictly club-music perception of the art, many of the classics shared similar origins.

“It was really hard to break in because it was seen as ballroom music and not serious music,” Dobroski says. “But believe me, I bet you a lot of classical music was written when people were drunk and sitting in bars.”

Slowly, that ballroom-music narrative began to change after the University of North Texas established the first undergraduate jazz program in 1947 thanks to a graduate student who proposed a jazz curriculum in his thesis.

People who grew up listening to jazz in the 1920s and ‘30s demanded the expansion of jazz in academia as they entered adulthood, Tonelli says.

Still, Northwestern faced unique roadblocks to the development of jazz due to the nature of both the school and the surrounding Evanston community.

For decades, Evanston was a conservative bastion of religiosity that emphasized a strict moral code, according to Tonelli.

The city was a dry town for many of the same years that jazz was thriving in urban areas around the country. Since jazz based itself around the nightclub atmosphere, it struggled to find an audience north of Chicago in spite of its ubiquity in downtown clubs.

“Things like [Evanston’s conservatism] don’t lend itself towards playing jazz regularly,” Tonelli says. “They don’t lend itself for jazz musicians to make a career here [in Evanston].”

On top of that conservatism being unaccommodating toward jazz at Northwestern, this traditional culture led students to frequently face racism and prejudice on campus. Al From, the Editor of The Daily Northwestern in 1964 and 1965, says that he and his staff uncovered an admissions system at Northwestern that limited the number of minorities whom the University accepted every year.

“The story we broke was that there were quotas on how many African Americans and Jews and Catholics could get in,” From says. “I’m not exactly sure when that ended, but the director of admissions was moved out.”

In 1964, the United States Department of State invited a Northwestern student jazz ensemble on a sponsored tour of Latin America, as part of a long-standing effort to send jazz musicians abroad.

According to an article published in The Daily Northwestern at the time, Vice President and Dean of Faculties Payson S. Wild sent a letter declining the invitation to the director of the Office of Cultural Presentations of the Department of State.

In the letter, Wild justified the decision by stating that the band operated outside the purview of the University curriculum, and that there was no regular faculty member to accompany the group on the tour. “We do hope that in the future it will be possible for you to invite a more representative group from the music school, one which will truly reflect the academic program of the University,” Wild wrote.

The following week, The Daily ran an editorial bashing the University for refusing to allow the jazz band to partake in such an opportunity. As the piece pointed out, Northwestern still allowed the football team to travel across the Midwest every weekend for competitions even though the group didn’t “reflect the academic program of the university.”

“

You were not even allowed to practice popular music or jazz music. If a faculty person’s walking past the room, he’d come in and threaten you with ‘You can’t practice that kind of music. Do it at home.’

Bernard Dobroski, former Dean of Bienen

ILLUSTRATIONS

BY RACHEL HAWLEY

Bienen Blues | FEATURES “Perhaps the officials are a little bit embarrassed that the group of Northwestern students invited to make the tour developed on its own initiative rather than under direct tutelage of the music faculty,” the editorial concluded.

When Colson heard the story, he seemed less than surprised.

“The idea that you restrict people from exercising the talent that they have because it’s not in line with what you want to promote, that’s the problem,” Colson says. “You get so many people that have a lot of talent, but it has to be devoted to this one model because somebody else external to them says this is the model that they want.”

Rufus Reid, a bass major who graduated in 1971 and formed his own jazz band at NU, argues that the separation between jazz and the academic program that Wild referred to in his letter to the State Department stems from a lack of understanding.

“Most people don’t like anything they don’t understand,” Reid says. “As far as I’m concerned, people still don’t understand jazz and what we do and how we do it.”

Colson even recalls knowing more about jazz than the instructor who founded a Northwestern jazz band while he was a student. The conductor told Colson not to play any blues in his audition for that band, but he ended up mistaking Colson’s jazz choice for a blues piece.

“It was kind of a problem with me anyway, because he just exposed that he didn’t know the music,” Colson says. “He’s here as an instructor, and he doesn’t know the difference between a blues form and a popular song, and that’s one of the reasons that he kept me out [of the band].”

After both Colson and Freeman were denied the chance to join this ensemble, the administration told them to focus on their academic technique instead, according to Colson.

“The school said, ‘We want you to be proficient in terms of the classical studies before you can get into the jazz band,’” Colson says.

In 1971, when Reid performed his senior recital in front of his classmates and professors, he was one of the first students to include a jazz section in his program. Still, he had to demonstrate sound technical skills across a variety of

classical repertoire before doing so.

Reid says that no faculty during his time as an undergraduate at Northwestern had the skills to further train him in jazz.

“I didn’t go there to have them teach me how to play jazz, ’cause they couldn’t have done that anyway,” Reid says. “It didn’t exist at that time.”

Several decades later, Dobroski heard similar stories about the suppression of jazz at Northwestern’s music school, lauded as one of the best in the country.

“You were not even allowed to practice popular music or jazz music,” Dobroski says. “If a faculty person’s walking past the room, he’d come in and threaten you with ‘You can’t practice that kind of music. Do it at home.’”

The formation of jazz at NU In 1979, Don Owens took over the fledgling jazz program after being named assistant director of bands and associate professor of conducting. Two years later, he established the Northwestern Jazz Festival, a yearly event that featured guest artists and master classes on topics like improvisation.

Over the next decade, Owens added courses such as Advanced Jazz Writing to the music school curriculum. In 1988, he even led the Northwestern Jazz Ensemble on a tour of major cities across the East Coast.

By 1991, jazz pianist Michael Kocour joined the faculty at the request of several students. According to “Advancing Music for a Century,” a book by Heather Rebstock about the development of music at Northwestern, “the first class [Kocour] offered attracted so many students that it had to be moved twice to larger locations.”

When Dobroski became the dean of the music school in 1990, he took matters into his own hands, motivated by his own reliance on jazz as a PhD candidate at Northwestern in the early 1970s.

“

I don't think we're the target of even a fraction as much money [as the classical program].

Sam Wolsk, senior jazz studies major

Throughout his time as a student in Evanston, he paid for his tuition with the money he earned performing in Chicago.

In 1998, Owens and Dobroski worked together to expand the jazz program into an official undergraduate jazz studies major, nine years after Owens initially formed a master’s program in jazz pedagogy. The music faculty unanimously voted in favor of the resolution.

Toni-Marie Montgomery succeeded Dobroski as dean in 2003, and chaos ensued when she axed the undergraduate jazz studies major following Owens’ retirement in 2005.

According to an article in the Chicago Tribune on December 7, 2007, Montgomery struggled to find a qualified replacement, and none of the top applicants accepted the position.

The search for a director continued, but still, no candidates emerged for months.

“In my opinion, they didn’t look good enough,” Reid says. “Especially in 2005, there were certainly people who were qualified to do that, but they may not have been qualified to be called a professor at Northwestern.”

Part of the problem, as Colson and Reid note, may have been a high demand among music schools for professors with master’s degrees or doctorates. The issue was that many top musicians didn’t have degrees, Colson says.

Reid points out that while there are still only a few names in jazz who have doctorates, plenty of talented musicians and educators would have been qualified to lead the program in Evanston.

“They might have been looking for a doctorate or something like that, and there’s a handful of doctorates in jazz studies even to this day,” Reid says.

FALL 2018 43

FEATURES | Bienen Blues Finally, after two years, in the winter of 2007, Montgomery caught a break when Victor Goines, former jazz artistic director at the Juilliard School and saxophonist for Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, accepted the position. However, not a single former professor within the department returned when Goines brought the program back to Bienen.

“When all this other stuff went down, all those people who were keeping the thing moving and teaching as adjuncts, they got let go after they got Victor in there, and he changed the whole thing,” Reid says. “It was a little funny how it was done, in my opinion.”

Goines declined multiple requests to comment on the current jazz program at Northwestern.

Current state of the program Goines has established a more consistent jazz studies program over the past decade, something that both alumni like Reid and current students appreciate. He tends to emphasize professionalism as an educator in order to continue building up a relatively new department within Bienen.

“I can reasonably surmise that maybe the program wasn’t taken seriously before, and now Goines makes it a priority for it to be taken seriously,” says senior trumpet player Sam Wolsk.

