Winter 2014

northwestern NORTH BY

WINTER 2014

the

MILLION DOLLAR decision

How Dance Marathon chooses its beneficiary

PLUS:

+ Remembering Ricky Byrdsong + CSOs Uncensored

+ Revisiting Identity + Inside NU Confessions

4

Registration opens April 7.

Classes begin June 23.

northwestern.edu/summer

inside this issue From the Outside Looking In

Finding a Cause Worth Dancing For Every year, DM raises over $1 million toward it beneficiary.

This how Team Joseph became that organization.

38 PREGAME 5 ADVICE FROM A PROFESSOR 6 DISCUSSION SECTION SIX-WORD SENIOR THESES Years of work become one line.

7 BEHIND LAB DOORS From hot chins to zebra fish fins, NU researchers study the darndest things.

THE GREAT MIGRATION Moving offcampus is cumbersome at NU, but how does it work at other schools?

8 OFF SEASON, ON POINT Chin up with these Northwestern sports that won’t crush your soul.

SPOTLIGHT

42

18 SWEATY BRUNCH Will run for waffles.

THE SEARCH FOR SHMEAR It’s the journey, not the destination.

19 HOMEWORK HELL, FUN ON THE EL Ride the line between work and play.

20 MATCH MADE IN HEAVENSTON We found spirited companions for Evanston’s most “gourmet” cuisines.

21 HACKING THE DREADED PACK Fly me to the booze.

22 THE INSIDE TRACK We trekked from South to North Campus and barely stepped outside.

BIRTHDAY BONUS Sometimes the best things in life are free.

24 MO’ GLUTEN, MO’ PROBLEMS Eat-

10 HERE COMES THE SUN We Want the

25 THE SCIENCE OF CUDDLING Basic

11 PLAYING CATCH-UP We’ve compiled the best—and the worst—places to sneak in some extra shut-eye between classes.

12 DUDE, WHERE’S MY SHUTTLE? The struggle is real.

13 CHANGING LANES Evanston gears up to become a more bike-friendly city.

ing in dining halls presents obtacles for students with dietary restrictions. human contact is the key to staying sane.

26 FUN BY FUNWESTERN

QUAD 28 FOLLOWING JUSTIN BARBIN We go behind the lens with Northwestern’s most loved photographer.

cover photo: david zhang

14 BREAKING TIES ASA’s boycott of Israeli

29 OLYMPIC DREAMS Wildcats trade in

higher education prompts debate over academic freedom.

30 LIVING A LEGACY Multicultural Greek

15 THESE ARE OUR CONFESSIONS Anonymous outlets foster solidarity among students.

16 DEMYSTIFYING THE SYSTEM So you broke the rules. Now what?

46

genius

This issue, we’re thinking about ...

D ... the vitamin D.

42

Out of Sight, Never Out of Mind Fifteen years after the murder or Ricky Byrdsong, his legacy still echoes throughout the community.

One writer confronts her various identities and their place in the Northwestern community.

purple for red, white and blue. organizations allow students to carve their own niche on campus.

31 INSIDE THE THICK ENVELOPE In the game of college admissions, the early bird gets the worm.

32 INSIDE THEIR ARIA For these Wildcats, opera is their forte.

33 LADIES FIRST Northwestern’s new theater group takes back the stage.

34 GETTING TO KNOW GARRETT We walk by it every day, but what’s actually inside?

THE “NWU” CLASS OF 2018 These Facebook trolls don’t even go here.

35 GUNNING FOR SUCCESS Instead of taking a gap year, these students defended a country.

36 BID ADIEU TO IOU With mobile payment apps, payback’s a cinch.

35 NO-DRONE ZONE Sorry, Amazon.

Evanston’s air space is clear.

CHECKOUT 50 CSO DORM DIARIES These gatekeepers see everything.

51 BUSTING THE BURN BOOK Could Aaron Samuels even go here?

BOOK BUGS The library is an unlikely home for Northwestern’s pests.

52 IF NORTHWESTERN WERE HOGWARTS AlohoMorty!

53 THE REAL CAMPUS TOUR Our friends at Sherman Ave give us an honest look at campus.

WINTER 2014 We asked our staff...

If you were a BuzzFeed quiz, which one would you be?

northwestern NORTH BY

magazine

ste Whi re ch ot Ca yp n e a ad re ian yo u?

Managing Editors Wh at r Priya Krishnakumar & Chrissy Lee oo are t veg Senior Editors you etab ? le Lucy Wang & Ben Oreskes Associate Editors Sam Hart & Martina Barrera-Hernandez Assistant Editors Kevin Kryah & Jasper Scherer Senior Design Editor Alex Lordahl How many Justin Biebers could you take in a fight?

Designers Max Gleber, Daniel Hersh & Margaret Kadifa Photo Director Which well-known Jenny Starrs turtle are you?

Photo Assistant Which poorly taxidermied animal are you?

Bryan Huebner Photographers Josh Aronson, Samson Fong, Astrid Goh, Aimee Hechler, Priscilla Liu & David Zhang Illustrator Steph Shapiro

northbynorthwestern.com Which Vladimir Putin are you?

Editor-in-Chief | Megan Thielking Are you Drake?

(Answer: Yes) Executive Editor | Alex Nitkin Managing Editors | John Hardberger & Kevin Kryah Assistant Managing Editors | Nicole Sampedro, Sam Niiro & Christian Holub News Editors | Mitchell Caminer & Rachel Fobar Assistant News Editors | Medha Imam & Julia Clark-Riddell Opinion Editor | Yunita Ong Assistant Opinion Editor | Kelly Gonsalves Features Editor | Anne Li Assistant Features Editors | Rosalie Chan & Zack Woznak Life & Style Editor | Lauren Kravec Assistant Life & Style Editors | Teresa Balistreri & Tanner Howard Entertainment Editor | Zach Silva Assistant Entertainment Editors | Tyler Daswick & Bo Suh Sports Editor | Shannon Lane Assistant Sports Editors | Daniel Hersh & Ben Sanders Politics Editor | Alyssa Kincaid Assitant Politics Editor | David Friedman Which inane twitter Writing Editor | Amanda Glickman account are you?

Assitant Writing Editor | Ali Pelczar Assistant Photo Editors | Olga Gonzalez-Latapi & Sherry Hong Video Editors | Mallory Busch & Adam Mintzer Interactive Editors | Sam Hart & Nicole Zhu Assistant Interactive Editors | Shelbie Bostedt & Alex Duner Webmaster | Sheng Wu

North by Northwestern, NFP Board of Directors Which character from

CORPORATE Director of Marketing | Paige Rotondo Director of Operations | Saron Strait Director of Talent | Mallory Busch

R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the

President | Megan Thielking Closet” are you?

Executive Vice President | Alex Nitkin Vice President | Priya Krishnakumar & Chrissy Lee Treasurer | Saron Strait Secretary | Hillary Thomas

Like what we do? Want to support independent, student-run journalism? Donate to NBN at northbynorthwestern.com/donate to help us keep doing what we love!

Published with support from

HELPING YOUNG PEOPLE MAKE THEIR VOICES HEARD ABOUT ISSUES THAT MATTER GENPROGRESS.ORG

BEFORE WE BEGIN.

PREGAME LIFE ADVICE FROM A PROFESSOR

PLUS:

Professor Norman Wickett shares some words of wisdom.

DISCUSSION SECTION pg.6 | STORY PITCHES THAT FAILED pg.6 | SIX-WORD SENIOR THESES pg.6 | BEHIND LAB DOORS pg.7 | THE GREAT MIGRATION pg.7 | OFF SEASON, ON POINT pg.8

‘‘

Understanding what you don’t know is how you can move forward and make new discoveries.

Be comfortable with not knowing. Let go of those feelings. Always speak up when you don’t know something. Embrace the unknown.

Professor Norman Wickett sits in his 6th floor office in the Hogan building after giving some of his words of wisdom. Wickett is a lecturer in the Program of Biological Sciences and in Plant Biology and Conservation. He has collaborated with 44 co-authors to publish eight different publications. When not teaching, he does research and works with the Chicago Botanical Garden.

Photograph by LUCY WANG

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 5

PREGAME

Discussion Section

The Story: Liz Steelman explained why we can’t all be campus leaders, no matter how much we want to, in her opinion piece, “We can’t all be winners: why Northwestern should redefine leadership.”

READER COMMENTS FROM NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM.

The Story: In “The Income Gap” from North by Northwestern’s Fall 2013 print issue, Kimberly Alters wrote about the varied experiences of low income students on campus.

The Comments: “I am so sick of all the entitlement on this campus, from both rich and poor people. Northwestern sells themselves [sic] as a place to grow, learn, and meet people from diverse backgrounds. Its generous financial aid package is designed to meet student NEEDS, such as tuition, housing, and books. Sure, Northwestern sells the experience of “living close to the amazing city of Chicago,” but there are plenty of free things to do there and NU even provides free transportation for students to Chicago. Going to Cubs games, eating at nice restaurants, shopping on Michigan Avenue, ski trip... those are completely noncrucial experiences that may or may not enhance your education here. I think the bigger issue here is that people feel ashamed or embarrassed about their backgrounds, and feel the need to “keep up with the Jones’” to fit in instead of just being honest about who they are and finding friends that are acceptive [sic] of their situation.”

- EP535 “Thank you to the students who bravely shared their stories! The ways microaggressions and misunderstandings exclude students (on the basis of socioeconomic status, race, etc.) on this campus is heartbreaking to me. The effects of social exclusion should not be minimized - they are shown to be real and incredibly damaging to individuals’ experiences and long term mental health.

Beginning these sorts of discussions is a great way to move forward on changing the campus culture. Thanks NBN!” - Samantha

The Comment: This article embodies the Northwestern I love, and the alma mater I was proud to graduate from. At its best, its student body shows a balanced mix of modesty, practicality, earnestness and intellect somewhat less marred by the elitism, pretension, and sarcasm that plagues the student bodies of other institutions. At its worst, well, that will be for another day. Go U. - Meyer Lansky

The Story: Tanner Howard’s opinion piece, “Northwestern’s first world problems” urged students to put their everyday complaints into perspective.

The Comment: I agree completely with the sentiment, but the phrase “First World Problems” completely erases the face [sic] that a lot of these problems (trouble accessing information services, food that doesn’t taste as good as one might wish but that one has little option but to consume, a bureaucracy that is difficult to navigate) are problems that people have all over the world, not just in the “First World”[sic]. The farmers in the Last Hunger Season struggled with each of these problems too, after all, if in a different context.

- Sunjay Hauntingston

The Story: In “All the Single Ladies: playing basketball the ‘right’ way,” Ben Sanders wrote about one men’s intramural basketball team that brings sass to the court each week, complete with themed costumes and intentionally wild free throws.

The Comment: Love this. Think reminders of how to be less competitive are always great at NU. - Rick Editor’s note: Some of these comments were edited for space and clarity.

SIX-WORD SENIOR THESES Years of work become one line.

B Y LU C Y WA NG

Chicago = jazz capital. Suck it, NYC. - Stephen Rees, sociology

Tasting carbohydrates temporarily increases self-control.

- Sandeep Jain, psychology

Numbers describing gun violence are complicated.

- Alex Glancy, MMSS and anthropology

Wow...I academically analyzed video games?

- Justin Wu, anthropology

6 | WINTER 2014

Russia to Kyrgyzstan: “Let’s be exclusive. ;)” - Sam Ide, political science

High school sucks, especially for chicks.

- Julia Anaya, communication studies

Wow. Much neurodegeneration. Sleep. Very important.

- Maria Rozo, biological sciences

Architecture. Music. (Re)constructing Barcelonan Catalan identity.

- Maris O’Tierney, art history

Behind Lab Doors

The Great Migration

From hot chins to zebrafish, NU researchers study the darndest things. B Y CH RI SSY LEE

C

ontrary to the tediousness that regular coursework suggests, Northwestern is home to a number of surprising and unusual academic investigations across a variety of fields. From football ticket auctions to chin beauty standards, here are six research projects from the past year—they’re likely more fascinating than anything you’ll read in your Intro to Macroeconomics textbook.

$$$

Purple pricing.

NU economists Sandeep Baliga and Jeffrey Ely are experimenting with pricing models on University athletics. For select games, they’ve introduced Purple Pricing, an auction-based method in which the seat prices start high and continually drop until tickets sell out. Buyers are then refunded the difference between their bid and the low price. The idea is to incentivize early buying, discourage resale and maximize profit. Sales for the Ohio State and Michigan games this football season used Purple Pricing and revenues increased by hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result.

$$$

$$$

Fishy limbs.

Our bodies operate like fish more than we might think. Neurobiology professor David McLean and postdoctoral fellow Martha Bagnall studied baby zebrafish, a tropical freshwater minnow, and found locomotive processes resembling those of human extensors and flexors. These$ findings help neuroscientists understand how to better treat neural problems.

$

$

Stretchy batteries.

Electronics can now be placed anywhere— even inside human joints—thanks to the world’s first cordless stretchable lithium-ion battery. McCormick professor Yonggang Huang and University of Illinois material scientist John Rogers developed a rechargeable, foldable and twistable battery that can operate for eight hours and stretch up to three times its original size.

Hot chins.

Anthropology researchers, among them Northwestern doctoral student Zaneta Thayer, discovered significant inconsistencies in chin shape across populations. The study found indigenous Australians have the most unique chin patterns relative to other populations, and also challenged the theory, long held by psychologists, of the universally attractive jutting jawline. suggesting the existence of “region-specific mating preferences,” according to the paper.

$$$

Face threats.

Embarrassing Facebook encounters, or “face threats,” as communication studies professor Jeremy Birnholtz calls them, produce more anguish in people who allow profile visibility to coworkers, family and friends.

Subjects with higher levels of general Internet know-how are also prone to greater reservation in response to an undesired Facebook post or exchange.

$$$

illustrations: priya krishnakumar

Word therapy.

The remedy to a lackluster marriage?

The written word. Psychology professor Eli Finkel studied 120 couples, who reported their relationship satisfaction, love, intimacy, trust, passion and commitment every four months for two years. Couples demonstrated a decline in marriage quality over the first year, but those who participated in three, seven-minute reflective writing exercises during the second year were more likely to maintain marital satisfaction and sexual desire.

Moving off-campus is cumbersome at Northwestern, but how does it work at other schools?

BY Z ACHARY W OZ NAK

A

sk any Northwestern upperclassman about moving off-campus and the response is usually a mixture of annoyed groans and hair pulling. Even after working around friends’ study abroad plans and tracking down a place with the most reasonable rent, students still find themselves dealing with difficult landlords and skirting around Evanston’s notorious brothel law. But do Wildcats really have it that bad compared to our peers at other schools?

We searched for some of the perks and pitfalls of off-campus living at other colleges around the country.