According to senior jazz studies major Louis Danowsky, one of the best features

of the jazz program at Northwestern is Goines’ ability to bring in famous artists for guest performances. When Danowsky and Wolsk were first-years, for example, renowned saxophonist Branford Marsalis joined the jazz ensemble for a weekend recital, even offering one-on-one instruction. The attraction that Marsalis added to the band resulted in a sold out Pick-Staiger Concert Hall ahead of the concert, by far the largest crowd that most players have performed in front of during their time in Evanston, Danowsky says.

One issue that current jazz studies students face is that most donations to Bienen are earmarked for the classical programs, according to Wolsk. While Goines encounters difficulty scheduling more than three jazz ensemble concerts per year, Bienen’s Symphonic Band enjoyed a tour of Asia this past spring break.

“I don’t think we’re the target of even a fraction as much money,” Wolsk says. “Even to go to Chicago, I think Mr. Goines has to jump through some budgetary hoops.”

This year, however, the big band already has two more performances on the schedule than the typical lineup, and the jazz small groups, formally known as combos, usually perform twice per quarter.

When Wolsk and Danowsky started their time at Northwestern, there were five other first-years in the jazz studies major. Only three seniors remain in the department after four others dropped the program.

Wolsk attributes that trend to the fact that many dual-degree jazz students end up deciding to focus on their other major. Still, he says most of them remain involved in jazz in some capacity, whether that be through musical theatre, their own band or otherwise.

Last year, two first-years majoring in jazz studies transferred to other jazz schools at the University of Southern California and

the Manhattan School of Music. According to Wolsk, their philosophies for music education didn’t line up with the way Goines runs the program at Northwestern. He says that these transfers out of Northwestern are an anomaly, whereas jazz students moving from Bienen to Weinberg is much more common.

“

Everyone is is always always Everyone looking out out for for each each looking other, and and II really really value value other, how there's there's not not aa lot lot of of how cutthroat competition. competition. cutthroat Everyone's friends friends and and Everyone's just trying trying to to push push each each just other in in aa positive positive way. way. other Louis Danowsky, senior jazz studies major

Although people like Reid have their reservations about the faculty turnover, Wolsk and other students say that some of the new, big-name instructors have brought talented jazz players to Northwestern thanks to the allure of these high-profile professors. An influx of 10 first-year students this fall has the department looking forward to a bright future.

Wolsk and others praise Goines for his accessibility and approachability. Even while he’s on tour, he frequently Skypes into rehearsals. “[Goines] is really good about encouraging dialogue with us,” Wolsk says. “When he’s there, he always wants

The evolution of jazz 1947

The University of North Texas starts the first collegiate jazz program in the country.

44 FALL FALL 2018 2018 44

The Jazz Workshop enters the offerings of the band program in the music early school.

1970s

1979

Professor Don Owens takes over the jazz program, directing a jazz band and adding jazz courses to the curriculum over the next decade.

Bienen Blues | FEATURES us to tell him what we think, and one of the things he hears the most is that we should play more, that we should have more opportunities.”

For Danowsky, the camaraderie cultivated within the program is its best quality.

“Everyone is looking out for each other, and I really value how there’s not a lot of cutthroat competition,” Danowsky says. “Everyone’s friends and just trying to push each other in a positive way.”

Struggles with diversity Today, both the jazz and classical programs lack diversity. After the only Black jazz studies major transferred out of Northwestern this past year, no Black students remain in the program, according to Wolsk.

“It’s all white this year, which closely resembles all of Bienen, too,” Wolsk says.

“I don’t even think that white people are overrepresented in our jazz band compared to the rest of Bienen.”

Danowsky also notes the correlation between diversity in jazz and financial factors. Since Northwestern doesn’t shell out the kind of merit scholarships that public schools or music conservatories might, those other institutions attract a much more racially diverse set of individuals.

“Music often involves a huge personal investment among families,” Danowsky says. “And so you happen to see more often that people of higher socioeconomic status

1998

study music and pursue music in college.”

There is also a lack of gender diversity in Bienen, especially within the jazz community. This year, three women are involved in the jazz program out of over 30 students, according to Danowsky. First-year jazz studies major Siobhan Esposito doesn’t find this number surprising – she thinks it’s indicative of the entire jazz scene, where women were often confined to the vocalist role for many years.

Fellow first-year Robin Steuteville, Esposito’s classmate and a double bass performance major, however, was particularly disappointed by this feature of Bienen when she arrived on campus.

“In general, the jazz program here is great, but one thing that I really have noticed is that it isn’t as diverse as I wish it were in a lot of different factors, and one of them is the amount of girls in the program,” Steuteville says.

One reason for the lack of both racial and gender diversity within Bienen and across much of the professional classical music industry, Steuteville says, is the intimidation factor of being in the minority in these programs.

Gender discrimination also creates a higher-stakes environment for women in the jazz industry, according to Tonelli. To gain the respect of other musicians, women have to spend much more time and effort proving their worth than men do.

“Jazz has always been dominated by men, and when a woman wants to play jazz, she gets questioned,” Tonelli says.

“And if she proves her worth, then she has to be really good to be taken seriously.”

While Steuteville has seen a general increase in diversity when it comes to bands at lower levels, the overwhelmingly white male majority at prestigious music schools and in professional ensembles continues to hinder progress.

“

Jazz has always been dominated by men, and when a woman wants to play jazz, she gets questioned.

And if she proves her worth, then she has to be really good to be taken seriously.

Vanessa Tonelli, musicology PhD candidate

“You see more people willing to try or continue into middle school or continue into high school, but there’s definitely also the systematic problem of when they look up and they can’t see role models that they can connect with,” Steuteville says. “Then, they’re more likely to stop playing their instrument, or to give up or to feel like they can’t be a part of this.”

The “this” to which Steuteville refers is an opportunity to join a collaborative program that’s continuing to improve the music school that once rejected Colson’s jazz aspirations.

“It’s a very supportive department. I mean, everyone loves to see you succeed, which is great, and I think you kind of need that for the art form,” Esposito says. “’Cause if people are trying to bring each other down, it’s not going to succeed.”

at Northwestern

Owens and Dobroski establish an undergraduate jazz studies major for the first time in Northwestern history.

Dean Toni-Marie Montgomery eliminates the major after failing to find a replacement for Owens.

2005

2007

Jazz studies returns to Bienen with the hiring of Victor Goines as the new director of the program.

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4.8 percent of the general population identified as Asian American in the 2010 Census.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY SARAH ZHANG

23.5 percent of Northwestern’s class of 2022 identifies as Asian American.

22.9 percent of Harvard's class of 2022 identifies as Asian American.

46 FALL 2018

Imperfect but imperative | FEATURES

Imperfect but IMPERATIVE WRITTEN BY MILA JASPER // DESIGNED BY SARAH ZHANG

W

hen Weinberg junior Emily Guo wrote her college essay, she looked to her sister and one of her closest friends to help make the story personal. She wanted to write about her identity, but needed help working through exactly what that entailed.

“It wasn’t easy for me to write,” Guo says. “I didn’t really know how to express it because not only was I trying to understand it for myself, but [also to] put it in a way that other people could empathize with.”

Guo is Chinese American. On paper, she says her upbringing fits common stereotypes often assigned to Asian Americans: she was studious, quiet and played piano. But she was also active and involved in sports. For a long time, she felt that it was hard to embrace her Chinese heritage.

Her small, upper-middle class community on Boston’s North Shore was predominantly white, and in some ways, she felt as though she was “passing for white.”

“I was like [Asian American] is a category that has been assigned to me, but this is all of the complexity that I’ve had to deal with in it,” Guo says, “And also all of the ways that it just doesn’t fit with what I am.”

She wanted her personal statement to write the narrative of who she was before college admissions officials could write one for her.

The question in the Harvard case is whether Asian American students are being denied access to higher education. Yet Asian Americans are overrepresented compared to the general population at both Harvard and Northwestern. Still, quota systems are illegal regardless of the numbers.

Affirmative action is on the line again in the lawsuit against Harvard. But this time, access to higher education, even at Northwestern, may actually be in danger.