Costly

Anyone who expects to score a decently priced pad in New York City that isn’t on Craigslist post with questionable demands should be wary of off-campus living at Columbia University. With average rent for a studio apartment at ranging from $1,100 to $1,900 a month, it should come as no surprise that only about 6 percent of its students decide to forgo the comfort of the university’s Upper Manhattan campus.

“Come on—it’s NYC—remember you are not living in the Midwest,” reads an anonymous post by a Columbia junior on the college review site, College Prowler. “Everything here is more expensive—especially housing.”

Prices aren’t very encouraging on the West Coast either. Only 9 percent of Stanford University students are willing to shell out the average rent of $1,000 on a studio near the school.

Lottery

If students at Brown University, Hamilton College and Middlebury are feeling lucky, they can try their hands at entering lotteries to live off-campus.

As rising juniors, Brown students apply to enter a drawing for permission to move off-campus.

This off-campus status applies for the rest of their time at Brown and is always guaranteed for seniors.

Hamilton’s lottery is particularly

selective and only applies to seniors. Only about 40 of the college’s 2,000-person student body are given permission to stray from the Clinton, N.Y., campus. Middlebury’s lottery is only slightly more accommodating, allowing 60 out of 2,500 students to live off-campus.

Review Process

For the more risk-averse, there’s always the option to apply to live offcampus through the housing office at College of the Holy Cross. Juniors and seniors are subjected to an application process based largely on the student’s disciplinary standing.

Although the school assures students the policy is in place to simplify the apartment hunt for upperclassmen, the student body’s reaction hasn’t been so positive.

“Students have ‘NO RIGHTS’ when it comes to living off campus,” reads one anonymous post on the review site College Prowler. “Everyone wanting to live off campus is subjected to a review process which can take months, despite the fact all students are adults over adults over 18, Holy Cross treats them as children has stripped their rights away [sic].”

Forced Out

Although Northwestern doesn’t guarantee housing for all four years, it prides itself for never having turned away a student who wished to live on-campus. Students at Rice University are less fortunate.

A three-year on-campus housing guarantee partnered with a push to accommodate all freshmen means sophomores and juniors often find themselves on their own.

Boston College has a similar three-year housing policy in place, save for a select group of honors students. Many BC juniors live offcampus, then move back to campus for their senior year.

“It helps the BC overcrowdedhousing issue, but also allows local rent prices to be ridiculously jacked up due to the supply/demand curve,” a Boston College student posts on College Prowler.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 7

PREGAME

Club Rowing

Off Season, On Point Chin up with these Northwestern sports that won’t crush your soul. B Y B EN SAN DERS

T

his school year was supposed to be a successful one for Northwestern’s highest-earning sport.

Fitz’s squad, coming off its first bowl win in 64 years, was expected to contend for the Big Ten title but instead suffered one heartbreaking loss after another.

While football may not have fared well, all is not lost. Many Northwestern teams still know how to compete—and the results show. These four teams will cheer you up, even as you sulk over the fact that Kain Colter isn’t returning next year.

Men’s Club Fencing Nothing says dominance more than national championships, and the Northwestern men’s fencing team has four club titles, more than any other squad in the country.

“There’s kind of the whole thing where ‘success breeds success,’” says 8| WINTER 2014

men’s fencing president and Weinberg senior Maciek Zmyslowski. “So because we’re good, other good people will come, but that’s only half the story.

It’s probably really the coaches.”

Technically, the men’s fencing team doesn’t have a head coach, but that hasn’t stopped Laurie Schiller from unofficially taking on the role.

Schiller, head coach of the Northwestern women’s varsity fencing team, claims the second-most wins of any coach in the sport.

Zmyslowski says Schiller treats them like a varsity team, but being at the club level means they don’t have to deal with “stupid” NCAA regulations.

“It’s possibly the best setup that could exist,” Zmyslowski says.

The men’s fencing team competes in the Midwestern Fencing Conference, which has about 20 teams split almost evenly between varsity and club schools. Year after year, NU finds itself finishing around third place,

At 6 a.m., most students are in the middle of their fourth or fifth hour of sleep. For the rowing team, that’s when they arrive at practice.

Weinberg junior Caleigh Hernandez, president of Northwestern’s co-ed club rowing team, describes the start time as “definitely a struggle.”

The hard work has paid off. Last year at the Dad Vail Regatta, the largest collegiate spring regatta in the country, the women’s team placed fourth out of 36 and was the only club team to advance to the finals. That same season, the lightweight men’s team placed second in their division at the regatta in Chattanooga, Tenn.

They are often referred to as the “Head of the Hooch.”

These wins are no small feat: The two squads compete against Division I teams, which enjoy official school funding and smoother recruiting processes, but club teams fundraise independently for coaching, equipment and travel. They also don’t receive the scholarships that varsity athletes do.

Despite the daily grind, the squad still knows how to have some fun. They even have a few sacred traditions.

“If you win a competition you have to throw the coxswain (the person who steers the boat and yells commands to the other rowers) into the water,” Hernandez says.

Ski Team Northwestern’s ski team outshines its competition in the Chicago division of the United States Collegiate Ski and Snowboard Associa-

tion (USCSA). Its skiers and boarders regularly finish in the top two of their respective runs.

Four years ago, this would have seemed impossible.

“When I was a freshman, we had maybe three people total that had raced before,” says ski team captain and McCormick senior Theresa Nave.

Rigorous training has brought greater success to the team in the past couple of years. The team holds land training twice a week in the fall in order to get in shape and to get the freshmen acclimated with the rest of the squad.

Publicity has also helped ski team up its game.

“The ski team has become a lot more publicized and we’ve done a lot better job of advertising for recruiting,” Nave says.

One specific individual who helped bring the team into the spotlight was snowboarder and Weinberg senior Anne Benda, who has competed in the last three USCSA Nationals.

Last year, Benda was the only one from the team to make it to Nationals in Sun Valley, Idaho. From Evanston, her teammates didn’t miss a second, tracking Benda’s runs in live time.

After the first run she placed third, but after a critical fall on the next run, she finished twentieth overall. Nonetheless, it was a moment that her teammates will never forget.

Debate Society Anyone who follows college debate in the U.S. could tell you that the Northwestern debate team is one of the best.

But Rahim Shakoor, a Weinberg sophomore on the squad, sees things a bit differently than the average fan.

“We’ve kind of had the ‘curse of Northwestern’ over the last few years,” Shakoor says. “We’ve gone to finals of the National Debate Tournament four years in a row and only won once [in 2011].”

Before the seniors compete, Shakoor and his teammates stay up until at least 3 a.m. doing research in preparation, but it’s not all heavy reading.

“A large portion of debate is watching video of the other team,” Shakoor says. This helps them understand what to expect out of their opponent.

Despite the tremendous amount of skill and practice involved, Shakoor doesn’t consider debate to be a sport, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t get to experience the same spirit of competition.

photo: bryan huebner

behind varsity powerhouses Notre Dame and Ohio State.

Their winning record has earned respect from varsity programs across the country. Zmyslowski says when teams like OSU compete against ordinary club schools, they send their substitutes. But against NU, they don’t mess around.

While the club team as a whole hasn’t won a national title since 2011, the épée squad has won the club championships the past two years.

Zmyslowski, who’s also the captain of the épée squad, plans on extending that streak.

“Winning national championships [for the épée squad] is not even like a goal,” he says. “It’s kind of a given.

Something we expect to do.”

EN GARDE The men’s club fencing team gives NU sports fans something to cheer about.

SPOTLIGHT R I G H T N O W W E ’ R E T H I N K I N G A B O U T. . .

The winter months have been a harrowing exercise in bundling up and braving historically low temperatures. Problems big and small arise in these conditions, leaving many in a constant state of

Photograph by JENNY STARRS

HERE COMES THE SUN pg.10 | PLAYING CATCH-UP pg.11 | DUDE, WHERE’S MY SHUTTLE? pg.12 CHANGING LANES pg.13 | BREAKING TIES pg.14 | THESE ARE OUR CONFESSIONS pg.15 | DEMYSTIFYING THE SYSTEM pg.16

SPOTLIGHT

Here Comes the Sun We want the D ... the vitamin D. B Y S H E LB I E BOSTEDT With temperatures dropping and the sun setting before

Bahá’ií Gardens

South Beach

With only a few services a week and limited winter hours at the visitor center, the Bahá’í Temple is still one of the most peaceful places within walking distance of campus.

Gardens radiate from the temple’s nine sides, and each offers sunshine during different parts of the day. For early morning sunbathing, head to the east-facing gardens, and for some midafternoon rays, hang out in the west-facing areas. Better yet, pack a picnic and enjoy it on the steps of the temple.

If you’re willing to Eskimo it up, another place to get early morning sun is South Beach, just across the road from 1835 Hinman. There’s no charge for entry in the winter. With mounds of ice built up on the water, this is the perfect place to perch, get direct sun and check out the Chicago skyline. Be sure to wear snow boots, though; nothing can ruin a trip to the beach like frostbite or frozen sand in your shoes.

we get out of class, Winter Quarter can be 50 shades of depressing, dull and dark. Combat

TAKE YOUR TAN TO SOUTH BEACH Right off campus is a sunny oasis. Kudos if you’re brave enough to take off your jacket.

PRAYING FOR SUN If you’re tired of the normal grind, take a trip up to the Baha’i Gardens. Assuming it’s sunny, it’ll brighten up your day.

the gloom and soak up some cherished vitamin D with these sunny spots.

The Windows by Norbucks Get more than just a venti white chocolate mocha with whip. If you arrive early enough in the morning, settle into a cozy pod chair—before it gets snatched up later in the day—and bask in the sun as it rises over Lake Michigan through Norris Center’s floor-to-ceiling windows. This is a great spot to catch some rays without going outside.

REALISTIC OPTIONS Chances are, you’re probably not going tan outside in the middle of winter. Here, you can stay warm, get Starbucks and feel the sun all at once.

Garden by Crowe

10 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

Snuggled between the two Fairchildren dorms, CRC and ISRC, this spot is perfect for catching some midday sun between classes. Annoying pests occupy the garden during the warmer months, but it’s peaceful during Winter Quarter.

Bring last-minute homework assignments you forgot to do last night and camp out on one of the many (often vacant) benches.

If you can find it, the roof of Tech is well worth the effort of weaving your way to one of the school’s most intimidating buildings. Give yourself plenty of time to get there, keeping your eyes peeled for anything labeled as the fifth floor. Even if you only catch a few minutes of precious light before sunset, the views of Evanston and Wilmette are incentive enough.

SNOWSHINE The roof of Tech might not be as accessible as others on this list, but it makes for some great views.

photos: jenny starrs

SUN’S OUT Take a few moments to clear the snow off this bench and you’ve got a perfect spot to snag some vitamin D.

Tech Rooftop

Playing Catch-Up

We’ve compiled the best and the worst places to sneak in some extra shut-eye between classes.

BY SA R A H T U R B IN

S

leep at Northwestern is just like a short line at Norbucks between classes on a Wednesday afternoon: a rare and spiritual experience. Trust us, you need this list. Because today’s the last last time you’ll stay up till 6 a.m. writing a paper, right buddy?

Judgment scale: 1 2 3 4 5

Judge not, that you be not judged Equivalent to wearing shorts in March Some shame on some of your family Casual scoffing A roll of the eyes

6 Serious scoffing 7 Maybe you’ll be in a stranger’s Snapchat 8 Maybe you’ll be on a stranger’s Instagram 9 Equivalent to wearing shorts in Chiberia 10 Hester Prynne status

McCormick Tribune Student Lounge If you can manage to haul yourself up to the second floor of McTrib via the stairs or the slowest elevator on campus in a sleep-deprived stupor, the student lounge is perfect for a quick nap amidst the Medilldo grad students and undergrad niche publication meetings.

Steal some food from the fridge while you’re at it, because there’s nothing like a snack before setting up, like, six alarms on your smartphone that sound like a crying baby.

Mudd Library The Seeley G. Mudd Library has seen its fair share of exhausted students, but this napping area has two sides to its coin. The first option is one of those weird, uncomfortable plastic chairs that NU has seemingly placed in Mudd just to torment students into sitting up straight. Give your aching buttocks a rest by choosing one of Mudd’s more cushioned options. Either way, Mudd is typically silent.

Judgment: 1 Sleepability: 3

Norris Second Floor The striped couches at the top of the flight of stairs to the second floor of Norris are seldom occupied. Their cushioning leaves something to be desired, but the only thing you have to worry about is foot traffic from the people who come to Norris just to slide down the wooden handrails. Plus, if you get some coffee before lying down, you can do that thing where you drink the coffee, take a quick nap right after and wake up feeling energized from your slumber and the caffeine.

Judgment: 5 Sleepability: 7

Judgment: 10 Sleepability: 5

Kresge

photos: jenny starrs

This one is full of opportunity if you do it right.

Hit the floor or use a few chairs—the choices are slightly less limited than they usually are.

Extra points if you play spot-the-liberal-artsTA while you’re slinking through the halls (hint: beards). Extra extra points if you use 25 Live to figure out which rooms are empty and aren’t anywhere near a six-hour StuCo rehearsal for a musical that has tap numbers.

Judgment: 2 Sleepability: 7

Caught stalking someone in your class on Facebook

Judgment: 7 Sleepability: 4

Judgment

Nestled conveniently on North Campus, Sargent’s lobby is chock-full of couches.

Great for a casual nap with little commitment, this location is good for a post-meal snooze or a pre-meal siesta.

Doing the walk of shame while wearing crocs and a wifebeater

McTrib StuLo

Sargent Lobby

Sargent Lobby

Norris 2nd Floor

Kresge Mudd Library A three-hour slumber with the fire alarm blaring all night

Finally sleeping on the clouds of Gods after DM

Sleepability NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 11

SPOTLIGHT

Dude, Where’s My Shuttle?

The struggle is real. BY J E NNY STARRS

N

orthwestern shuttles are like Beyoncé albums.

You’ve waited so long that you’re completely surprised by its arrival.

Those 15 minutes in the polar vortex are almost worse than the last two album-less years. You’re excited yet full of questions. What is a visual album? Is this the Intercampus or the Evanston Loop? You can’t stop yourself from dancing, whether you’re in your room, or you’re under the icy Weber Arch, but that’s just so your blood circulates. The Northwestern shuttle is

unpredictable and untamable, and yet it has the entire student body under its thumb. To make sure you don’t succumb to frostbite, or even worse, miss your 9 a.m. in Tech, here’s an account of one week spent calculating the ebb and flow of the Northwestern shuttle system. Use this guide along with the University’s brand-new shuttle tracker app, and you’ll never be left out in the cold again.

Scheduled Arrival / Real Arrival Thursday, Jan. 9

Monday, Jan. 13

Wednesday, Jan . 15

8:27 a.m. / 8:36 a.m.

8:27 a.m. / 8:25 a.m.

8:27 a.m. / 8:26 a.m.

Intercampus from Ridge and Simpson

Intercampus from Ridge and Simpson

Intercampus from Ridge and Simpson

4:06 p.m. / Unknown

5:46 p.m. / 5:48 p.m.

6:20 p.m. / 6:27 p.m.

Intercampus from Ridge and Simpson

Evanston Loop from Ridge and Simpson

8:40 p.m. / Unknown Evanston Loop from Ridge and Simpson Waited 15 minutes then walked.

Friday, Jan. 10

9:16 a.m. / 9:16 a.m.

Intercampus from Ridge and Simpson

4:56 p.m. / Unknown

Intercampus from Weber Arch.

Waited 15 minutes then walked.

Number of waits that exceeded 15 minutes and left writer trudging through the snow and ice to get somewhere:

3 waits

Tuesday, Jan. 14

Thursday, Jan . 16

8:27 a.m. / 8:29 a.m.

9:36 a.m. / 9:39 a.m.

Intercampus from Ridge and Simpson

Intercampus from Ridge and Simpson

Average Wait Time:

6.08 minutes

8:30 p.m. / 8:34 p.m.

Campus Loop from Library

Average Wait Time from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.:

2.5 minutes Average Wait Time from 4 p.m. to midnight:

9.67 minutes *All data collected on weekdays between Jan. 9 and Jan. 16

12 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

illustration: alex lordahl

Intercampus from Weber Arch Waited 15 minutes then walked.

s e n a L nging

Cha

ore e a m HERER m o c C be up to A S P E R S s r a e J ton g . BY Evans endly city ri bike-f

G

photo: samson fong

iven Northwestern’s thriving bike culture, it’s no surprise that the Associated Student Government’s December survey featured an entire section devoted to questions regarding the installation of bike lanes around campus.

The survey came at an opportune time, because Evanston received a $480,000 federal grant in early November to install protected bike lanes throughout the city.

Chris Mailing, general manager at local bike shop Wheel & Sprocket, thinks Evanston has done a fantastic job of managing bike lanes in recent history.

“It has been officially designated by the League of American Bicyclists as a Bicycle Friendly Community, and it’s one of only two silver-level communities in the state of Illinois,” Mailing says.

When it comes to bicycle safety, however, there’s always room for improvement. The League of American Bicyclists award comes in tiers, offering recognition at the bronze, silver, gold, platinum and diamond levels.

To evaluate a city, the League determines how well it satisfies the “5 E’s”: engineering, education, encouragement, enforcement and evaluation and planning.

Evanston stands to improve “enforcement” in particular, a criterion

which calls for “ensuring safe roads for all users.” Evanston’s profile on the League’s website says the city falls in the “26-50%” category, meaning 26 to 50 percent of its main streets are dedicated to bike facilities.

The recent federal grant should go a long way toward improving Evanston’s silver status and the ASG survey may play a role. ASG Associate Vice President for Sustainability Wesley Lien, a Weinberg senior, thinks Evanston will consider the survey results when planning how to allocate the grant’s funds.

“Evanston is considering a huge bike infrastructure re-haul for the city,” Lien says. “The rationale is that we wanted to collect feedback from the students, then present it to the city.”

Lien hopes the survey can elicit support from the student body. “In general, I hope to get a lot of interest in improving bike infrastructure, especially on Sheridan Road,” Lien says.

Evanston has already begun making those improvements. Last summer, the city added a bike lane along Church Street, and that’s only the beginning.

Martha Logan, Evanston’s community engagement coordinator, believes bike lanes have long term benefits that perhaps make them a necessary addition. “The pro is that [bike lanes] encourage bicycling,”

If we can get the residents of Evanston to bike to their shopping, they are much more likely to shop in downtown Evanston and other commercial districts.

— Chris Mailing Wheel & Sprocket bike shop general manager Logan says. “That means fewer cars on the street and less wear and tear on the roads. Reducing vehicle traffic also lowers vehicle emissions.”

Mailing takes it a step further, noting that bike lanes lead to less air pollution, a healthier community, lowered cost of health insurance and oil and fewer wars, he says.

Bike lanes keep cyclists off the sidewalks—particularly relevant for Sheridan Road’s pedestrian-filled sidewalk—while also giving the cyclists equanimity and peace of mind. Mailing is confident that improving bike lanes would noticeably increase in the number of bike riders around the city.

“In several cities, they’ve done surveys asking people what it would take to get them to ride [their bikes],” Mailing says. “In the results, 60 percent said they would ride their bike if it is comfortable and convenient— this is the crowd that is interested in bike lanes.”

Logan believes recent innovations have made lanes an even more feasible option.

“They now have protected bike lanes in order to keep the bicyclists from being doored [by cars],” Logan says. “There’s a smaller chance of that happening now. We’re definitely on the cutting edge of making improvements and being sensitive to bicyclists.”

In general, Lien, Logan and Mailing all seem to view bike lanes in a positive light, despite high costs and construction inconveniences. The long-term benefits, they say, generally outweigh the short-term costs.

Another of those long-term benefits applies to Evanston businesses, according to Mailing.

“If we can get the residents of Evanston to bike to their shopping, they are much more likely to shop in downtown Evanston and other commercial districts,” Mailing says. “That’s opposed to Old Orchard Mall, which is un-bicycle friendly and the money from that goes to Skokie.”

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 13

SPOTLIGHT

Breaking Ties ASA’s boycott of Israeli higher education prompts debate over academic freedom.

B Y M I T C H E LL CAMI N ER

14 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv • Public Health in Israel • Tel Aviv University Exchange • The Modern State of Israel: Politics, Economics, and Ethnicity

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jerusalem

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Beersheva

ACADEMIC AFFILIATIONS The Study Abroad Office officially affiliates with five approved programs in Israel, including three located at Tel Aviv University.

“We want them to clarify that that is their view and that it doesn’t represent the whole NU community,” says Dalia Fuleihan, Weinberg junior and co-president of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).

“I’m sure that nominally [Israeli] universities support academic free-

dom but their actions say otherwise,” Fuleihan says. “Most importantly they’re complicit with the military that significantly curtails Palestinian academic freedom.”

Others have been more supportive of the President’s letter, including Weinberg sophomore and Wildcats

for Israel president Jonathan Kamel.

“By boycotting Israeli academics, you’re preventing collaboration between the US and Israel which is counterproductive to the goal of promoting academic freedom for all,” Kamel says.

Schapiro did acknowledge that the letter doesn’t speak for the entire community, including several professors who are affiliated with the ASA. “We absolutely support the right of any of our faculty, staff and students to say what they want,” he says. “It wasn’t meant to stifle discussion. The irony is that boycotts stifle discussion.”

In January, the Modern Language Association voted to support a more limited condemnation of Israel, but it did not call for a boycott in the same way as the Association for Asian American students and the Native American Indigenous Studies Association, which have announced boycotts similar to the ASA’s.

Since December, public forums organized by SJP have sustained campus interest in the ASA boycott. If larger and more visible organizations join ASA’s stance, this episode could be the start of a larger public debate over academic freedom in Israel and around the world.

illustration: margaret kadifa

I

n December, a national debate was ignited over the American Studies Association’s boycott of Israeli academic institutions. With a brief statement from President Morton Schapiro and Provost Dan Linzer, Northwestern jumped into the fray.

On Dec. 23, an email announced to students and faculty that the University disapproved of ASA’s boycott, citing Northwestern’s breadth of joint-degree programs, research partnerships and study abroad programs with Israeli universities.

Supporters of the boycott claim that Israeli academic institutions stifle academic freedom and enjoy numerous structural and governmental advantages compared to their Palestinian counterparts. The boycott’s opponents counter that Israel’s record of academic freedom is sterling compared to that of other countries in the Middle East, and that a boycott is counterproductive.

“Being the president of an academic institution and you’re supposed to boycott other academic institutions because of the policies of their government?” Schapiro says.

“It’s just completely against everything you believe in.”

The December email echoes the sentiments of over 100 university presidents and chancellors and the American Association of Universities, who have issued similar statements. Four universities withdrew all affiliation with the ASA. Schapiro sits on the executive committee of the AAU and participated in discussions regarding the wording in the association’s official statement.

Northwestern has close ties to Israel, offering joint degrees with Tel Aviv University in both law and business.

The statement ignited controversy across campus as students rushed to either praise or condemn the administration. Nearly 20 studentgroup leaders published a letter to Schapiro and Linzer criticizing them for speaking on behalf of the entire University community.

these confession boards as a “place where people can go to discuss things that they might not be able to with their peer group.”

Getting People Talking

These are Our Confessions Anonymous outlets foster solidarity among students.

B Y SA M H A R T I try really hard to be okay, but this school is eating me alive.

I’m actually in love with one of my greatest friends on campus, and it terrifies me.

I go to the gym every single day but I still can’t help but feel fat.

N

photo: samson fong

early 2,000 Facebook users have liked the Northwestern Confessions page as of February 2014.

The page describes itself as “a completely anonymous page to confess about your weird, funny, sad, fortunate, or unfortunate experiences, hopes, and dreams at NU!” Anonymous platforms on social media are not unique to Northwestern. Across the globe, universities, high schools, cities and communities have similar pages. According to postdoctoral student Nick Merola, the phenomenon particularly resonates among college students because they are in a transitional stage of life.

“This is an age group that’s struggling to find how they fit,” says Merola, who conducts research at Northwestern’s Social Media Lab, a School of Communication research group that studies how social interaction technologies are, and can be, used for work and play, Merola says. “You

know they’re out of high school, out of all that, and now they’re like, OK, here’s the whole wide world. How do I fit into it?”

According to preliminary research by the Social Media Lab, anonymous confession boards fit a unique intersection of anonymity and identifiability. Anonymity allows users to express opinions on taboo subjects, but also enables “flaming,” which is bashing or hostile conversation between Internet users. Identifiability allows users to reach a known audience, but exacerbates concerns about their reputations.

But on a confessions page, posters can speak to a known audience without revealing their identity. The stakes are extremely low.

Merola says this kind of confession isn’t necessarily new. Advice columns, bulletin boards and op-eds have all accommodated anonymity to discuss taboo subjects. Social media, however, has just made anonymity faster, rawer and more expansive.

“I think the main difference is that these are archived for everyone to see. The barrier of entry is very, very low, and it spreads,” Merola says.

“Communication is so much faster and there’s no lag time.”

Ultimately, Merola describes

I love Northwestern, but some days I have trouble justifying the debt I will be in and the continued financial struggles I’m putting my parents through.

NU Class Confessions is a Tumblr for issues about socioeconomic status at Northwestern. The page has been filled with hundreds of confessions about issues regarding money and student life ranging from eating out at restaurants to receiving financial aid packages.

The page was started by the Northwestern Quest Scholars Network, a group that includes lowincome students in the QuestBridge scholarship program and allies to low-income students.

SESP senior Erin Turner, who helped start the page, didn’t expect it to blow up as much as it did. “It almost started as a publicity stunt ... a way to get people talking,” she says.

At first, Turner and the Quest Scholars Executive Board had planned to collect confessions through a Google Form and post them on a white board in Norris. After receiving 30 submissions within the first few hours, they decided to start a Tumblr.

Turner says that the issue of class is a taboo at Northwestern. For her, the page is “a way to get people to realize how much we don’t talk about socioeconomic status.”

On a Lighter Note Connor Steelberg looks like he’s strutting down the runways of Paris whenever he walks down Sheridan.

What a beautiful human being.

Twenty-two likes. Four comments.

“WHO’S UGLY NOW, MOM??” Connor replied in a comment.

The trend of anonymous expression extends beyond the serious issues brought forth on Northwestern Confessions. Inspired by the Confessions page, Northwestern Crushes emerged last year, with much more lighthearted results.

The Northwestern Crushes moderator, who has asked to stay anonymous, says they like the lighter nature of their page.

“Our page has been kept very playful and not very serious,” they say. “I feel like it’s caused a lot of positivity on campus.”

The moderator started the page last April with four friends, but now only two of them continue to manage the page. In the beginning, they reposted every crush they received, but after some complaints from students and problems adhering to Facebook’s community standards, they began to filter out sexual, pornographic and non-consensual content.

“We don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable,” the moderator says.

Still, the moderator estimates that 99 percent of crushes end up being posted, and there’s no sign of the page being shut down anytime soon.

Making a Difference Merola notes students’ positive responses to the serious issues that have surfaced on Northwestern Confessions.

“For people that are revealing these identities, these things they’re uncertain about, getting this positive feedback from their peers can be very positive for them,” says Merola, who has also noticed campus groups like CAPS and SHAPE are reading the confessions, responding to posts and connecting with readers.

Turner hopes for actual, substantial change through the discussions started on NU Class Confessions.

“I think different administrators are looking at this page, and I think this can hold some sway with them,” she says. “Something I would personally like to see out of this would be support groups for people who are dealing with a lot of financial stress.”

But for now, Turner is satisfied with what the page has accomplished.

“There have been some posts where somebody said ‘I felt so alone, but now I know I’m not,’” she says. “If that’s the only impact [this page] has, that’s incredible.”

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 15

SPOTLIGHT

Demystifying the System So you broke the rules. Now what? BY SHANNON LANE But students may not fully understand what the system does or how it works.

Luckily, Lance Watson, Assistant Director of Student Conduct & Conflict Resolution wants to help make the system easier to understand.

There are two ways to resolve a problem through UHAS: a conciliation meeting or a hearing.

Hearing

16 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

Conciliation Meeting

Who is involved?

Who is involved?

According to Watson, hearings are attended by six to nine members of the University community, including students, faculty and administrators, the chair of the hearing board (often a student), factual witnesses and character witnesses. Factual witnesses are people who have “firsthand knowledge” of the incident, while character witnesses can testify to the respondent’s qualities and reputation.

A complaining party (often the University), a respondent (usually a student, who represents his or her organization) and the Executive Secretary from the Office of Student Conduct & Conflict Resolution, who oversees the entire process. The complaining party and respondent may also invite character witnesses to testify on their behalves.

What happens during the process?

What happens during the process?

1

The complaining party files a report with the office, which then informs the respondent of the complaint and the policies you allegedly violated.

2

The respondent can choose a representative to help them during the process. Parents, alumni and lawyers cannot be representatives.

3

The respondent meets with the Executive Secretary to hear about UHAS procedures.

4

Twenty-four hours before the hearing, the respondent must submit the name of their representative, as well as factual and character witnesses. At this time, they can also submit exhibits, documents or other materials that they think will demonstrate their argument more clearly.

5

The hearing is called to order. The charges are read and both sides can give opening statements.

The complaining party presents its side and then the respondent present theirs.

6

The hearing board deliberates on possible sanctions. The respondent can request a separate “sanctioning phase” of the hearing where they can bring up their past disciplinary issues.