This problem isn’t exclusive to Guo; all college applicants have to figure out how to use their essays to make themselves more than a list of test scores and extracurriculars. But according to Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a group of rejected applicants suing Harvard University, Asian American students carry an extra burden to prove themselves in the admissions process.

SFFA is accusing Harvard of engaging in racially biased admissions practices by creating caps on the number of Asian American students admitted. The group claims that Asian Americans were consistently scored lower on the “personal ratings” category — where applicants are rated on factors such as “kindness,” “courage” and “likability”— of the application, despite strong results on test scores and in extracurricular activities.

The argument in this case isn’t new. The same man who organized SFFA, Edward Blum, was the force behind a similar lawsuit that made it to the Supreme Court in 2013 and 2016, where affirmative action was upheld. The argument has played out on Northwestern’s campus before, too.

HOW NORTHWESTERN FITS IN In May of 1991, the Northwestern Review, a conservative and now defunct student-run weekly, published a story called “Separate and Unequal: An Investigation of NU Admissions reveals something less than equal opportunity.” Replete with a slew of non-committal quotes from then-Associate Provost for University Enrollment Rebecca Dixon and an “unavailable for comment” from then-University president Arnold Weber, the Review’s article exposed a potential issue with the way race in admissions is discussed. Their actual assertions went much further, claiming that the University was giving an “unfair advantage” to Black applicants.

The story was based on admissions data provided by anonymous administration officials, and said that the favoring of Blacks in admissions was hurting white students and minorities, specifically Asian American and Hispanic applicants. “This fact may be an ominous one for Asians,” the article reads. “As more Black students are recruited, more

FALL 2018 47

qualified Asians are likely to be rejected.”

And, in regards to low admission rates for Hispanic applicants, “some minorities apparently add more value than others.”

The Harvard case is more than just similar to the argument the Review made in 1991 – it has the potential to fundamentally alter college admissions across the country. It already has the backing of the Department of Justice, which in July submitted a statement of interest supporting SFFA, and according to The New York Times, has reallocated resources from its civil rights division to investigations into university admissions practices.

The DOJ says that because Harvard receives funding from the federal government, it is subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance. Northwestern, like Harvard, also relies on federal funding and is subject to Title VI. “What the plaintiffs are hoping for in this case is that the court will overrule [Regents of the University of California v. Bakke’s] holding that you can have affirmative action in favor of African Americans,” Northwestern Professor of Law and Political Science Andrew Koppelman says. “The plaintiffs are hoping that the Supreme Court today, which has completely different membership than at the time of Bakke, will reinterpret the statute to say that universities cannot take race into account at all.”

This would challenge Northwestern’s “holistic admissions” process, which former University spokesperson Al Cubbage told The Daily Northwestern “looks at a number of different factors, including race.”

Koppelman says that should the Court move to overturn affirmative action, he expects universities to make their opinions heard so that they can continue to use race in admissions.

Over the summer, 16 universities did just that by filing an amicus brief in defense of Harvard’s admissions practices. Northwestern and the University of Chicago were the only U.S. News top-ten schools not on the list.

That said, Northwestern has emphasized its commitment to holistic admissions that include taking race into account.

“Many other universities could have participated in the amicus brief,” University Spokesperson Bob Rowley wrote in an email to NBN. “Nothing should be read into the fact that Northwestern is not one of the amici, one way or the other.”

Tyler Washington, the VP of Accessibility and Inclusion for ASG, also expressed “entire faith” in University President Morton Schapiro and VP for Student Affairs Patricia Telles-Irvin to maintain their diversity practices, citing their “strong voices.”

“Northwestern is kind of in a tough place in

48 FALL 2018

that they are taking a lot of affirmative action steps,” Washington says, emphasizing the University’s 20 percent Pell Grant-eligible goal as evidence of its commitment to diversity. “I think they want to make sure Asian American applicants feel like they’ll be given a fair shake, so that’s probably the calculus that played into not making comments either way.”

BEYOND THE TEST SCORES The Review’s investigation began with a quote from Northwestern's admissions policy: “It is the policy of Northwestern University not to discriminate against any individual on the basis of race … in matters of admissions.”

In the eyes of the Review, the University was violating its own policy by admitting African Americans at a rate of 73 percent, compared to the 49 percent overall rate, even though the mean SAT score for African Americans was 1070 compared to the overall mean of 1240.

These numbers were from 1984, the first year for which the Review had admissions data, but they followed similar patterns for each of the years they had statistics, 1984-87 and 1990.

Dixon said that the numbers cited in the Review’s article “didn’t sound right,” but later told the Chicago Tribune that the “thrust is not too far off.’’

“There is much more to a person than just a test,” Dixon told the Review. “Why do you keep going back to the scores?”

This question is the crux of the affirmative action debate.

“Race plays a pretty critical role in admissions if you are trying to build a diverse and complete and holistic class,” Washington says. “Some of those factors in having a holistic class aren’t captured in SAT scores and GPAs. That much is obvious to anyone who has just talked to another person before.”

In both the 1991 case at Northwestern and the current Harvard case, the argument has been that more qualified students are being locked out of elite schools to make room for Black students.

This line of thought pits minority groups against each other, yet regardless of which group is better off, all minority groups have been subject to the white majority, according to History Professor Ji-Yeon Yuh. For example, Guo felt she had to defend herself for looking like an “overachiever” who only cared about school. According to Yuh, the very definition of “overachieving” in this context is derived from Asian Americans’ status being compared to white Americans.

“If you feel like you’re doing something and you’re doing something well, [it’s] because you’re Asian and not just because you did the thing well,” Guo says of this stereotype.

Yuh agrees, citing the underlying meaning behind the label overachiever. “[Overachieving] means that you’re not

"Asian Americans and African Americans are not competing with each other for spots.

They’re competing with white applicants for spots." supposed to achieve that much,” Yuh says.

“You’re ‘uppity.’ White people or white men were supposed to be achieving this, but instead you are, so you are ‘overachieving.’”

In the Harvard case, SFFA asserts that Asian Americans are subject to quotas to make room for other minority groups and white people. But Yuh says the position of all others has been crafted to prop up the white majority.

“The fundamental thing about college admissions is that Asian Americans and African Americans are not competing with each other for spots,” she says. “They’re competing with white applicants for spots, and nothing shows that more clearly than the case against Harvard.”

Yuh traces this conflict between minorities back to the civil rights movement in the 1960s, when she says the notion of the “model minority myth” first emerged. This myth is the stereotype still common in society today: that Asian Americans are high achieving and lawabiding citizens because of their Asian culture.

“Americans were saying through the model minority myth ‘look at these Asians, they are succeeding, that proves there’s no racism, that proves that these Black people over here complaining about racism are complaining about nothing,’” Yuh says. “This is the beginnings of the ways in which the broader American society is deliberately pitting Asian Americans against African Americans.”

According to Yuh, the character judgments admissions officers make in the “personal ratings” category could be impacted by this myth.

“There are stereotypes ... about Asian Americans being nerdy and therefore lacking

social skills, about Asian Americans being greedy, because they’re overachievers and therefore lacking empathy and kindness, and about Asian Americans being robotic because all they do supposedly is ‘study study study,’” Yuh says. “So the ways in which Harvard evaluates its applicants seems to replicate some of these stereotypes.”

SFFA has to prove that Asian Americans have actually been hurt in Harvard’s admissions processes, though.

“If, in fact, Asian Americans can’t show at trial that they’ve been hurt,” Koppelman says, “Then they haven’t got any basis for appealing because the trial court looks to the reports as a matter of fact.”

CLASS & BUILDING AN APPLICATION Like many Northwestern students, when Weinberg junior Seri Lee was in second grade, they was learning addition and subtraction.

And they was frustrated.

“My parents couldn’t help me with that because the way they learned how to add and subtract was different from the way the American school system teaches you,” Lee says.

Lee’s parents are immigrants. They didn’t go to college, and they don’t speak English.

As a first-generation, low-income student applying to college, Lee faced extra challenges.

“I had to navigate by myself,” Lee says. “FAFSA and CSS, they ask you to basically pull up your parents tax information as if an 18- or 19-yearold is supposed to know how to navigate taxes and that kind of information.”

As Lee’s story shows, disadvantaged students often carry more responsibilities

"It [affirmative action] benefits the most privileged Black applicants.