7

The respondent can request a re-hearing if there is new evidence to present. If they think there was an error in procedure or interpretation of the university’s policies, they can appeal the board’s decision, but they cannot present any new evidence or witness testimonies.

1

The complaining party files a report with the office, who then sends the respondent a copy of the complaint and a list of the policies they allegedly violated.

2

The respondent can participate in a conciliation meeting, where they’ll meet with a faculty member, a Student Affairs staff member and another student. Each party will tell their side of the story.

3

Both sides agree to a compromise, the Executive Secretary writes an agreement and both sides sign it.

This process is both long and exhaustive, so next time you’re thinking about breaking the rules, take a look at this list—is it really worth it?

illustration: alex lordahl

F

ollowing several high-profile stories in campus media over the past few months, the University Hearing and Appeals System (UHAS) has received a lot of recent attention on campus, even though it’s been operating quietly for much longer. The UHAS is charged with resolving issues among students, their organizations and the university, as well as promoting the university’s values.

Y O U R G U I D E T O L I V I N G S M A R T.

plus:

genius SWEATY BRUNCH pg.18 | SEARCHING FOR SHMEAR pg.18 | HOMEWORK HELL, FUN ON THE EL pg.19 | MATCH MADE IN HEAVENSTON pg.20 | HACKING THE DREADED PACK pg.21 THE INSIDE TRACK pg.22 | BIRTHDAY BONUS pg.22 | MO’ GLUTEN, MO’ PROBLEMS pg.24 THE SCIENCE OF CUDDLING pg.25 | FUN BY FUNWESTERN pg.26

Regain the calories you burned with these jogging trails and brunch combinations.

Photograph by DAVID ZHANG

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 17

genius

Sweaty Brunch T

here’s no better way to explore Chicago than by foot. Better yet, jog—and reward yourself for burning all those calories with a hearty meal. Here are seven running routes and brunch destinations to visit along the way.

Will run for waffles. BY ROSA LI E CHA N

Baseball Run 4.5 miles

Distance:

Get off the El at Fullerton and run east toward the lake. Enjoy Lincoln Park’s zoo and conservatory, both scenic spots nestled in the middle of the city. Run south along Lakeshore Drive to North Avenue Beach, then northwest along Lincoln Avenue toward Batter & Berries (2748 N. Lincoln Ave.), a breakfast spot known for its French toast flight. You get extra credit if you run through Lincoln Park Zoo.

Evanston North Distance:

2.7 miles

If you want a short, easy run, start by jogging north along Sheridan Road, turn left on Linden Avenue, passing the Bahá’í Temple. Finally, turn left at Green Bay Road and have breakfast at Walker Bros Original Pancake House (153 Green Bay Rd.) in Wilmette.

Evanston South Distance:

3 miles

Run south along Sheridan Road, continuing until it becomes Chicago Avenue and eventually Clark Street. Gorge on fresh baked Mexican pastries at Panaderia Ayutla (6963 N. Clark St.) in Rogers Park. Just follow the smell of churros and pan dulce.

The Search for Shmear It’s about the journey, not the destination.

B Y S A M FR E E DMA N

I

t’s long been rumored that within the labyrinthine expanse of the Technological Institute lies a genuine clone: a second Einstein Bros Bagels on campus.

Engineers swear they’ve bought breakfast there before, but South Campus residents regard them skeptically. The University appears to have confirmed the existence of an Einstein Bros Bagels on the second floor of Pancoe Life Sciences Pavilion by posting its hours of operation on the nuCuisine website, but we weren’t convinced.

In search of the truth, fellow NBN writer Orko Manna and I set out to locate this fabled bagel boutique. Armed with only fleeting confidence and a camera, we ventured into the bowels of one of the nation’s largest academic superstructures and began our search.

18 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

Distance:

3.5 miles

Whether or not you believe the Cubs will break their century-long World Series drought, Wrigleyville is worth your time. Start at the stadium and head east to Lakeshore Drive. Depending on how fast you’re running, you’ll notice a sudden scenery change from Wrigleyville’s sports bar atmosphere to Belmont Avenue, a hip area full of vintage shops and record stores. Heading south along Belmont Avenue, turn right on Clark Street, right on Waveland Avenue and right again on Sheffield Avenue to return to Wrigleyville. Try Ann Sather Restaurant (3411 N. Broadway St.), or for vegan options, head to Pick Me Up Cafe (3408 N. Clark St.).

Argyle, Lincoln Square, Devon Avenue and Andersonville 6 miles

Distance:

Take the El to Argyle and run west on Argyle Street, which is filled with Chinese and Vietnamese shops and restaurants. Keep running until you hit Lincoln Square, a historically German neighborhood. Turn right at Western Avenue and run north to Devon Avenue, a street with a variety of Indian, Eastern European and Middle Eastern shops. Run east until you reach Clark Street, then turn right toward Andersonville, a historically Swedish neighborhood. Stop for baked goods at the Swedish Bakery (5348 N. Clark St) or a full breakfast at M. Henry (5707 N. Clark St).

For more routes, visit northbynorthwestern.com/library

8:08 p.m.

8:10 8:11

The Campus Loop arrives at our stop. It’s negative 6 degrees outside. Tech’s warm embrace couldn’t come sooner.

We enter the lobby. The choice: left or right? We turn right because it’s a 50-50 shot, right?

Recalling a rumor that the store is in a place called Pancoe, an adjoining building to Tech, we ask a nearby custodian which way to walk.

He points us in the same direction we’d been going. Confidence in our instincts soars.

8:15 8:24 8:27 8:33

The hallway seems longer than Bowser’s endless staircase in Super Mario 64. The idea of turning anywhere grows more frightening. It’s getting hotter and Orko is sweating.

We figure it’s about time to turn. Given that a left would take us back toward the center, we make another right and continue down a new, visually identical hallway.

The room numbers don’t make sense.

We turn a few more times in what seems to be a general northeast track before realizing we have absolutely no idea where we are. Panic

photos: david zhang

Lincoln Park

Homework Hell, Fun on the El Ride the line between work and play.

BY TAYLOR T HOMAS

A

healthy school-life balance becomes harder and harder to maintain as the quarter progresses. If you’re not studying, you feel guilty about not studying, so you start studying again. Or you drink. And then drink more to forget about not studying. It’s a vicious cycle.

What’s a student to do?

Maintain that balance with day trips. Spend your days working and nights partying, and get there on the El. Here are a few suggestions for where you can hit the books and then hit the bars.

Adams/Wabash Station, Purple/Brown Line

Diversey Station, Purple/Brown Line

Northwestern Intercampus Shuttle

Next Door 659 W Diversey Pkwy

Northwestern Law School Arthur Rubloff Building 375 E Chicago Ave.

Art Institute of Chicago 111 S Michigan Ave. Russian Tea Time 77 E Adams St. The Art Institute has free Wi-Fi and free admission for Northwestern students. If you’re a museum member, there’s also free coffee in the member lounge. Regardless, the cafeteria has perfect study tables and a research library that’s open to the public three days a week. Depending on when you finish working, head to Russian Tea Time for afternoon tea, Russian pancakes called blini and if you’re so inclined, vodka shots.

Kuma’s Too 666 W Diversey Pkwy

Luxbar 18 E Bellevue Pl.

Next Door is a State Farm-run financial advising center that doubles as an open workspace. They’ve got free Wi-Fi and a barista bar with local pastries and coffee. After work, head to Kuma’s Too, the younger sibling of Kuma’s Corner, to enjoy a craft beer and heavy-metal themed burger. Yes, there are burgers named after the likes of Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and Mastodon. sets in. Orko tries to load a map of the building on his phone, but the thick, cavernous walls seem to be cutting off our phone service.

photos: jenny starrs

8:36

An angry-looking bald man asks us what we’re doing. We mumble something about salmon shmear. He tells us we’re in the Catalysis Center. Further east is the Center for Nanofabrication. Having no idea what this means and feeling unsettled by the man’s droopy, sleepdeprived eyes, we thank him and quickly turn in the other direction.

8:39 8:40

The map finally loads onto Orko’s phone. Apparently there’s some sort of bridge or corridor we should follow into Mudd Library.

8:45 8:49

We cross a bridge into the library. Students at a table nearby glare at us, so we converse about numbers and atom smashers until they’re out of sight.

Orko realizes we could’ve entered Mudd from the outside. He mutters something about a midterm and killing someone. Unsure of whom he’s referencing, I remain one step behind him as a precautionary measure.

This is a long library.

Northwestern’s Chicago campus is beautiful, right on Lake Shore Drive with a view of Navy Pier to the southeast. It’s also two blocks from Michigan Avenue, and a short walk away from the restaurants on Rush Street.

The district is a nexus for great dining, and you can start your night off with drinks on the second floor of Luxbar overlooking street traffic.

8:50 8:54 9:08 9:15 9:20 9:23 9:25 9:27

We ask a librarian to point us in the direction of Pancoe. She does.

We cross into Pancoe. For some reason, we find ourselves discussing chicken cutlets.

We went in a circle. We went in a circle. We’re right back where we started, presumably near the entrance to Pancoe, but more importantly, where is that?

Delirium is setting in. Orko keeps repeating the word “midterm,” as if he’s outlining the structure of a typical Northwestern quarter.

A custodian walks by. We beg for directions. He points upstairs.

So close. We can almost smell it. (“It” being the bagels.)

We arrive. It’s closed. The absence of a doughy prize sullies the mood a bit, but like Columbus “discovering” America, we feel pretty rich anyway.

How do we get out?

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 19

genius

Match Made in E

HEAVENSTON

We found alcoholic companions for Evanston’s most “gourmet” cuisines. B Y AN PHU N G

Taco Bell will always hit the spot. The Cheesy Gordita Crunch is a soft, warm cornucopia of all your classic Taco Bell ingredients—beans, cheese, diced tomatoes and lettuce—with an added crunch. Pair it with a Skol-spiked Baja Blast to feel simultaneously festive and hyperaware that you’re still in college.

The 7-Eleven Fresh To Go cheeseburger and 40-ounce malt liquor Nothing better than burgers ‘n’ brews with the bros, am I right?

Forty ounces is a lot of beer, though, so a good strategy to tackle this combination is by only drinking half of it at first. Meanwhile, you’ll start developing a healthy appetite for cheap food that’s also available 24/7. While you’re destroying that burger, you’ll have a fair amount of malt liquor left to wash it down in shame or triumph. This is an American classic.

Burger King Value Menu items after shots of rum The trick with this combination is to take gratuitous shots beforehand. Even if it’s cold outside, the rum coursing through your veins will keep you warm just long enough to reach Burger King. Since there isn’t really anything commendable on the Value Menu, create a tasteful plate of your personal favorites instead.

Joy Yee Sesame Chicken and boxed sangria

A Joy Yee dish is like a box of wine: If you finish the entire thing, there’s a good chance you’ll feel sad about yourself after. So why not share an appetizer and an entree, along with a box of sangria? It’s a pleasant combination, and perhaps the only one on this list that might make you feel somewhat like an adult.

Norris Dunkin’ Donuts and spiked coffee

20 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

What better way to get hyped for the newest addition to Norris’ food court than by improving upon the classic combination of coffee and donuts?

Before Dunkin’ Donuts fades into oblivion like its Norris vendor predecessors, try starting the day with a golden donut and coffee spiked with Bailey’s or Kahlua for a true morning pick-me-up—and continue to deny your raging alcoholism.

photos: priscilla liu

Two Taco Bell Cheesy Gordita Crunches and Baja Blast Spiked with Skol Vodka

vanston isn’t exactly a traditional college town.

While Wildcat spirit is undeniable, on weekends the streets aren’t littered with the same kind of debauchery you might expect near a university campus. Shops close early and food options are limited during the most crucial times: when you want to get schmacked. Fortunately, with the right alcoholic companion, you can enhance Evanston’s small latenight meal selection.

dreaded PACK W hacking the

Fly me to the booze.

BY J E RE MY LAYT ON

hether you’re going home for break, flying out to New York for a job interview or traveling to Puerto Vallarta to rage your face off, the success of your trip begins and ends with what you bring with you. Clothes and toiletries are obvious, but there are other key items that can make or break your trip. According to the Transportation Security Administration, it’s legal to bring up to five liters of alcohol in your checked luggage (provided you are of legal drinking age, of course). Take advantage of this rule with these tips to make sure you make the most of your flight experience.

The Sushi Roll Believe it or not, glass bottles can break, and they have a high probability of doing so when they’re being shaken back and forth by turbulence at 30,000 feet in the air. An easy solution to make sure your Grey Goose doesn’t shatter and spill all over your cashmere sweaters is to roll the bottle up inside your clothes like sushi. Tuck them away in the corner of your suitcase and fly with peace of mind.

The Manhattan Like the cocktail, this one is a classic, and generally very effective for getting all your shit inside one bag. Stack your shirts, pants and underwear in separate piles, creating several towers that make up the city of your suitcase. If your clothes are the skyscrapers, the empty spaces between them are the streets. Populate those streets by tossing the rest of your items in the spaces between the towers. It’s the industry standard if there ever was one.

The “F**k it” photos: priscilla liu

If you’re anything like me, you probably think packing is a huge pain in the ass. You’d rather hang out with your friends the night before you leave instead of folding your clothes into neat little piles. If you truly don’t care about wrinkled clothes, just toss them into your suitcase until you can’t fit any more items without the zipper breaking. You may never be able to wear your polos again, but hey, at least you didn’t have to waste any pre-vacay time.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 21

genius

Sheridan

The Inside Track

Walk into University Library, and don’t even bother pulling out your Wildcard. Just walk up the stairs and exit out the other side. Don’t turn toward Norris, instead walk straight on the paved pathway toward Swift.

We trekked from South to North Campus and barely stepped outside B Y CARO LI N E LEVY

B

aby, it’s freaking cold outside. But don’t fret, because NBN has just the survival tool for you. In light of the latest polar vortex (pat yourself on the back for surviving, though we know you didn’t go outside during those double feature snow days), we’ve devised a route across campus to ensure that you will survive the next inevitable stretch of arctic temperatures.

Instead of trudging from South to North Campus shiver-twitching and muttering, “I love having four seasons, I love having four seasons” under your breath, maximize your time indoors with this scenic route across campus.

1. Kresge Step outside Kresge.

Inhale deeply to dramatically signify that you are ready for this journey.

Birthday Bonus Sometimes the best things in life are free.

BY K E V IN K R YAH Birthdays are cool. Free stuff is cool.

Put the two together and you’ve got yourself a damn fine celebration.

Finding free goodies, though, is the issue—but not anymore. Plenty of Evanston businesses give away freebies if it’s your big day; you just need to know where to look. And, hey, we did that for you! Consult this list to make sure that you can maximize your acquisitions on your special day.

22 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

Cough because you gulped in air that is now freezing your lungs.

2..