That this becomes the most prominent battleground for racial equality is racial justice on the cheap."

with less access to resources and activities that can help them look attractive on applications.

Test scores are heavily influenced by a students’ ability to pay for test prep, as well as by the quality of the education they received more broadly. Extracurricular activities can give a boost to applicants whose grades or SAT scores aren’t up to snuff, but those also require access, time and money.

“One of the characteristics of affirmative actions is that it benefits the most privileged Black applicants,” Koppelman says. “That this becomes the most prominent battleground for racial equality is racial justice on the cheap.”

Instead, Koppelman argues, policies like the 20 percent Pell Grant eligible goal are the path forward to ensuring diversity because they make college more accessible for lower income students.

“Northwestern is such a rich school that we can admit on a needs-blind basis,” Koppelman says. “Ultimately, what you want to do is have such a range of education opportunities that it doesn’t matter if you got into Harvard or Northwestern.”

Pell Grants are not enough to fully pay for Northwestern’s tuition, but the University’s soaring endowment can make up the difference for needy students.

This is not to say race shouldn’t be a factor in admissions, though, according to Lee. “A reality with no affirmative action is worse than one with affirmative action,” Lee says. “I think that in this case there needs to be analysis of both race and class. There are wealthy people of color obviously, and if you’re wealthy you’re just going to become more wealthy, but that’s not saying race isn’t important.”

Even though racism has manifested itself in economic disadvantages to minority groups, such that minority groups often have higher ratios of poverty than whites, the raw numbers show that there are actually more white people living below the poverty line than minorities. So fully switching to classbased, race-blind admissions would not effectively foster diversity.

“It really depends on what kind of diversity universities are going to commit themselves to,” Yuh says. “Are they going to commit themselves to a race-blind socioeconomic diversity? Or are they going to commit themselves to a kind of diversity that is going to account all manner of things?”

AFTER ACCEPTANCE The editorial that accompanied the Review’s investigation asked, “at what cost and to what real advantage” is the University “admitting more and perhaps less qualified Black students,” pointing to relatively low graduation rates for Black students.

This indictment of Black students for being unable to keep up as a justification

for the elimination of affirmative action is shortsighted, according to Lee. “I think, personally, diversity and inclusion is bullshit,” Lee says, noting that without support, disadvantaged students will struggle once they come to campus.

It has been widely reported across campus publications that mental health services at Northwestern do not adequately meet student need; this means low-income students and students of color like Lee feel like they have nowhere to turn when they experience this isolation.

“You need to change the culture and the practices of the University to actually really give these students from a diverse background equitable opportunities,” Yuh says. “People can’t succeed if they’re thrown into the water and told to swim. They succeed if they’ve already been taught to swim, and they’re familiar with the water, or if somebody can guide them.”

This frustration isn’t new, either. The Review quoted Karla Spurlock-Evans, Northwestern’s former Director of African-American Student Affairs, expressing the same idea.

There is no doubt that lack of access to support services hurts all students, and particularly disadvantaged students, but how much responsibility universities should take on to make up for social inequality is an open question.

Northwestern can admit more Pell Grant students, but until access to high quality public education is available to all, and not just those who are privileged, the pool of qualified low-socioeconomic class students will naturally be smaller than it should be.

“The 1950s and the 1960s are seen as a time of amazing class mobility for Americans, and one of the big drivers of that is the G.I. Bill [which helped WWII veterans pay for college],” Yuh says. “So we might talk about, ‘Oh well, what can colleges actually do?’

Colleges can expand the middle class.”

While it was universities that educated these veterans, the access to higher education was made possible by the federal government, not the universities themselves.

Although the plaintiffs in the Harvard case argue that categorization is the essence of discrimination, simply eliminating the categories doesn’t alleviate the different levels of privilege to which each group has access.

The article in the Review took criticism from then-President Weber for ignoring 30 years of racial equality and progress on campus. In the 1960s, Northwestern’s campus was whitewashed. Affirmative action helped to change that, Weber told the Tribune. He went on to say that “affirmative action will eventually become self-effectuating” because minority populations would outnumber the white population in America. Twenty-seven years later, we still aren’t there.

FALL 2018 49

FEATURES

50 FALL 2018

50 | Fall 2018

PHOTO BY SAKKE OVERLUND ILLUSTRATION BY AUDREY VALBUENA

Tackling the hyphen | FEATURES

Tackling the

hyphen Student–athletes struggle to balance top-tier expectations in the classroom and Big Ten pressures in competition.

WRITTEN BY ANABEL MENDOZA // CONTRIBUTED REPORTING BY ABIGAIL WOLF // DESIGNED BY AUDREY VALBUENA

L

indsay Adamski, a pre-med senior and co-captain of Northwestern’s women’s swim team, approaches the pool’s starting block for the women’s 200 medley relay. The odor of chlorine stings the air as fans dressed in purple t-shirts and baseball caps crowd shoulder-to-shoulder on the bleachers of the Norris Aquatic Center. The spring of the diving board heard pulsing in the background begins to fade among the crowd’s whistles and cheers. The pool is Adamski’s home.

Adamski, who wears a black swimsuit embellished with a purple “N,” a black, latex swim cap and mirrored swim goggles, is nearly unidentifiable among the crowd of other Northwestern swimmers. She walks past the scoreboard, past the bleachers designated for the different teams and past the divers thrusting themselves into the air before landing in the water without a splash, to arrive at the starting block. She places her feet firmly, left foot forward, into a lunged, take-off position. Her eyes focus intently on the water, while her arms begin to sway slightly back-and-forth in anticipation. She is ready, zeroed in only on herself and the lane in front of her. In just a few seconds her race will begin, and she’ll plunge herself into the

pool. For that moment, it’s just her and the water. The stress of her upcoming midterms, the research she commutes to and from downtown Chicago to conduct and her meetings with coaches and doctors, among a number of other commitments, cease to exist for the 30 seconds she is racing.

The race marks the beginning of an onerous weekend for Adamski – competition from 5-9 p.m., practice the next morning at 6 a.m., midterms due Sunday evening and studying for the MCAT in March. The constant demands of Northwestern’s Division I athletics and top-tier academics are an all too familiar reality among the lives of student-athletes. As Adamski says, “We know we’re going to have to get up early; we know it’s going to hurt.”

This pain isn’t always physical. Rarely is there a time when a student-athlete can just be a student or just an athlete. They are living in a hyphenated world. Physically and theoretically, academics and athletics are kept separate. Student-athletes find themselves constantly balancing expectations from these disparate sides, living at the intersection of physical perfection and academic success, stretching themselves to meet expectations from coaches, trainers, professors and classmates, expectations that don’t find space to coincide.

Whether you’re a Northwestern student-athlete or a “narp” – a “nonathletic regular person” as collegiate athletes commonly refer to their peers – you’ve likely heard the number: $270 million. The newly constructed Walter Athletic Facility stands lakeside, its modern glass edifice and cutting-edge athletic technology representing the newest additions to Northwestern’s campus. But amid campuswide budget cuts and the exclusivity of the facility, which remains accessible only to studentathletes and their coaches, the building has been the cause of much frustration and tension among student-athletes and non-student-athletes. One student on the NU Crushes and Confessions Facebook page went so far as to call it the “temple to the football gods” and criticized the career, tutoring and nutrition services given to athletes, despite other students lacking the same access to these resources.

Looking in from the outside, it’s easy to mistake the new building for a luxurious resort, where student-athletes enter into a new dimension; a world of regular massages and therapeutic hot tubs, a fuel station conveniently stocked with an assortment of free snacks, laundry chutes where their dirty FALL 2018 51

athletic gear vanishes into the abyss only to magically return freshly washed and dried. But the athletic facility also serves as a physical reminder that Northwestern student-athletes and nonstudent-athletes co-exist on one campus, but in two separate worlds.

Daily Grind At the Big Ten Swimming and Diving Championship back in February, swimmers from Big Ten schools across the country were beginning to warm up in the pool.

Out in the hallway, Adamski sat with her laptop, typing away to complete a paper with an alarm clock ticking down to race time. Despite having an hour and a half to warm up, Adamski spent 45-minutes in the pool, in order to leave time to finish an assignment due later that night. When she eventually finished, Adamski quickly shut her computer, running back into the pool to grab her suit, change and compete. During the championship, Northwestern’s men’s and women’s swim teams often travel for an entire week to compete. For Northwestern swimmers and divers, the championship usually takes place in the middle of winter quarter, during a time when other students on campus are preparing for their first round of midterms.

The feeling of a pressing deadline causes much stress for students as it is. They can often ask professors for extensions, or, in the case of student-athletes, try to meet with one of the 70 individual tutors Northwestern athletics has dedicated to an exclusive tutoring program. Adamski often holds herself back from asking for that help, though.

“I have the type of personality that I don’t want to do that,” she says. “I don’t want me being a student-athlete to be [the reason] I get special benefits, special perks because of what I’m doing. I’ve never asked for an extension because I’m like the deadline is here, I need to figure it out and get it done.”

Regardless of how much Adamski might benefit from an extension, asking for help comes from an underlying worry that non-student-athletes will see her,

a student-athlete, as someone receiving special treatment. So instead, she chooses to hold her tongue.

According to a survey by the American College Health Association, studentathletes nationwide report “four nights of insufficient sleep per week,” given how much of their time is consumed by travelling, practice and balancing schoolwork. The NCAA reported that onethird of student-athletes are consistently sleeping less than seven hours a night, which often leads to difficulty concentrating and performing both athletically and academically throughout the day. Healing and recovery from physical injuries and conditioning happens

Rarely is there a time when a

student-athlete can just be a

student or just an

athlete.

They are living in a

But in many ways, that constant mental and physical fatigue has become second nature. Across campus, the always-punctual high-pitched blare of a 5:45 a.m. alarm clock disrupts the silence in a Bobb room where first-year linebacker Khalid Jones begins to wake. Apart from his athletic gear, Jones has the stature of a football player. Looming at 6-foot-1-inch and 228 lbs, Jones is the type of athlete whose size, strength and skill make him a wanted member of numerous Power Five teams. Nevertheless, he’s humble about the number of athletic offers he received, knowing Northwestern was where he wanted to be. His sore muscles, never accustomed to the taxing regimen of weight lifting and sprints, ache at the onset of another day’s practice. Jones packs away his gear and iPad which holds his playbook, along with his chemistry notes and Spanish homework, everything he’ll need for the day.

Across campus, alarms begin to ring at different intervals of the morning; athletes like Jones begin to wake to meet their coaches and teammates often well before the rest of the student body starts their days.

“We practice Monday through Thursday, but Tuesdays are our really tough days where we condition. Wednesdays are still really hard physically,” he says.

“Not to mention we still lift two times a week on top of that … By the time I go to class, I’ve already been up for like six hours.” For Jones, starting his days at the break of dawn is his college experience.

From basketball to swimming to football to lacrosse, the daily schedules of studentathletes differ team-to-team but remain largely structured by the same fundamental building blocks: practice, games or competitions, conditioning, team meetings and mandatory study hours. Everything is planned to a tee.

According to NCAA regulations, studentathletes can train a maximum of 20 hours per week in season and eight hours per week during offseason; coaches rarely end weekly practices before this cap.

A recent study which surveyed over 44,000 Division I student-athletes, in addition to over 2,000 administrators and 3,000 head coaches, concludes that most student-athletes would like a mandatory

hyphenated world.

52 FALL 2018

during these essential hours at night, so limited sleep leads to even more physical strain on student-athletes’ bodies.

The physical exhaustion, though not unusual for student-athletes – especially those like Adamski who must follow an evening of competition with an earlymorning practice – becomes intensified during the week when classes and meetings are added to their meticulously planned schedule. The most prevalent case is when the fatigue of their earlymorning workouts catch up to them in the classroom. For Adamski, that has often meant teaching herself the course material after class. “A lot of times I find myself zoning out no matter how much coffee I have,” she says. “It’s so hard to focus.”

two-week “no-activity” period after their season is complete, while coaches in men’s football and men’s and women’s swimming primarily do not support as much time off.

Similarly, during the post-season, studentathletes responded that they’d prefer fewer than eight hours per week of training, while coaches preferred more hours per week.

However, these often-contested measures rarely account for the additional time spent traveling or attending team meetings.

“Generally during the week, I would say, probably three to four hours in total watching film, going over the plays, knowing what you need to do,” Jones says. “Not to mention your four classes that you’re taking.” On top of this, Northwestern football players lift two to three times a week for about an hour each session. This combination of physical and mental work required of studentathletes often makes it difficult for them to find time in their days to unwind and relax.

While coaches and trainers might encourage student-athletes to prioritize mental health, as was the case on the women’s basketball team, often the University’s highexpectations for student-athletes to perform athletically and academically, in addition to their overloaded schedules, makes prioritizing self-care impractical.

Even on their once-a-week off-days, student-athletes still feel an underlying expectation to work on perfecting their athletic craft. Student-athletes not in the gym during their day off are often found in the library or locked in their rooms catching up on schoolwork to make the deadline for an assignment.

While student-athletes have certainly chosen a college-experience heavily devoted to playing Division I sports, their time spent in the weight room or travelling every other weekend to compete naturally limits the time they can devote to doing assignments, studying both in and outside the classroom or taking on part-time jobs during the school year.

Nonetheless, some student-athletes often feel a lone responsibility to manage their athletic and academic careers out of fear that non-athlete students will criticize them for receiving special benefits. But many argue being a student-athlete never ends: they are constantly faced with the expectations of both jobs.

An imposter on campus The smell of antiseptic lingers in the air.

Lab benches line the room, equipped with two spots on each side for lab partners to work together. Bench-after-bench, lab partners armed with white coats and safety goggles begin gathering beakers and pipettes for their assignment. Among the crowd of pre-med students is Adamski, who asks around for a partner when it seems everyone but her has found one.

“Does anyone want to partner up?” she asks. Chatter between already-established pairs picks up, as groups begin working, leaving Adamski completely on her own.

“Everyone else would partner up,” she remarks, “I’d be the last person. I feel like I add value, but … I’ve learned to not identify myself as an athlete.”

Adamski isn’t alone in feeling this way either. Often, to be taken seriously within Northwestern’s rigorous classroom setting, and more importantly, to feel accepted on campus, student-athletes have felt they must conceal all parts of them that are tied to Big Ten athletics, to the newly constructed Ryan Fieldhouse and to the perks that some non-student-athletes are quick to criticize them for having.

“I try to wear regular clothes for the week because the non-athletes tend to not like athletes in the classes that I’m in,” Sandra Freeman, a junior pre-med student says. “I first like to establish myself as someone who is equal to everyone else in knowledge and ability and commitment before I tell people that I’m an athlete.”

It’s a common fear among Northwestern student-athletes that their athletic clothes stand out as obvious red flags among non-athlete students. Their personalized backpacks and embroidered attire call attention to their lives as athletes, and like the new facility, they believe a similar narrative is passed forward: this time, a narrative that student-athletes are somehow less capable when it comes to academics which they feel many have internalized throughout their time at Northwestern.

Standing at 6-foot-2-inches and shortspoken, School of Communication senior and starter on the women’s basketball team, Pallas Kunaiyi-Akpanah, began playing competitive basketball at 14-yearsold, shortly following her move to the United States from Nigeria. Her hope,

she says, is to be drafted to the WNBA after she graduates early following winter quarter. While the prospect of playing professionally isn’t always a reality for student-athletes after college, NU for Life, a professional development program for student-athletes on campus, helps to equip many with the resources necessary to excel professionally upon completion of their athletic careers. But similar to Freeman, Kunaiyi-Akpanah felt her athletic gear would out her to “narps” on campus.

She says she was afraid of suddenly becoming synonymous with unintelligent, indifferent and completely antithetic to the hard-working, driven population of true Northwestern students – those who have been accepted based on academic standing and achievement.

“When I first came as a freshman, [and] sophomore, I was a little concerned about how I would be perceived coming to class with sweatpants and a hoodie on,” says KunaiyiAkpanah, gently clasping her hands together, pausing briefly while her eyes drift to look at the ceiling. “I was afraid of how people might see me as a first impression, like ‘maybe she’s not smart or she doesn’t take school seriously’ or something like that.”