3.

Annie May Swift

4. University Library

Circumvent Annie May Swift.

Yes, outdoors. THE BACK ENTRANCE IS A CLASSROOM. I REPEAT: THE BACK ENTRANCE IS A CLASSROOM. Don’t repeat my mistakes, unless you want every head in the class to swivel slowly around and gape at snowsoaked you.

Flat Top Grill You need to sign up for the Flat Top mailing list for this one, but it’s so worth it. Every year on your birthday, you get a free stir-fry meal. Not only that, but you can get a free appetizer or dessert coupon on your half-birthday too.

Andy’s Frozen Custard A free birthday treat awaits you, but only if you join the Andy’s mailing list, endearingly called the “Yum Squad.”

Make sure you sign up before your birthday and reap the spoils.

Noodles & Company This one requires a little advance planning. If you sign up for their Eclub, you’ll receive a “Noodlegram” on your birthday that amounts to a free entree. However, you’ll need to have been a member of the E-club for more than 60 days to be eligible.

Sheridan Emergency Solutions: 1. Try the windows. Notice that this route only considered doors as viable exits…

2. Petition ASG to build an underground tunnel across campus (10K initiative anyone? Hey, I’m still holding out on winning that raffle).

3. Pad your entire body in toe warmers.

4. Or, you could always download the shuttle tracker app.

5.

Swift + Cresap

Enter Swift’s side entrance, where “Mark W. Cresap Laboratory” is etched into the building. Walk through Swift and come out the main entrance. Cut over, briefly outdoors, to Annenberg. Take a moment to realize how delightfully warm you feel thanks to all this time indoors.

Enter Annenberg’s front entrance. Walk down the stairs and leave through the back doors (facing the lake). Turn left and walk toward Ryan Hall.

6.

Annenberg

7.

Voila! You are just a short walk from Tech’s back entrance! Admire the neighboring construction that is your gateway to heaven, and duck into your final destination. Congratulations, my friend, and best of luck to you reversing these directions for the route back.

8.

Ryan

Tech

Enter Ryan Hall’s back doors (across from Silverman). After coming through double doors, turn right. Follow the hallway maze of the first floor until you exit the building’s … side entrance?

Really, it won’t be clear at this point what is side, front, or back.

illustration: priya krishnakumar

Cheesie’s Pub & Grub

Joy Yee Noodle Kitchen

No formal birthday deal exists at this beloved artery-destroyer, but you can stop by here on your 21st birthday and get a free shot.

Just flash your ID and you’ll be one step closer to blackout before you know it.

If you ever want to celebrate your birthday at a restaurant, seriously consider Joy Yee. If it’s your birthday and you dine in, you’ll receive a small complimentary birthday cake. Tell your waiter when you first get seated and await your cake.

CVS It’s not as flashy as a restaurant deal, but the CVS birthday experience is still worth mentioning.

If you sign up for the ExtraCare card (and you should, it’s free), you can register it online to get $3 in ExtraCare bucks on your birthday.

Einstein Bro’s Bagels Whether you visit the location on Sherman Avenue or you can manage to find the one in Tech, Einstein’s offers a nice little birthday treat. Sign up for their mailing list and on your birthday, you’ll receive a free breakfast sandwich with the purchase of any drink.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 23

genius

The Science of Cuddling

W

hen students complain about stress, they don’t necessarily focus on alleviating it. If they knew temporary relief could be found simply from a couple minutes of cuddling, there’d be fewer frantic Norris conversations that go something like, “I am literally done and just can’t anymore.”

So grab a cuddle buddy and keep reading; it’s for your mental health.

An old study by psychologist Harry Harlow found that when given the choice between an inanimate surrogate mother made of wire or one made of cloth, orphaned baby macaque-rhesus monkeys preferred the cloth-covered option. The cloth moms provided the perfect amount of “snugglability” and actually improved the orphans’ health. By clinging to the cloth surrogates, they were more likely to eat and drink properly, be psychologically stable and flourish in general.

The hormone oxytocin, which is the key to happiness and wellbeing not only in baby monkeys but also in baby humans, facilitates 24 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

contact comfort. It’s affectionately known as the “love hormone” and “cuddle hormone.”

So how can we capitalize on oxytocin’s power over our mental and physical health?

If you enjoy skin-on-skin action of the romantic or platonic variety, find a cuddle partner who, in the words of sex advice columnist dan savage, is “good, giving and game.”

If you aren’t the touchy-feely type, you can quite literally copy the Harlow study and create an artificial snuggle situation: Tightly wrap yourself in a warm blanket and, if you want, hug a large pillow.

Lisa Ferentz, author of Treating Self Destructive Behaviors in Trauma Survivors: A Clinicians Guide, recommends patients participate in blanket

wrapping and pillow hugging if they ever feel the urge to engage in selfdestructive behavior. The warmth that results from wrapping and hugging is often enough to distract and temporarily soothe. It seems simple but anyone who suffers from the winter blues or exam anxiety can use this as a coping strategy.

But if you enjoy skin-on-skin action of the romantic or platonic variety, find a cuddle partner who, in the words of sex advice columnist Dan Savage, is “good, giving and game.”

Establish what kinds of snuggling you enjoy. Perhaps consult Rob Grader’s The Cuddle Sutra, a collection of helpful cuddle position pictorials not unlike the famed Kama Sutra.

Experiment with different locations: couch, bed, floor, secluded library corner, igloo ... and check on each person’s PDA tolerances. Will this be a “During Netflix Only” activity or will it extend to spontaneous after-class seshes? If it is indeed platonic, are there certain boundaries that cannot be crossed without making things awkward?

For those seeking the perfect cuddle buddy, Grader has some key advice: Do a quick gut check when the cuddling commences. Do you want this to go on and on? Or are you counting the seconds until you can escape without seeming harsh?

When you’re this physically intimate with someone, instincts always tell the truth.

Word to the wise on romantic snuggle buddies: Oxytocin is a large reason why prolonged hook-up concepts like the classic “friends with benefits” often get skewed quickly.

Why? Intense physical contact can often send signals to the brain that you’re super content and need more of whatever activity is creating that feeling. Casual sex and any form of post-sex touching constitute this super-content feeling.

Physical contact essentially becomes a drug that sustains happiness. And we all know drugs should be used with caution. Isn’t it rich how “Hugs, not Drugs” loses all relevance when hugging—in its many complex forms—is doing the drugging?

photo: chrissy lee

Basic human contact is the key to staying sane. BY AMANDA GLICKMAN

Mo’ Gluten, Mo’ Problems Eating in dining halls presents obstacles for students with dietary restrictions. BY CARTER SHERMAN

T

photos: chrissy lee and astrid goh

ali Jona stands in front of the soup station, carefully scrutinizing its nutritional labels. A few seconds later, she sees the dreaded words: “contains gluten.” Empty bowl in hand, she walks away. Salad it is.

Again.

No one would ever call Northwestern cuisine gourmet, but for students who can’t eat gluten, the quality of dining hall food doesn’t matter.

Almost all of it is inedible anyway.

“I try not to eat in the dining halls because I am very frustrated a lot of the time,” says Jona, a gluten-intolerant Weinberg sophomore. “I just want variety, instead of eating the exact same thing all the time.”

Gluten is a protein found in wheat, rye and barley. Sensitivity to gluten can range from intolerances to allergies. While still serious, intolerances provoke different reactions than allergies. On the severe side of the spectrum lie diseases like celiac and Crohn’s, which are autoimmune conditions.

Here’s a quick biology lesson: Inside your intestines are miniscule hair-like structures called villi, which line the intestine and help absorb nutrients. These help you absorb nutrients—which is why, for celiac sufferers, it’s so devastating when gluten flattens their villi. Not only is gluten not absorbed and passed to the rest of the body, but the body loses its ability to process other kinds of nutrients. You can eat everything in sight and still starve.

Students on gluten-free diets often rely on nuCuisine chefs to help them choose the right foods. The chefs are usually knowledgeable, but sometimes there are exceptions.

When Communication sophomore Cordelia Dewdney ate at Sargent her freshman year, she often asked chefs what foods contained gluten.

“They’d be like, ‘Oh no, no, no,’”

she says. “Then I would ask another [chef], and they would look in the ingredients, and there’d be flour or barley or something, which I’m allergic to.”

People often don’t realize how many foods contain gluten. Bread, pasta, pastries, even beer—that reliable college staple—are off-limits to gluten-sensitive people. Gluten-free stations, offering basics like wheatless bread and cereal, appeared in all dining halls last year.

Justin Heaton, nuCuisine’s head dietician, says the stations are intended to provide ready-made foods to the increasing gluten-free student population.

“I do see [the options] growing,” he says of Northwestern’s gluten-free food program. “There is obviously the demand for it.”

When asked how soon growth will occur, Heaton says he’s “not quite sure at this point,” but added that nuCuisine is “moving forward.”

Students agree that these stations are an excellent first step, since they ensure students can always at the very least make a sandwich. But the problem isn’t that gluten-free students can’t find something to eat. It’s that they often have no choice but to always eat the same thing.

“It would be great if they had one hot dish that was labeled gluten-free,” says Dewdney. “That in itself would make a big difference.”

Jona says she’s gotten used to Northwestern’s limited options.

What she can’t accept, however, is how often dining halls add gluten to foods that don’t need them.

“All the soups in the dining hall are thickened with gluten, which is common in mass-produced food, but it’s frustrating because it’s usually something I eat all the time,” Jona says. “It’s almost upsetting. The soups don’t have to be like that.”

LABELS MATTER While dining halls have designated areas for gluten-free products, hot dishes often are not labeled.

According to Heaton, soups are ordered from outside vendors, so the school can’t change their gluten thickening. However, some dining halls are starting to use stocks and sauces prepared by in-house chefs.

“If chefs are making their own stocks and sauces, they would be gluten-free because they wouldn’t have that base,” Heaton says.

Many students say Northwestern’s labeling system also needs improvement. French fries are particularly problematic. Violet Redensek, a gluten-intolerant Weinberg sophomore, once got sick from seasoned fries because the recipe label hadn’t been updated to include gluten.

Communication sophomore Weston Jacoby, who has celiac disease, had no idea the fries were cooked in a fryer also used for wheat products, a fact he only learned after talking to the chefs.

“If I’m here for four years,” Jacoby says, “that could be a long-term problem if I’m eating things that are contaminated or mislabeled and I don’t know it.”

When dining hall dishes are gluten-free, they’re not always marked as such. Instead, gluten just isn’t listed as an ingredient. This is due to the possibility of cross-contamination, Heaton says, but students argue labels must be more discerning. They know from experience or staff recommendation certain foods are safe, but their labels do not reflect that. These labeling discrepancies also waste time for students.

“The hardest part is trying to be a frantic college student and trying to find a way to eat healthy,” says Rebecca Rego, a SESP senior with celiac disease. She lives off-campus, but frequently eats at Norris and C-Stores.

“You can’t just run and grab NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 25

genius

Fun by Funwestern H

ere at NBN, we felt the need to return to our childhood ways. We also wanted to give our readers the chance to create some hard-hitting journalism of their own—so here’s a Mad Lib! Enjoy! Recommended: have a friend read you the questions.

something,” she says. “If it had a label on there, it would be so much easier. I wouldn’t be reading fifty ingredients. It would just be a matter of, ‘Oh, this says gluten-free. Great, let’s go.’”

Northwestern is trying to accommodate gluten-free lifestyles, students say. Students who reached out to nuCuisine have had positive experiences, though the attempts are not always successful.

After her first quarter at Northwestern, Jona met with Heaton. If Jona could provide Heaton with a schedule of times, places and foods for her meals, he’d compose a diverse weekly diet. But like most Northwestern students, Jona knew her life was too hectic to follow a tightly regimented timetable, leading her to turn down Heaton’s offer.

However, for Weinberg freshman Jacob Rosenblum, a custom weekly diet was exactly what he needed.

The slightest cross-contamination can cause a reaction for Rosenblum, so none of his food can be cooked in dishes that have touched gluten. Before arriving on campus, Rosenblum called nuCuisine, who assured them they could handle his needs, and Rosenblum says they have.

“I live in Willard, and the dining staff there is especially amazing,” he says, “They know me by my face, so they’re always readily available to help me rather than having to search them out.”

Heaton says another student in Elder currently follows a custom weekly diet as well, but he wishes there was more dialogue between gluten-free students and the administration because not all students know it’s an option.

“We welcome feedback from the students. So if students are having a hard time finding meals, they can always come to me,” Heaton says.

“They’re definitely moving in the right direction,” Jona says. “It’s just taking longer than I, or other glutenfree people, would have probably hoped.”

26 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

Campus official: __________________

Article of clothing: __________________

Controversial social topic: __________________ Plural noun: __________________

Least favorite alcoholic beverage: __________________ Expletive noun: __________________

Topic: ___________________

Plural expletive noun: __________________

Past tense verb: ___________________

Adverb: __________________

Adjective: __________________

Nostalgic adjective: __________________

Plural Noun: __________________ Article of clothing: __________________

Campus landmark: __________________ Campus animal: __________________

Campus controversy: __________________ Social or Greek organization: __________________

Adverb: __________________ Body Part: __________________

A Saturday Night at Northwestern _______________ attended a_______________ panel for the free_______________. campus official

plural noun

controversial social topic

The speaker droned on and on about ______________ while _______________ topic

same campus official

_______________ about his/her plans for the evening. He/she planned to feel past tense verb

_______________, wild and free that night. Nothing would stop him/her in his/her quest for adjective

_______________. He/she had been lonely for far too long. As the crowd milled around the plural noun

refreshments, he/she put on his/her _______________and headed out of Cahn auditorium. article of clothing

He/she caught the_______________ Shuttle, which arrived late and headed to the campus controversy

_______________house. When he/she got there, he/she took off his/her _______________ social or Greek organization

article of clothing

and asked for a _______________. The bartender said “No, you _______________. least favorite alcoholic beverage

expletive noun

_______________ are for_______________!” The crowd, which had been boogying plural expletive noun

plural form of same beverage

_______________ until then, suddenly started chanting, “Keg stand!” Never one for peer adverb

pressure, _______________ succumbed and began to relive his/her _______________days. same campus official

nostalgic adjective

And that’s the last he/she remembered. _______________ awoke the next morning by the _______________, naked and with a same campus official

campus landmark

_______________ _______________licking his/her gnarled _______________. campus animal

adverb

body part

WHAT ’S GOING ON AROUND CAMPUS.

Not used to being the subject, Justin Barbin jumps for joy at our studio day.