Yet, even when it comes to studentrun social events and extracurriculars beyond the classroom setting, the dayto-day schedules of student-athletes, complete with a variety of athletic obligations, make it nearly impossible for them to attend on-campus events hosted by their non-athlete peers. Whether it be Refusionshaka performances, student-run comedy shows or affinity group meetings, often the activities and extracurriculars that are central to an undergraduate’s experience are not always feasible for student-athletes to become involved in.

Though it can be difficult, sometimes they can find moments to share in these larger communities on campus: Pallas made time to perform a comedic act for the Afropollo talent show, winning third place.

“My schedule doesn’t allow me much socializing with students in general. We’re always with the athletes, we’re always traveling … That could be a reason why they feel like they don’t really accept us, because they don’t get to see us a lot,” Kunaiyi-Akpanah says.

Like Kunaiyi-Akpanah, some studentathletes have come to see their occupation of this remote space at Northwestern FALL 2018 53

FEATURES | Tackling the hyphen

as being a byproduct of their physical absence from campus, further restricting the opportunity to develop relationships with non-student-athletes.

Mapping out race Inside the 555 Clark lecture hall of African American Studies 212, dozens of students begin to trickle in minutes before class starts at 9:30 a.m. Among the group is a large number of student-athletes. Lauryn Satterwhite, a sophomore basketball player in Medill with an infectious smile and “In Jesus Name I play” bracelet, makes her way with the group toward the back right of the room. Many of them, having come straight from practice, carry to-go boxes filled with fresh fruit and breakfast burritos, attempting to eat while taking notes. All sitting together, Satterwhite and the rest of the student-athletes are a throng of athletic hoodies and Under Armour backpacks surrounded by non-athletic students.

It is clear that a separation exists in the classroom between studentathletes and non-student-athletes.

However, for student-athletes whom the intersections of race already situate them as minorities on Northwestern’s predominantly white, wealthy campus, the struggle to belong is exacerbated.

“As a student-athlete, I already feel out of the loop with things like even with the Black culture on campus, I still feel like I’m out of the loop on it just because I am an athlete,” Satterwhite says about being a Black student-athlete at Northwestern.

Last year, Satterwhite received a text from a friend in one of her journalism classes who invited her to a Black student event on campus. “When I got there, first I was like ‘Wow, I didn’t know there was this many Black students on campus,’” Satterwhite says. “That was like my first impression, and then second, I was like ‘this is kind of cool, I wish I could get invited to more of these.’”

For Satterwhite, this was a moment in which being invited for the first time also made her realize just how many events 54 FALL 2018

she had missed. There were already communities and friendships among Black students on campus that began forming without her, so despite the invitation, Satterwhite couldn’t help but still feel uninformed.

“Then I found out that they had all these GroupMe’s, like the ‘Black @ NU ‘21’ group chat, all these group chats that me and Lindsey,” another Black basketball player, “weren’t in … they had all these events, yet they didn’t make an effort to reach out to student-athletes and become friends with them and invite them.”

This obscure middleground where Black student-athletes like Satterwhite struggle to feel a part of the larger community of Black students at Northwestern complicates this constant juggling between the two identities of “student” and “athlete.” Instead, for many student-athletes of color, finding where they belong is muddled as they try to navigate these overlapping, yet very different spaces as students of color or student-athletes of color. In moments when students like Satterwhite struggle to feel part of Northwestern’s community of Black students, it is the athlete label that continually seems to place them as outsiders.

Satterwhite’s sentiments are not a new feeling for Black student-athletes at Northwestern. In 2016, Johari Shuck, a professor at Indiana University, who studies racial diversity issues in higher education, visited campus to talk to a six-person panel made up of current and former Black student-athletes at NU. One panelist, Derrick Thompson, a football player from the class of 2000, noted how walking into the Black House as a first-year student, he was perceived as solely an athlete and not as a Black student. In his research Shuck states, “[Black student-athletes] can’t always relate to the [non-athlete] Black student … Wedges exist because Black students don’t understand the experiences of Black athletes, and vice versa.”

While the challenges of feeling a part of Northwestern are often compounded

for student-athletes of color, Satterwhite and other student-athletes of color’s experiences do not stand for the entire Black student-athlete or student-athlete of color community. As Shuck would say, this isn’t a “one shoe fits all” experience.

“What being a Black person is to you might be different for what it is to me.”

These experiences, too, are uniquely different in each space that Black student-athletes and student-athletes of color occupy too, whether that be spaces of color, the classroom or the gym.

Shortly after Northwestern’s football team won the Big Ten West title, many non-athlete students took to social media. Celebratory captions such as, “Cats are Best in the West,” “NORTH(BEST IN THE)WESTERN” or simply “SPORTS” with a link to a local news story about Northwestern winning the accomplishment appeared all over social media. The win brought a wave of excitement across campus, as many students celebrated the victory, proud to claim Northwestern and the win as their own. But as a result of the win, the football season was extended by a week in preparation for the Big Ten Championship game in Indianapolis on December 1. Many football players from outside of the Chicago area did not go home for Thanksgiving and instead spent the holiday training with the rest of the team for the last regular season game against Illinois. That said, it’s difficult to find a single football player who complained about missing out on a brief break from classes and time spent with family and friends, because playing is what they love doing. When the alarm rings at 5:30 or 5:45 a.m., their bodies might ache for a few more hours of rest, but every day they will get up, they will train and they will attempt to manage life as student-athlete the best they can.

hangover

56-57 How to lose a guy in 10 weeks 58 Which Northwestern stereotypical career are you?

59-61 Stuck in the Mudd 62 The good, the BDE and the ugly 63 CTEC Mad Libs FALL 2018 55

HANGOVER

How to lose a guy in 10 weeks Advice and tales from students who got ditched (and hitched) abroad.

WRITTEN BY DAVID GLEISNER DESIGNED BY AINE DOUGHERTY

All names have been changed to protect students’ identities.

W

hen Abby left for Sydney, Australia at the beginning of winter quarter last year, she had a lot on her mind: her new living situation, the classes she’d be taking, the new people she’d meet. One thing that she was not focused on was Jonathan, her ex-boyfriend. They had split up several months earlier at the end of the summer and had avoided each other all fall quarter.

But Jonathan was thinking about her.

And he was doing so on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, wearing a full suit and holding a light blue Tiffany bag.

Abby knew he would be traveling to Australia, but after a long flight, orientation, dinner and drinks, she did not expect – or want – to see him on her first day there.

“I had been awake for like 48 hours straight, and I was slightly buzzed. I was just dead, and then he starts texting me,” Abby recalls. “He was like, ‘I’ve been at the Opera House for six hours.’”

Abby was shocked, but she agreed to meet Jonathan for drinks because she felt bad for the man who had waited in the blazing sun for her.

“Of all the people I expect to spend my night with on my first day in Australia,” Abby says, “it is not my ex-boyfriend.”

For many students, study abroad is a time for new beginnings, a time to “find yourself” and, more importantly, gather stories with which to annoy your friends

56 FALL 2018

when you get back. In this valiant quest, relationships from back home can seem like a drag, and many students cut them out.

But starting fresh isn’t always as easy as it seems. Abby and Jonathan started dating their first year at Northwestern, and after their breakup before junior year, they avoided each other completely.

While she was home for winter break, though, Abby received an “uncomfortably long” text from her ex detailing his plans to travel to Australia, coincidentally, around the same time she would be there.

“I was just floored,” Abby says. “We hadn’t talked at all. That’s what made it so strange — we just averted eye contact for three straight months at school.”

In Australia, after going out for drinks, Jonathan gave Abby the Tiffany bag, which held a diamond necklace and a 13-page handwritten confession of Jonathan’s feelings.

“I felt really kind of pity, because I was like, ‘I cannot believe you embarrassed

yourself so much,’” Abby says.

The two got together a few times for coffee or drinks as Abby grappled with trying to form a friendship with her ex.

But eventually, Abby realized she would have to tell him the truth.

“I realized that I really am gonna have to explain to him that this is not gonna happen,” Abby says. “And I think he slowly admitted to me that a big reason why he came there was not for himself, it was because he knew I was gonna be there. Shocking.”

Cutting off his relationship before studying abroad was also a priority for Will, who relocated to France last September.

Will and Jessica began dating following a chance encounter at a Willard formal late fall quarter in 2016, just as Will was finishing up his application to study at Sciences Politiques in Paris. Will planned to study abroad for a full year, and he knew the relationship wouldn’t last. He decided to cut it off at the end of spring quarter.

HANGOVER “I was like, ‘I think there’s something special here so I don’t want to just take off, but I’m gonna just take off,’” Will says. “We did a very bad job breaking up.

We broke up in name only mostly.”

The two continued talking throughout the summer despite living in different parts of the country, and when Will left for France, they were still FaceTiming on a weekly basis. As Will settled into Parisian life, he wasn’t having nearly as good of a time as he anticipated. While he toured the apartment he would be living in for the spring semester, he thought about having to continue living apart from Jessica, and had a realization.

“It was like this terrifying deer in headlights moment,” Will says, “And I was like, ‘Fuck, I can’t do this, I have to go back.’”

Upending his plans, Will flew back to Chicago to begin winter quarter at Northwestern. He and Jessica got back together, and winter quarter was “awesome, it was great.” But then Jessica headed off to Israel for a spring break trip, marking the beginning of the end for their relationship.

“She came back from the spring break trip to Israel,” Will says. “It took a little time to percolate, but within three or four weeks, she had clearly decided, ‘there’s this giant world out there, and I can’t possibly see it with you.’”

Will did not anticipate this breakup round two. In retrospect, he sees how going abroad can have different effects on different people. For some, it causes a months long desire, and for others, it causes them to rethink what and who is important in their lives.

Although the excitement for exploring a new country can mean the end of relationships at home, cuffing season happens abroad, too. In the second act of Abby’s soap opera, just as her exboyfriend was preparing to head back to the U.S., she ventured into Tinder for the first time in her life.

The dating app led to a beach date with an Australian man, Matthew, which led to many more dates. She and Matthew went on a trip to Japan together before Abby headed back home to New Jersey for the summer. She knew she wanted to keep the relationship going and hoped to see

him again at some point, and this guy pulled through. “[He] came a little less than a month after I left,” Abby says. “So I have this 25-year-old Australian man flying to New Jersey to stay with my parents and my sister and I.” Matthew, who had just quit his job at a non-profit, flew halfway around the world to visit. Their fairytale romance, however, just wasn’t the same in New Jersey as it was in Australia, Abby says. The day after he left, she gave him a call letting him know they needed to break up.

When there isn’t an ocean separating a couple, going abroad can be the perfect catalyst for a happy, healthy relationship.

Catherine and Peter got to know each other patrolling the beaches of Costa Rica on a Global Engagement Studies Institute (GESI) summer program.

Neither knew of the other’s growing feelings, but on a trip to a volcano at the end of their program, things became clearer. The cold climate of the high

elevation led to cozy cuddling, and friendly hand-holding led to kisses. When they arrived back home after the program ended and continued talking, Catherine knew it was something special.

“I started thinking about it after the volcano,” Catherine says. “We were apart until school started, and we would talk all the time, and I was like, ‘This is something I’m actually feeling.’”

Their relationship blossomed when they got back to campus. The couple is now trying out Northwestern life, which Catherine says is “really good, zero complaints.”

Growing close abroad gave the two an idea of what it’s like to relax together, and back in the hectic life of NU, Catherine says that understanding is invaluable.

“I don’t want to say we change as people abroad versus being here in the U.S. and working and being students, but our goals and things are just completely different once we come back to Northwestern,” Catherine says. “We’re just making new memories.”

ILLUSTRATIONS BY RACHEL HAWLEY

FALL 2018 57

HANGOVER

investment banking (whatever that is)

wannabe actor

Aren’t you so glad you suffered through Actors Gym just to end up here, under the bright lights of New York City? Sure, you live in a maintenance closet wallpapered with cast lists without your name, but you’re living the dream! We all love a starving artist.

rk et

Stage kissing

My friends in shitty theatre productions

Favorite thing to watch?

McKenzie

When your alarm goes off in the morning, it’s the animatronic Wildcat roar they play at football games. You do the New Student Dance while you brush your teeth. Your underwear is purple, every single day.

Nobody hates you. Life is idyllic.

You help people reach their financial goals.

Do they know what these goals are? No. No one does. But the joy is in the journey. It does not matter that we will never get there. The essence of life is in the trying.

Gam

Th

the next Josh

c to es

e? A re yo

a km

Go to tailgates to network with my slap cup teammates

u k id

ding?

I have re hearsal.

What’s your gameday routine?

e ak W

es Wildcat football gam

I get to the stadium two hours early just to make sure I get the free t-shirt.

d an

easing marginal Decr utility

t

hris

us C

Do you still talk to your exes?

Bla c

Mo

If you could have dinner with one person, dead or alive, who would it be?

Jes

kM

START!

or irr

ones

WRITTEN AND DESIGNED BY EMMA KUMER

Dow J

t wor k

What’s one thing you pretend to hate, but secretly love?

stereotypical career are you?

rty Sch apiro

ke ba

C

olin Boy le a

which northwestern

Never. There’s just so much unresolved ~drama~ between us.

Do you consider yourself creative?

I can write an entire Daily story off of one nonsensical quote.

hits and I’ll Give me a couple

freelance journalist

They say that “freelance” is just another word for unemployment, but last year you made so much money that you had to be taxed for it (That’s right. A whole 50 bucks, man).

58 FALL 2018

Only when my other dealers won’t respond.

I can’t lose the LinkedIn connection with Tracy. She works at Deloitte!

I wear patterned shirts with checkered pants.

You tell me.

Yeah, we’re best friends!

I’m personally unable to burn bridges! Yay!

What do you want for Christmas this year?

e. get ther

For someone to renew my subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud.

For someone to watch my web series :(

Ski Trip, except all the snow is cocaine.

taking a

year Wes Anderson gap to “experiment”

the next incarnation of

If he wasn’t so problematic, you’d want to be him.

Unfortunately, you’ll settle for the next best thing: shooting experimental, new-age indie flicks with symmetrical wide shots and a vibrant, colorful tinge.

The whole world is your Moonrise Kingdom!

You can’t be a doctor when there are so many drugs out there that still need to be tried. It’s research, alright? You can’t prescribe things to patients if you don’t know the results ...

Stuck in the Mudd

See what happens when you don’t leave the library for 24 hours.

The Scenario: Ben and Gabe will spend 24 hours in Mudd Library without setting foot outside its glassy walls.

The Rules: Do not leave the premises of Mudd Library under any circumstances.

Food may be delivered to Mudd, but nothing else. Ben and Gabe must both test and rate the Mudd shower.

The Supplies: Ben brought his backpack, a pillow and blanket, extra clothes and toiletries (moisturizer is important!), a Clif Bar and an apple. Gabe brought the same, but also a burrito (second of the day), and a positive mental attitude.

The Reward: Clout.

WRITTEN BY BEN KRIEGER & GABE SCHMITTLEIN DESIGNED BY ANDIE LINKER

Ben Krieger (left) and Gabe Schmittlein (right) passing the time by working hard (or hardly working).

The Challenge: Since the beginning of time, humankind has asked the big questions: Who are we? What is the meaning of life? Why does the Seeley G. Mudd Library have a shower in the bathroom? Of course, as long as these questions have existed, people have tried to answer them – Aristotle, Plato, Confucius – all in vain. Now it is time for Ben Krieger and Gabe Schmittlein to take their best shot at this last question.

FALL 2018 59

The Arrival

The Shower

Gabe We pull up to the intimidating, steely gates of Mudd Library in a stylish Volvo Crossover. I can’t help but feel like we’re being ferried down the River Styx into Hell – no, more like purgatory. But here we stand, on the footsteps of history. We enter. We’re on our own now. One of the most basic human needs is shelter. Gabe and I have laid claim to a study room in Mudd that should serve us well throughout the night – if we can properly defend it, that is.

While many animals pee to warn enemies to stay off their territory, humans are above that nonsense.

Rather, Gabe and I have passiveaggressively strewn our stuff all over the room and started to get our blankets and pillows ready for the night on the study room couches, as if to say “you can kick us out, but we’re gonna take about 15 minutes to pack up.”