Photograph by JOSH ARONSON

FOLLOWING JUSTIN BARBIN pg. 28 | OLYMPIC DREAMS pg. 29 | LIVING A LEGACY pg. 30 INSIDE THE THICK ENVELOPE pg. 31 | UNDERSTANDING THEIR ARIA pg. 32 LADIES FIRST pg. 33 | GETTING TO KNOW GARRETT pg. 34 | THE “NWU” CLASS OF 2018 pg. 34 GUNNING FOR SUCCESS pg. 35 | BID ADIEU TO IOU pg. 36 | NO-DRONE ZONE pg. 37

QUAD

Following Justin Barbin

We go behind the lens with Northwestern’s most loved photographer. BY BEN O RESKES

I

t’s sorority bid night, and we’re standing outside Kappa Alpha Theta waiting for their newest members to arrive. It’s post-polar vortex but still freezing, and photographer Justin Barbin offers me a tissue.

At 6 p.m., the sky is pitch black.

Barbin, who Theta hired to take pictures for the night, offers my photographer Josh the large, detachable flash from his camera. He won’t stop complimenting Josh’s photo skills, and as we make small talk waiting for the girls to come, he repeatedly says how grateful he is.

Grateful for this. Grateful for that.

Grateful for the adulation and generosity of the Northwestern community.

As older members of the sorority file out of their castle of a house, music begins to blare and Barbin is a blur, darting between the girls. The ladies spot their newest “babies” entering the quad and pandemonium ensues. Justin wears leather wingtips, green socks and a fur hat as he bops along to Theta’s own version of Wiz Khalifa—Black and Gold. He balances on an icy snowdrift as girls come up to him constantly, asking, Justin, can you take a photo of me? Justin, can I have a hug?

28 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

They pose and, of course, he obliges. He’s all about giving. He gives himself over to these events, completely and totally integrating himself into these communities—his subjects.

“I hope that it comes across in my photos that I care about the people that I photograph,” Barbin says when we speak a couple days later.

Theta’s newest sisters stream in, hugging each other as Justin records indelible images that he’ll later post to Facebook. The photos will make these girls’ days, and that’s all he cares about.

Barbin graduated from Northwestern in 2011, but often returns to campus to shoot Greek events and theater productions.

“I did shows all four years of college, and really that environment was what cultivated my reputation as a photographer,” he says. “I would photograph all the theater productions I went to, all the theater parties I went to. And from there, it really branched out to meeting friends of friends.”

In high school, Barbin was class president, on the debate team and involved in theater. He took his camera everywhere and posted photo-filled

essays to his Xanga blog. “Everybody knew what I did and appreciated it,” Barbin says. “So they welcomed it, and I just kept it up.”

Barbin met Kacy Smith (SoC ’11) during their sophomore year of college. The two played orphans in a campus production and quickly became friends. His genuine enthusiasm for the little things in life, Smith says, is what people love most about him.

Smith spoke of Barbin’s independence and self-reliance. It’s not easy to make ends meet as a photographer without working another job on the side.

“This is my only source of income and I can support myself through what I love,” he says. “It’s hard to be impressed, because I’m in it.”

This success doesn’t come without adversity. At school, Barbin performed in plays, sang in an a cappella group and took a heavy course load.

He was considering a career in advertising. Then in the spring of his junior year, Barbin learned his stepmother had cancer. Doctors told her she had a couple of months to live.

“Instead of being really enthusiastic and excited, when something happens that is the opposite of that, [if] it really hurts the person’s soul or hurts for a day, he’s very reluctant to show that,” Smith says. “So to me it seems like he’s changed, because he’s started to show that side of himself to more people more easily.”

One night, around the time he

heard about his stepmom’s diagnosis, Barbin was walking home from a play, first stopping by 7-Eleven for a Coke Slurpee.

“I was about to open my front door, this guy grabs me from the back, chokes me and tells me to shut up and shoves me down on the ground and puts his foot on me,” he says.

The thieves grabbed his camera and nothing else, taking the only tool that allowed Barbin to exercise his passion.

In response to the incident, Barbin’s friends took action. They organized a fundraiser, “Barbin Camera Bonanza Bar Night,” at The Keg of Evanston and launched justinbarbincamerafund.org to help raise money for a new camera.

“That’s the sort of thing that he inspires,” Smith says. “It’s sort of jaw dropping. I heard the news about my best friend being mugged and his camera being stolen, which I didn’t even hear from him. The next thing I knew, there was an event happening for him.”

The campaign raised a combined $1,257, according to an NBN article from May 2010. When asked what he thought of all the support, the word he fell back on so often to characterize his success didn’t suffice.

“I can’t even put into words that would adequately describe how loved I felt, how grateful I was,” he says. “I mean, ‘grateful’ doesn’t even cut it to describe how I was feeling.”

photo: josh aronson

CAMERA READY Barbin prepares to take pictures on Bid Night, Tuesday, Jan. 15.

Olympic Dreams Wildcats trade in purple for red, white and blue. BY KAT HE RINE DE MP SE Y

I

photo: courtesy of jordan wilimovsky (swimming); courtesy of stephanie holthus (volleyball)

t takes exceptional athleticism to stand out in the Big Ten, but there are Northwestern athletes whose talents extend beyond Division I sports. They’ve been suiting up to compete on a national level.

Northwestern swimmer and Weinberg sophomore Jordan Wilimovsky competed at the FINA World Championships. He snagged 14th place in the 25-kilometer, and was one of two Americans to finish in the top 15.

Wilimovsky, who broke Northwestern’s 1,650-yard freestyle record as a freshman—then broke it again as a sophomore—won two medals at the World Junior Open Water Championships in 2012. He says international competition is shaping him into the swimmer he aspires to be.

“You definitely really just want to make it again and do whatever you can to get back to that level,” Wilimovsky says.

It all starts with making the cut.

For SESP senior Stephanie Holthus, making the U.S. Women’s Junior National Volleyball Team in 2010 out of hundreds of candidates was especially meaningful because she had tried out in past years unsuccessfully.

“I called my mom and I was crying, and she thought I was crying because I got cut,” Holthus says. “I was crying because I made it.”

Holthus remembers the palpable excitement when she played at the 2011 FIVB Women’s Junior World Championship in Peru. The players were “mobbed” by fans, and there were even police escorts, Holthus says.

“Everyone wanted pictures with us. I got a baby thrown at me once,” Holthus says. “Thank goodness I caught it.”

When competing abroad, players must adjust to different competitive styles. Weinberg sophomore and wrestler Jason Tsirtsis, who competed at the FILA Junior World Championships in Bulgaria last August, describes movements of non-U.S. competitors as “more relaxed.”

Eating overseas can be another challenge. Tsirtsis found himself adapting to unappetizing and un-

healthy food—a tricky situation for wrestlers, who are constantly trying to cut weight in order to compete at a lower weight class.

SESP senior and field hockey AllAmerican Tara Puffenberger says a fast food joint was a welcome sight when she traveled abroad with her U-16 team back in high school.

“They stopped at a McDonald’s

and we literally all started crying. We were so happy because we were so hungry. I think I got like four cheeseburgers [and] two to go,” Puffenberger says.

But at the end of the day, international competition is about more than just food or boisterous crowds. It’s about going the distance and making sacrifices for the team.

GOING FOR GOLD Student athletes like Wilimovsky (top) and Holthus (bottom) regularly compete at a national level.

Wilimovsky literally went the distance during his 25-kilometer race in Barcelona. The nearly five-hour event was so long that he and the other swimmers took pit stops to ingest nutrition throughout the race, much like marathon runners.

As a 5-foot-10 athlete, getting into the water with professional swimmers, who are considerably taller, puts Wilimovsky’s endurance and wits to the test, according to Dave Kelsheimer, Wilimovsky’s club coach.

“He’s not going to be able to just muscle his way through things. He’s going to have to be much smarter,” Kelsheimer says.

Holthus persevered through injury at the Junior World Championships in Peru. She played with a previously-sustained stress fracture, and near the end of the tournament became sick, dehydrated and required medical help, but stepped onto the court anyway, according to Rob Browning, her Junior National Team coach.

“She didn’t look like she was sick— she didn’t act like she was sick— even though she was,” says Browning. “She knew that her team needed her and she performed.”

Holthus says improvement requires facing top players, and playing internationally helped prepare for the “beast” that is the Big Ten. Right now, Holthus plays professionally in Puerto Rico and Wilimovsky is training for USA Swimming’s National Team tryouts again. Tsirtsis says he wants to wrestle for an Olympic gold medal one day.

Whether they’re shooting goals, swimming for miles or going for kills on the court, Northwestern athletes with experience on Team USA have something in common: They’ve learned how to strive for ambitious goals and brush off obstacles along the way.

“You can’t be afraid of failure. If you want to pursue the national team or the Olympics I really believe that the dream has to be enough,” Parsley says. “It’s about pursuing what you’re passionate about and you love.”

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 29

QUAD

Living a Legacy Multicultural Greek organizations allow students to carve their own niche on campus. BY M EG A N FU

with 14 members in its Northwestern chapter, was an opportunity to bring a new niche to campus.

“Achieving active membership hasn’t been a huge focus for us because we have been trying to build a foundation for ourselves before we do anything bigger,” Ge says.

“You hear about segregation and the issues your mothers or grandparents went through,” Dent says. “You come to college and see it’s still alive and you’re facing it, too. It becomes something blacks and Latinos bond over. We have to support each other.”

Dent never considered joining an IFC organization because he says he didn’t want to simply fill a quota.

Like Castellanos, Weinberg senior “If I’m being honest, I feel like Leah Jones had no intention of join- I could have gotten into whatever ing a sorority as a freshman. But after house I wanted strictly because of my spending time on campus, Leah had a skin color to fill in a quota, like, ‘Oh, change of heart. he’s black—let’s get him,’” Dent says.

Leah’s mom, cousin, aunt and Former IFC President and SESP grandmother were members of Delta senior John Cowgill says in the four Sigma Theta, making her a legacy, but years he’s been part of IFC, he has ultimately that wasn’t what inspired never heard anyone use the term her to join an NPHC chapter. NPHC “quota” in a recruitment discussion. is a historically African-American or“Although I am confident that no ganization that, at the national level, IFC chapter has any kind of quota was established in response to disensystem in place, the fact that one is franchisement and deep segregation perceived reflects a serious issue,” in the 1930s.

Cowgill says. “The implicit and per“I got to campus and really felt ceived barriers to entry to the IFC that as a black woman, campus life is community are something that IFC is very segregated,” Leah says. “I did not continuously working to remove.” think it was going to be like that at all.”

The most important factor leadLeah isn’t the only one to note ing to Dent’s decision to join NPHC racial segregation at Northwestern. instead of IFC or MGC was the signifiSESP senior Tony Jones, a member of cance it held in his family history: His Alpha Phi Alpha, noticed it too, but mother, stepfather and father belong “was not surprised.” to NPHC organizations.

Tony says segregation is speFor McCormick senior Savannah cifically evident among the various Enders, family legacy in a specific Greek councils and because of this, chapter played a major role in the deone of his chapter’s primary goals has cision to join. been to collaborate with PHA and IFC “Coming into college I didn’t know more often. exactly how I wanted to be involved, “There is definitely a division and but my mom and my grandma and my I’m not sure why,” he says. “I have aunts were all a part of this sorority so not been a part of my fraternity long if I was going to join one it was going enough to see how to be [Alpha Kappa the dynamics of the Alpha].” relationships have Tony, however, is BY THE NUMBERS been in the past, but the first in his family I guess it’s because to go Greek.

32: percentage of underthis school is still “I didn’t have graduates affiliated with pretty segregated.” many family mema fraternity or sorority.

When he arrived bers that attended at NU, SESP sophocollege,” Tony says.

Average Chapter Sizes more and Alpha “I’m trying to set NPHC: 7 IFC: 75 Phi Alpha member the standard for my MGC: 13 PHA: 121 Malik Dent was kids and grandkids, shocked to see such of going to college deep divides along and pursuing your racial, ethnic and dream. Hopefully my cultural lines. son, my grandson will want to be Al“I honestly thought everyone pha men as well.” would be able to hang out with each Tony adds that it would be OK if other and there wouldn’t be any ishis future children joined a chapter sues,” Dent says. besides Alpha Kappa Alpha, because Dent thinks general life experi“at the end of the day,” he says, “all ences and personal beliefs contribute the NPHC fraternities are a brotherto these divisions. hood.”

CELEBRATION This February, the 2012-13 MGC executive board won the Association of Fraternal Leadership & Values MGC Council Award.

S

ize matters.

Out of the 2,766 students in fraternities and sororities at Northwestern, 96 percent belong to a chapter in the Interfraternity Council (IFC) or Panhellenic Association (PHA), according to the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life. The remaining four percent make up Northwestern’s multicultural Greek life.

The average PHA chapter size is 121 members, and 75 for IFC. The average size of a Multicultural Greek Council (MGC) chapter is about 13, and for the National Panhellenic Council, Inc. (NPHC) it’s seven.

Before coming to Northwestern, Weinberg senior John Castellanos described himself as “anti-Greek” and considered fraternity life to be nonessential to the college experience.

However, during his freshman year he began to miss his high school friends, realizing he lacked those relationships at Northwestern.

Then he met the brothers of Omega Delta Phi Fraternity, Inc. Castellanos joined Omega Delta Phi, Inc. in May 2012 and between January 2013 and 2014, served as president of MGC. For Castellanos, his chapter’s size of 11 has had a huge impact on the relationships he made with his brothers.

“You learn everything about each other,” Castellanos says. “They become your closest group of friends and they become your real brothers.”

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MGC adds four new chapters

Once made up of four sororities and one fraternity, MGC has added four new fraternities to its council in the last two years: Sigma Lambda Beta, Alpha Iota Omicron, Pi Alpha Phi and Lambda Upsilon Lambda Fraternity, Inc. Two of the four, Sigma Lambda Beta and Lambda Upsilon Lambda Fraternity, Inc., have reached active member status.

Active membership, the third and final status after interest group and associate, takes one to three years to achieve. The first step in adding new chapter is finding a group committed to starting the organization. With support from its national organization, the group presents to the Northwestern advisory board. If the group can then gain a unanimous approval vote from the MGC executive board and a representative from each existing chapter, it can begin the interest group process.

SESP junior Juan Cabrera got the idea to bring Sigma Lambda Beta, a historically Latino based international fraternity, to Northwestern two years ago with seven other students.

“We thought the eight of us could create a new outlet for incoming and current students, and potentially reconnect with current organizations on campus,” says Cabrera, now the president of Sigma Lambda Beta.

For Weinberg junior Alan Ge, creating Pi Alpha Phi, a historically Asian-American interest fraternity

photo: courtesty of giovanni delgado

NPHC members for life

Inside the Thick Envelope

W

hen Fallon Gallagher began the college application process in mid-October, she was certain she would apply early decision (ED) to Northwestern. The University’s convenient location, hands-on journalism program and academic pedigree drew the high school senior to the early round. On top of that, Gallagher is a legacy.