Ben Just over five hours into our experience, Gabe and I have reached a crossroads: Defend our turf or give in to the people who “reserved the room.”

We begrudgingly leave, but we make sure to shoot real dirty looks on our way out. Gabe and I will have to find a new domain for now. I think it was Einstein who once said that a house is not a home unless it’s where you live.

I wonder what he would think about Group Study 2146. Your two favorite survivalists plan to hole up here for the next 10 or so hours. Don’t tell anyone, but we cheated the three-hour reservation system (thanks to friends who were willing to put in their email addresses to hold down extra blocks of time for us) and have this safe haven reserved all night.

6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.

PHOTOS BY STEPHANIE J. SHIN

60 FALL 2018

10:00 p.m. - 1:00 a.m.

Gabe The clock strikes midnight and I’m all hopped up on Vitamin Water XXX (sponsorship pending), which means it’s time for an adventure. We head out to explore all the nooks and crannies of Mudd. We head up the staircase, but the doors to the roof

and the third floor were locked. Down in the foyer, all the usual couches and tables have been cleared for some kind of event the next day. Our first few hours have been pleasant and entertaining, but they were nothing in comparison to what came next.

Ben After strolling past students oblivious to the library’s crown jewel, tucked away inside the bathroom, I got to experience the palace that is the Mudd shower.

It has its own room within the bathroom, which made the space feel like a five-star hotel (I’ve never stayed in one, but this is what I would imagine it would be like).

Say what you will about a shower in a place of study, but it is everything I dreamed of and more.

Gabe After Ben comes out of the shower clean and happy, I decide that it is my turn to test it out. As I walk there, I can’t tell if people are looking at me because I’m holding a towel or because I smell bad from spending six hours straight in the library – regardless, I feel like a real celebrity walking down the red carpet. The shower itself is grand and obviously expensive. Water

HANGOVER

pressure and temperature were both ~on point~ and it was the cleanest shower I’ve used on campus (probably because no one uses it).

Sleep

2:00 a.m. - 8:00 a.m.

Ben Now I know all of you have slept on a twin XL school mattress. Good news: the couches in Group Study room 2146 might be a slight step up.

Placing two couches perpendicular to each other, Gabe and I are close enough for emotional support but far enough apart to maintain our independence.

I’m warm, safe and have about an inch to my left until I fall onto the floor.

Can’t wait to get some shuteye and see what Mudd has in store for us come morning.

A New Day

other – such is life in the wild. I must say I owe a great debt to that couch in Group Study room 2146. It would make Tempur-Pedic jealous; I had a wonderful sleep. Soon enough, we are forced to leave our precious room, and now we must join the masses. We find two nondescript white chairs at a nondescript white table. It is here where we sit until high noon. A time of action. Ben and I are hungry for success in this Mudd 24-Hour Challenge, but we’re also just starving. We’re feeling even more boujee than usual today, so Ben gets an acai bowl delivered to him, and I get a Southwestern salad with avocado from the Farmer’s Fridge vending machine. This salad is an absolute delight. Feta cheese, tomatoes, beans and a light vinaigrette transport me to the boiling heat of Phoenix and the dusty streets of Santa Fe.

9:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.

The Final Hours

Gabe The sun rises over the Frances Searle building. A fresh dew lays upon the carpeted floor. The only sound to be heard is Ben’s loud breathing uncomfortably close to my face. Our heads are really quite close to each

Ben With the help of a friend and the everlasting support of Gabriel, I have slain my problem set. This momentous occasion has inspired a new quest: to clean up the aftermath of our lunch.

3:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Things have really come full circle.

Gabe’s salad jar even got returned right back to its home in the vending machine. Just as the Earth has provided us with Mudd Library, we provide for it with our recycling.

Gabe Even the strongest people can be broken down, and I’m not really that strong so I’ve broken down rather easily. Mudd has gotten to me. I don’t want to look at the translucent walls anymore. WHAT IS A WALL AND WHAT IS A MIRROR? I’m trying to nap but it’s not going so well. I think this challenge might beat me before I can complete it. Ben gives me hope. He appears so resilient; may his strength carry me through these final hours and ward off the walls/mirrors that torment my mind.

Ben Gabe and I have rallied and success is ours! If you’ve never kissed the ground outside of Mudd Library, my advice to you is simple: don’t. But after the trials that Gabe and I have been through, the taste of that cement is like a summer’s bloom mixed into a unicorn frappuccino. I shed a single silent tear as Gabe wept, and we walked, together, into the setting sun.

FALL 2018 61

HANGOVER

the good, the

BDE and the

ugly For these NU icons, confidence is key.

WRITTEN BY PRIYANKA GODBOLE DESIGNED BY CLAIRE BUGOS

Ryan Fieldhouse: Baby carrot For blatantly overcompensating and failing to deliver.

62 FALL 2018

Willie the Wildcat: Radish Willie gets brownie points for pumping up the crowds, and being the “hottest mascot in the Big 10” (according to my roommate).

But taking into consideration his creepy, anthropomorphic paws that make even the best of us feel dead inside, he isn’t going to rank high on the BDE list anytime soon.

T

hey say size matters, but thanks to meme culture, frat bros everywhere can relax.

Social media connoisseurs know it as soon as they see it. Ariana Grande releasing “thank u, next” during the newest season of SNL, Jeff Goldblum’s existence, Edna Mode’s haircut; they all have one thing in common — Big Dick Energy.

BDE isn’t about size. It’s about swagger. All it takes is having the kind of je ne sais quoi that comes across as self-confident and not as cocky asshole. Men are not the only ones that can be endowed with BDE, either. In this day and age, it’s easy to point out examples of women

George R.R. Martin: Zucchini Tyrion Lannister might be small, but there’s no way in hell George R.R. Martin’s energy is. The audacity of this man to keep millions of fans across the globe on hold every day while taking years to finish his final book is truly outrageous.

One taught me patience ...

who exude such a quality — Rihanna, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Lady Gaga.

The concept emerged from a certain SNL comedian who is the former fiancé of the aforementioned pop star. Pete Davidson may have coined the term, but the meme has now taken on a life of its own.

One of the major keys of Big Dick Energy is that it can turn up in unusual people, places or things — even at Northwestern University. NBN ranked Northwestern icons’ BDE using veggies as a scale from puny to massive, because what else? Without further ado, here is NBN’s guide to BDE at NU.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus: Squash Thankfully a better mother in real life (@ charlie_hall) than on Veep, anyone who can make a president look good right now must truly have a chutzpah that most of us cannot muster.

Meghan Markle: Eggplant For seducing her way into royalty, being a theatre major during her time at NU, currently carrying the newest royal baby in her womb and putting the “sex” in Duchess of Sussex.

HANGOVER

Forgot to submit your course evaluations and got locked out? Never fear… just fill in these blanks and you’ll know whether or not to take the class.

WRITTEN AND DESIGNED BY EMMA KUMER

Okay, buckle your _________, _________, because this class is a plural noun

plural school mascot

_________! I took it back in _______ when Professor ________ was still year

noun in ALL CAPS!

obscure food item

young enough to take a _____________ to ___________ (and that was mode of transportation

building on campus

the old _________, for any babies reading this — not that _________ building material

same building

__________ you guys are spoiled with now). I signed up for this because

noun said with distaste

my PA told me it was the most _________ class at Northwestern, but I was adjective

_________ mistaken. Then, there’s approximately ____ pages of reading number

adverb in ALL CAPS

due every night, which means that even the _________ Sparknotes will take expletive

you at least ______ minutes to read! number

But if that sounds _________, just imagine how you’ll feel taking a midterm weak ass adjective

where you have to write _________ essays in _________ minutes about all number number

the _________ and _________ you witnessed in the chapters you didn’t noun another fucking noun

read, comparing all the _________ characters to _________________ adjective

adjective, but this time with FEELING

historical events and remembering the exact page number and longitudinal coordinates for every _________ plot point. My advice for incoming adjective

students? DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS! You will regret every _________ of unit of measurement

it! This class is as hard as walking down Sheridan without running into any _________ boys or ___________ kids. I beg of you — save yourselves, least favorite frat

most annoying student org

before it is too late. ___________ hashtag of choice

FALL 2018 63

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