“The ED aspect made me an even stronger applicant,” she says. “The ED acceptance rate is slightly higher and I had already done everything I could to show NU how serious I was.”

“Slightly higher” is an understatement: For the Class of 2017, Northwestern admitted 32 percent of ED applicants, compared to the 12 percent it accepted for regular decision. If application numbers are any indication, Gallagher isn’t the only one catching on to the early admission edge. After a frenzied season of Common Application submissions, Northwestern’s Class of 2018 broke records for the highest number of ED applications, set a year earlier.

The upward-sloping popularity of early admission isn’t unique to Northwestern. Each record-breaking application cycle—and the resulting press release—adds to the ever-growing college admissions landscape.

Why Generation Y? photo: david zhang

The American population saw a significant spike in its post-World War II Baby Boom generation. In time, these Boomers had children of their own, creating another population spike from 1980 to 1995, dubbed the Millennials generation, or Gen Y. These baby boomlets are the force behind recent college admis-

sions trends. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education found a peak in American high school graduates in 2011. Fittingly, national statistics for the incoming college class of 2011—the same student pool that made up the high school graduate peak—showed a 3.3 percent increase in enrollment at four-year private non-profit colleges, according to the National Student Clearinghouse.

What’s baffling, though, is admissions statistics have swelled beyond population trends. Although high school graduation numbers have peaked, year-by-year application numbers show a whole lot of waxing and not a lot of waning.

“More students are applying to colleges than ever, and they’re applying to more schools per student,” says Jennifer Rucker, guidance counselor at Chicago’s Lincoln Park High School, where about 72 students out of the near 600-student senior class have applied to Northwestern.

“The average used to be six or seven applications per student,” Rucker says. “Those numbers have gone up, and the average is about eight or nine now. Of course, there are always the students who’ll apply to 25.”

Playing the numbers game

When Christopher Watson began his post as Dean of Undergraduate Admissions in September 2007, Northwestern was at a crossroads.

In the previous admissions cycle, the university had joined the Common Application, which now serves 517 institutions in 47 states and six other countries.

“Changing to the Common Application has always been very contro-

In the game of college admissions, the early bird gets the worm. BY LUCY WANG

“If you’re not a recruited athlete, if you’re not a legacy, if you’re not an underrepresented minority, the only trump card you have left at most schools is ED.”

- James Conroy guidance counselor

versial because people make the assumption that the only reason you’re doing it is because you want to increase application numbers and drive down acceptance rates,” he says.

The year after the University switched to the Common App, it received a record number of applications. That record remains unbroken.

The switch has also changed the demographics of the applicant pool.

“The increase comes from international students, lower socioeconomic background students, different races and ethnicities,” Watson says.

“Simply joining the Common Application opened up a whole new cohort.”

“Diversity” has been a touted theme, especially for Northwestern’s Class of 2016 and Class of 2017: University press releases introducing the classes tout each as the most diverse in university history.

Early and binding wins the race

The Common App has transformed college admissions across the board, but NU’s most pronounced changes have occurred in ED. Since 2000, overall applications have doubled, but ED applications have more than tripled. With 2,863

students accepted ED, about 45 percent of the Class of 2018 has already been determined. That’s the highest percentage of any incoming class filled through early admission and more than twice that of 15 years ago.

Across the nation, early admission numbers have also reached historical heights. Brown, Boston University, Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago and Vanderbilt all reported record highs.

Even a Common App server crash in August, which forced 46 schools to postpone their deadlines, didn’t make a dent in these ED numbers.

After over 28 years at New Trier High School in Wilmette, Ill., guidance counselor James Conroy has honed his elevator pitch for ED. “For a top-performing student, if you’re not a recruited athlete, if you’re not a legacy, if you’re not an underrepresented minority, the only trump card you have left at most schools is ED,” Conroy says.

Record-breaking statistics aside, a more practical consideration also weighs on the minds of high school seniors: The earlier they apply, the shorter the wait and the freer their second semesters. Anthony Escobar, who will join his brother, Weinberg freshman Walter Escobar, at Northwestern next year, notes that the early notification of ED is its biggest plus.

“It’s a big relief and now I can breathe again,” Escobar says.

And for now, before the hustle and bustle of Pre-Wildcat Welcome Programs and Wildcat Welcome, before the deluge of summer reading, dorm selecting and summer packing, he’s got some peace of mind.

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Understanding Their Aria

WORKING THE REGISTER Junior Joseph Schuster, who didn’t learn to sight read until college, practices his singing.

For these Wildcats, opera is their forte.

BY O LG A G O N ZALEZ-LATAPI

Joseph Schuster, Junior If you had to explain opera to someone that has never heard anything about it, what would you say?

What I hear most frequently about opera is it’s old and stuffy. This is so wrong. The Metropolitan Opera in New York just did an opera called Two Boys: Two boys meet on the Internet and [it] is not stuffy at all. There are so many hilarious operas where no one commits suicide or kills anyone.

Opera really is for everyone and the situations the characters find themselves in are so timeless.

What other kinds of singing experience do you have?

As someone singing classically now, one of my most seemingly shameful vocal experiences was the four years I spent in high school show choir.

Madison East ENCORE Show Choir.

Youtube us. People here were so confused when I started as a freshman.

I never really learned how to sight read until college because we only sang about 10 songs in a year. College choir was a huge shock, as were ear training classes. I also sang a lot of musical theatre in high school with my private voice teacher, but never sang anything but chorus in community theatre productions.

What is the easiest part of being in the Voice and Opera department?

Making friends! The people in this department are so kind and passionate about what we all do. We tend to be a little cult-like, but I think it’s awesome that I get to have classes with the

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same people for four years. I wouldn’t change my friends for the world.

And the hardest part?

Being told no, or not having good results from an audition. Those can be very damaging because oftentimes, you take it personally. You have to focus on the long game and how to take the criticism constructively.

What do you love most about opera?

I love music because of all the doors it opens to other disciplines. You can learn about music history and how it coincides with world history and art history. You get to learn about sound physics and how resonance explains what you do vocally, as well as how it can enhance what you’re doing.

Then there’s all the text that is set to music, which ties into writing, literature, poetry, and drama. Opera ends up, in my opinion, being the culmination of all these things. Art in the sets and costumes, drama in the text and music, history in explaining why musical decisions are made to make it stylistically appropriate, science to help you project your voice into the performance hall.

Why did you choose Northwestern?

What do you love most about opera?

It is the point where the physical, the mental and the emotional meet. It captures the different elements of humanity and mankind through music, text and artistry.

When I was in the ninth grade, I came to Chicago on a choir trip and visited the school. I was immediately in love with the atmosphere of the campus and was well aware of its renowned music school.

What is the biggest lesson you have received while studying opera?

What is the easiest part of studying voice and opera?

The importance of making yourself vulnerable. The process of singing in front of professors and peers can seem extremely scary because it exposes you and strips you down to your bare self. It was not until I learned to let my guard down and become vulnerable that I was able to truly take in and comprehend what I was being taught.

One of the easier parts is being surrounded by people who you know you share a strong love with.

When did you start singing and why?

Frank Laucerica, Freshman

What do you love most about opera?

When I look back on my life so far, I can see that music has always been a central part of it. As a child, my father always played recordings of classical music around the house, and I would sing along. At seven, I was given my first CD: American soprano Ruth Ann Swenson singing various arias from Verdi’s La Traviata. I immediately fell in love with opera, and decided then and there I wanted to be an opera singer. I started taking voice lessons that very summer. I couldn’t truly comprehend the concepts and meaning behind opera, but I knew it gave me a voice as well as a way to express myself.

If you had to explain opera to someone that has never heard anything about it, what would you say?

Natasha Nassar, Sophomore

A culmination of art, theatre, music and emotion. It is a genre of art that can make you feel as if you are in another world, but still impact your perception on your own world.

When did you start singing and why?

When I joined choir in first grade. I always was a fan of musical movies and my mom suggested I join.

And the hardest part?

The competitive nature of the program, in the way that all the students are so talented that it is easy to be intimidated.

Opera can transport a person into any story, any time period, any world.

It can so effortlessly take someone through a universe of feelings and ways of thinking.

My favorite opera is...

Frank: La Boheme by Giacomo Puccini Natasha: La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi Joseph: The Turn of the Screw

by Benjamin Britten

photo: bryan huebner

F

or many, Bienen’s Voice and Opera department is a mystery, except for the tunes we hear coming out of the Music Administration Building at all hours of the day. Here is a glance into three opera students’ aspirations and everyday lives.

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT Members of Lipstick Theater prepare for their winter quarter production of A Wrinkle in Time.

Ladies First A new Northwestern’s theater group takes back the stage.

B Y ALI Z A A B A R BA N EL

I

n theatre, a discipline where actors mold themselves into characters and embody the words created by literary legends, the stories sometimes offer a skewed view of the diverse demographics that make up society. The stage brings to life fairy tales and historical epics, yet some performances don’t give voices to women. Lipstick Theatre, a Northwestern student group founded this past year, aims to address this inequality.

Lipstick Theatre has introduced works to the Northwestern community that focus on topics like sexuality and gender. Shows this year include Alice in Wonderland, A Wrinkle in Time and The Vagina Monologues.

While Lipstick includes students of both genders, the group is largely female and values shows that are written by female playwrights or ones with strong female characters and substantive themes.

“Lipstick [Theater] is important because it’s giving a voice to women’s issues,” co-president Lauren Stremmel says. “We’re young, still in our very first year on campus, and we’re still small, but we have already begun to make some big waves by staging works that ask questions about femininity and sexuality.”

One of Lipstick Theatre’s boldest moves came last winter in the form of its first student-run, student-produced burlesque show. Declaring, “We are looking for anything and everything, anyone and everyone,” the group solicited dancers of all experience levels. The second annual show will debut during Spring Quarter.

While the sheer novelty of stripping might contribute to the burlesque show’s popularity, participants believe the atmosphere of

acceptance is what made the show a success.

Communication sophomore Michael Fleischer, this year’s burlesque show producer, continues to emphasize the theme of self-celebration, which was characteristic of last winter’s production.

“We strive to help people realize how beautiful they are,” Fleischer

We strive to help people realize how beautiful they are.

We believe everyone is beautiful and that they should feel confident with their body.

—Michael Fleischer

photo: david zhang

says. “We believe everyone is beautiful and that they should feel confident with their body.”

For Medill sophomore Alaura Hernandez, participation in Lipstick Theatre has jumpstarted a burlesque career. Over the summer, Hernandez performed with The Velvet Hearts!, a burlesque troupe in Columbus, Ohio.

This year, Hernandez is returning to the NU Burlesque show as a director and attributes her love affair with burlesque to the nurturing environment Lipstick Theatre offers.

“Right from the start, I knew I found something I loved,” Hernandez says. “Auditions were so open and inviting, and the community was so accepting and loving. I felt I could really express myself around my fellow performers. I grew a lot as a person throughout the whole process.”

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Getting to Know Garrett

We walk by it every day, but what’s actually inside? BY SARAH E HLE N

A

s Northwestern students, we’ve all made the trek to Tech at least once in our student careers, if not every day when you’re a pre-med student.

And during the walk down Sheridan Road, while simultaneously weeping because of the bitter cold and trying to avoid eye contact with that person you only sort of know, you might have noticed a large, cathedral-like structure on the east side of the road.

What is that mysterious stone castle, you ask? It’s Garrett-Evangelical The-

ological Seminary, of course.

Garrett, which has its permanent home here on the Evanston campus, is a graduate school of theology founded in 1853 as the Garrett Biblical Institute.

“The school was founded by a woman—Eliza Garrett. She felt strongly that Methodist clergymen needed to be well educated, not just be religious persons who went around preaching,” says Lallene Rector, current president of Garrett-Evangelical.

With a student body of approximately 400 scholars, Garrett-Evangelical provides for its students as any other institution would, offering a wide variety of classes, degree programs (including a Master of Divinity and Master of Theological Studies), in-school housing and of student activities.

Graduates of Garrett-Evangelical can be found in professions such as pastoral care, counseling, clergy, and social justice work.

Rector, who just began her term in January, serves as the school’s first female president. She now spends her days doing administrative and developmental work and nurturing relationships with the school’s Trustees.

“I like to think that Eliza Garrett would be pleased!” Rector says. “It is a privilege to serve in this role for a school I believe has been and will continue making a positive difference in the world.”

Before taking the presidency, Rector worked as the Associate Professor of Psychology of Religion and Pastoral Psychotherapy, and served as the academic Dean for the past seven years.

Seeing as Garrett-Evangelical stands at the geographical center of Northwestern’s Evanston campus, Rector hopes to continue the strong friendship the school has with NU— more specifically, with president Morton Schapiro.

Garrett-Evangelical and the University strengthens this relationship with a long-standing tradition of a biannual lunch meeting for clergy and local Evanston leaders, co-hosted by the presidents of both schools.

“Our former president established an important relationship with President Schapiro, and I intend to continue that,” Rector says.

The “NWU” Class of 2018

N

orthwestern admitted about 1,000 early decision applicants into the Class of 2018 in December, but if you’re gauging the incoming class purely based on the “Northwestern University Class of 2018” unofficial Facebook group, most of those 1,000 appear to be current Northwestern upperclassmen, Internet trolls and students from Grinnell College.

It’s common for current students to join the incoming class’s Facebook group to answer questions or promote their organizations, but the 2018 group, which numbers roughly 1,050 students, is a different beast.

Since the admissions office mailed early decisions acceptances in December, posts have run the range, not only in topic—from the university’s geographically inaccurate name to the availability of Evanston bars—

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but also in tone and humor.

“Anyone else getting tickets to the Rose Bowl?” says one sarcastic post on Dec. 14 by McCormick freshman Drew Floyd. “Can’t wait to see the Cats finish their undefeated season!”

Throughout the deluge of posts, reactions of actual Class of 2018 students varied significantly, from amusement to disappointment and even confusion. Gabe Leto, an incoming freshman from Chester County, Pa., appreciated the humor.

“I thought the whole thing was pretty funny,” Leto says. “We had to expect it considering the fact that the group had no real form of security. In a situation like that, there’s nothing you can do but sit back, watch, laugh and play along every once and awhile.”

Texas native Jack Du, another incoming student, was less amused.

“I think it’s majorly disrespectful to troll the Northwestern Class of 2018 page,” Du says. “I understand the trolls didn’t have bad intentions and can see why they found it funny, but I think there are some things that are off limits. Most of the trolls were from other universities, and as is always the case, were eager to prey on the prefrosh.”

Du expressed his frustration on the group wall. His Dec. 14 post received 90 likes.

“If you’re fucking tired of trolls please like this post,” Du’s writes. “Can we please have some more respect?

Please let us, the northwestern mighty and proud class of 2018, talk amongst ourselves and get to know the people we’ll be spending the best 4 years of our life with [sic]. Please just have courtesy and think about how you’re tarnishing our school.”

While many of the trolls were current freshmen like Hastings, or members of Sherman Ave, there was also a contingent from other schools, including Wesleyan University, Emerson College and Tufts University. A handful of Grinnell College students have been active in the group as well.

“Does anyone here like memes?” says a Dec. 16 post by Grinnell student Nicolas Knoebber. “I really enjoy them, with some of my favorite being, doge, that cute dog; GoodGuyGreg, and Success kid XD. We should totally share our favorite memes here!!!! [sic].”

The trolling activity died down after Winter Break, but incoming freshmen will surely remember their unique introduction to Northwestern long after they arrive on campus. They may even have learned a thing or two.

photo: aimee hechler

These Facebook trolls don’t even go here. BY GRANT RINDNE R

Gunning for Success Instead of a gap year, these students defended a country. BY DANIE L HE RSH

D

ing Wang couldn’t move.

After hours of intense training— trekking miles on an island just off of Singapore carrying a pack loaded with a tent, survival gear, water, ammunition and a SAR 21 rifle—he wasn’t just tired. He was having a seizure.

And he thought he was going to die. “[I had] a lot of thoughts, like, ‘Have I actually told my parents that I loved them in how many years?’" says the Weinberg sophomore. "They always go, ‘Ding, we love you!’ and I’m always like ‘Yeah, sure, cool.’”

The seizure, which Wang believes was caused by sweating out all of his body’s salts, happened during basic training for the Singaporean military service.

countries. Unlike Israel, only men are conscripted into military service.

Part of their training includes the grueling march Wang experienced, which is followed by setting up camp and digging trenches.

“They start punishing you guys for being too slow,” Wang says. “There’s actually no way to go faster than what you’re doing, but they’ll punish you in any case.”

The punishments included more drills and one of them sent Wang into seizure. He was taken away to get rehydrated and regain full strength.

Weinberg sophomore Chen Ming Cheong also went through the Singaporean military, but on the path to becoming an officer. After the three

and his fellow soldiers, exhausted from being overworked, had to remember everything they had been taught to defend the hill. Halfway through the exercise, however, something didn’t go according to the script.

“It’s monsoon season, it’s a monsoon climate, so there’s a lot of lightning, so our area was struck by lightning,” he says. “There was a tall tree and it struck the tree and it hit my friends around the trees.”

The friends were immediately evacuated to the hospital, but the rest of the platoon continued with the drill without their comrades.

“You have four or five friends in the hospital, wondering what happened to them, how they are feeling,”

them, and then always update and [give] feedback to the squadron at the same time. So I’m like the middleman through which all that information has to pass.”

On his first day, things didn’t go as planned. An Apache helicopter had a dual-engine failure. According to Wang, the emergency was unprecedented.

“Everyone else who [had] handled an emergency was like, ‘Another aircraft has suffered a lightning strike, maybe we need to standby, send people there,’” Wang says. “It's never something like, ‘Something is going down.’ Literally going down. This doesn’t happen.”

The pilots were able to minimize the harm by rotating the helicopter

CONSCRIPTED Weinberg sophomores Ding Wang (left) and Chen Ming Cheong (right) joined the Singaporean army when they turned 18.

photos: priscilla liu

Joining the Singaporean army is mandatory for all male citizens when they reach the age of 18. In order for the small nation to have a significant standing army, all men are required to serve about two years, depending on which branch they enter.

Of about 72,000 members of the military, almost 40,000 of them—57 percent—are conscripted. They go through three months of basic training, then are streamed into the different branches of the military.

When Singapore became independent in 1965, one of its first orders of business was to set up a military.

Officials decided to use Israel as a model and had advisers secretly travel to Singapore to help with training. No one could know, because Singapore did not want to cause a conflict with its neighboring Islamic

months of basic training, he went to Officer Cadet School (OCS), where he trained for another nine months and was promoted to First Lieutenant.

During both basic and OCS training, Cheong pushed his limits physically and mentally, especially during a particularly grueling exercise known as the Centipede Drill, which took place in the sweltering southeast Asian tropical rainforests.

“We had to simulate being a platoon that had to defend a hill,” Cheong says. “Two people had to dig a fire trench … Basically it was just a nonstop digging process. After we dug the trench, I never thought I could do it because it was just nonstop. I didn’t sleep for like 34 hours in a row.”

His superiors then sent another platoon to “assault” the hill. Cheong

Cheong says.

While Singapore was never at war during their tenure, other nations, like South Korea, have 18-year-old conscripts whose futures are less certain.

“I mean sure, [Singapore] might have a tenuous peace agreement,” Wang says. “But if you’re in the Korean army, you can be called up at any time to face North Korea.”

After finishing his training, Wang worked at the Sembawang Air Base, where his two main jobs were airspace planning and coordination and response.

“The airspace zone that we actually have to cover spans from Singapore to Manila” he says. “It’s quite a huge area. Basically what I have to do is get them down and then get them clearance to take off. Then, they go, and I have to keep constant tabs on

in order to keep the rotor spinning by using its momentum. When it crashed, only the tail broke off and the two pilots walked away unscathed.

When both Wang and Cheong finished their two-year tenures, they decided to come to Northwestern, bringing with them all of the life lessons they learned in the military.

“It’s very much this process of teaching you discipline, teaching you time management, just doing the right things even when no one is looking,” Cheong says.

Wang agrees, believing that one of the most important values he learned during his service was putting himself in other people’s shoes.

“You start to empathize, you start to see things through other people’s eyes,” he says. “All that matters is that you’re brothers. Brothers in arms.”

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With mobile payment apps, payback’s a cinch. BY MAT T HE W Z AMPA

F

or those perpetually surprised when their wallets are empty, Venmo takes the cash out of students’ hands. “I use [Venmo] to split the bill when we go out and order bottle service,” says Robert Horn, 23, a recent graduate of American University’s Kogod School of Business. “I guess you would call that ‘ballin’ on a budget.’”

Mobile payment apps like Venmo create a one-click experience to bring consumers, merchants and friends together on one platform.

With Venmo, users enter their debit or credit card number into the app, which generates a “friends” list from the user’s phone contact info or Facebook friends. The user can pay or charge friends for various transactions as long as the friend on the other end approves the charge. It’s simple, easy to use and can be done entirely via smartphone. Students use Venmo for everything from paying friends back for concert tickets to paying for rent.

The mobile payment industry is making its mark. Forrester Research

estimates the industry will add $90 billion in total U.S. spending in 2017.

An app that documents every transaction you make may repurpose rabid spending in theory, but Weinberg senior Graham Horn does not trust Venmo. “I feel I have more control of my spending when I use cash,” says Horn.

David Teitelbaum, who has worked in the alternative payment system industry since the advent of the Internet, identifies Venmo as a convenience, not a control. When it’s convenient to remove cash from your friendships, “you’ll use Venmo,” he says.

“We’re further eroding the use of cash or checks,” says Teitelbaum, 54, a partner at Sidley Austin, LLC. “I know that’s a strange concept for you, but [students] actually wrote checks to each other when we needed to sometimes.”

Applications like Venmo remove the pen and checkbook from friendships. Even with the ease of access, some students still resist digital payments on principle.

“It is hard for me to trust people,” says Medill freshman Katie Ellison. “I don’t think my friends should assume that because they ‘request funds,’ I am going to trust a screen.”

Venmo is a licensed money transmitter in California. “It’s a bank.

Without trust, it wouldn’t exist,” says Ethan Cohen, a freshman in Medill.

Venmo turns friends into moneygrubbers, Horn says.

“It makes debt and owing someone money immediate,” he says.

Horn finds a ‘running tab’ helps friends remain friends. “With Venmo, it’s just mean. ‘Please pay me now’ makes people not have to ask for things. It’s not about getting them back—you’re always going to pay your friends back,” he says.

Venmo may depersonalize the five bucks you owe your roommate, but Teitalbaum says it has a net neutral effect on our budgets.

“I think people that are good at budgeting are not going to lose control or track of their budgets,” says Teitelbaum.

Whatever reservations users may

INSTANT LUNCH MONEY If you don’t have any cash or a credit card at hand, you can easily pay back friends using Venmo.

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It makes debt and owing someone money immediate. With Venmo, it’s just mean ... It’s not about getting them back—you’re always going to pay your friends back.

— Weinberg senior Graham Horn phone, and I never go more than five feet from my phone, then what do I need that Coin card for?” he says.

The mobile wallet space is gaining momentum for start-ups like Stripe Inc., a four-year-old company evaluated at $1.75 billion. Long-standing members of the ‘billion dollar club’ like eBay Inc., the majority shareholder in digital payment forms for some ten years, are already looking at alternative payment systems to their own.

This includes PayPal, which bought Braintree for $800 million in 2013.

“A budgeting impulse is really more about your thought process, how you socialize your spending habits,” says Teitelbaum. If you chronically suffer from ‘empty wallet syndrome’ (read: if you’re just bad at budgeting), a record of transactions is not going to cure a bad habit. Budgets are not about the available technology. They are about long-term, logical decisions.

So what does the market presence of Venmo and Coin tell us? “There is not a clear winner in the mobile wallet space yet,” says Teitelbaum.

photo: chrissy lee

BID Adieu TO IOU

have, Venmo’s growth is hard to deny.

In 2012, Venmo was acquired by payment platform company Braintree for $26.2 million, according to Forbes, and has over 100,000 users.

Despite Venmo’s growing user base, it may face competition from electronic payment devices such as Coin.

Coin, an intermediary between physical cash and mobile apps like Venmo, allows users to sync all their plastic payment forms onto one card.

“Coin will replace your average credit card,” says Robert Horn, a financial analyst at Hilton Worldwide.

Teitelbaum doesn’t necessarily agree.

“You’re going to say, well, why do I even need the one card? If all of my card information is sitting here on my

No-Drone Zone Sorry, Amazon. Evanston’s air space is clear.

B Y AN N E LI

D illustration: priya krishnakumar

rones may be the military’s present and Amazon Prime’s future, but they won’t occupy Evanston airspace anytime soon. Thanks to a moratorium passed by Evanston City Council last May, commercial drones are banned for two years in Evanston in a preemptive effort to combat privacy violations and abuse.

The moratorium made Evanston the third city to ban drones in the U.S. after Illinois became the first state to regulate drones last August.

“Unmanned aerial vehicles were getting ahead of our existing federal and state regulations,” says Jane Grover, alderman of Evanston’s seventh ward. “[Local activists] suggested that [drones] had implications for Evanston, and we should be interested in getting ahead of the issue.”

Grover championed the moratorium to her colleagues, who passed the resolution in a narrow 5-4 vote.

The concerns were brought to her attention by local activists, including Evanston psychotherapist Dickelle Fonda, who hopes to bring awareness to the issue.

“We also wanted people to understand that drones are being manufactured now,” Fonda says. “Drones have the capability to spy on people. They have the potential to be abused. That potential does outweigh the potential for good.”

The potential for abuse includes unlawful surveillance and crowd control. However, the potential for good is important to note, too. Surveillance drones can help find missing persons or provide information and assistance

during weather-related emergencies, according to Commander Jay Parrott of The Evanston Police Department.

For now, the EPD doesn’t need drones, nor does it expect to operate them anytime soon. However, they hope to learn from the example of larger police departments who do use drones before operating the vehicles themselves.

“We’re not going to be one of the

Drones have the capability to spy on people. They have the potential to be abused.

That potential does outweigh the potential for good.

— Evanston psychotherapist Dickelle Fonda

first agencies [to use drones],” Parrott says. “Evanston is a condensed area—only 7.8 square miles. I’m not sure there’s such a huge use for drones in this particular area.”

Garnering support for the moratorium wasn’t as easy as Grover and Fonda had hoped. Opponents argued that the EPD’s progress would be hindered by a moratorium, and that the resolution was preemptive. Grover hypothesizes that the split vote was because it wasn’t among Evanston’s highest priorities.

Fonda suggested that the post9/11 climate has instilled enough fear in civilians that they’re willing to give up certain civil liberties.

“If that’ll keep us safe,” she explains, “That’ll do it.”

Come 2015 when Amazon hopes to launch delivery drones, NU’s mailrooms might need to change. That’s the year when Evanston’s drone ban expires, too. But if you just can’t wait, Barnes & Noble on Sherman Avenue sells the Parrot AR. Drone 2.0 Quadricopter for $299.95.

Your New Shopping

Obsession 522 Davis Street Downtown Evanston Across from Joy Yees’s

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 37

finding a cause worth

dancing for

Every year, Dance Marathon

receives over 75 beneficiary ap-

plications, and will ultimately raise over $1 million toward one of

them. This is how Team

Joseph became that organization. story by Alex Nitkin

photos by Chrissy Lee

Joseph and Marissa Penrod at NUDM Top Chef on Feb. 1.

38 | F A L L 2 0 1 3

Even for late May, it was a notably beautiful morning when Weinberg senior Anna Radoff and SESP senior Josh Parish invited the newly-chosen executive board of Northwestern University Dance Marathon 2014 to take their seats in McCormick Tribune 3-107.

The sprawling, ceiling-high windows filled the room with light from the sun rising over Lake Michigan, waking up anyone still trying to shake off their Saturday morning cobwebs. Looking out the massive windows, you could just make out the students and townies sunbathing and throwing frisbees on South Beach. But for the 22 people around the long U-shaped conference table who were about to whip out their laptops and lock themselves in the room, there’d be no opportunity to enjoy the rare weather.

They would stay here well into the evening, and possibly into the next day, to collectively make the most influential decision of their college careers: which organization, in 10 months time, would receive a check for more than $1.2 million.

The confetti had barely settled over Dance Marathon 2013 when Matt Larsen and Katie Amys, the event’s executive co-chairs, chose Parish and Radoff as their successors. In the months leading up to that year’s 30-hour philanthropic frenzy, while Larsen and Amys were helping their exec team put together the final details of the event, they also began collecting applications for the next year’s beneficiary. When Parish and Radoff officially took the reins in early April, Larsen and Amys handed them hard copies of nearly 80 applications, in duplicate, from prospective beneficiaries for DM 2014. Radoff joked that it was a “suitcase” full of information, but the hundreds upon hundreds of pages—comprising essays, photos, financial statements, letters of recommendation, videos edited onto CDs—probably wouldn’t have fit into one handheld bag.

The pair began by judging the applications separately, grading them based on a common rubric.

Together they would narrow down the applications for a round of phone interviews, and again for another round where representatives of the beneficiaries would come, sometimes by plane, to McTrib for an in-person interview.

Being full-time students with busy schedules, Parish and Radoff both described the experience as mentally and emotionally taxing. At that time Parish was on his SESP practicum, spending his days working at a company in downtown Evanston while devoting his nights to reading applications, in a routine he says got him “more than too tired.” To pile on, while they were shaving applications from one round to the next, they were also interviewing students to fill the 20 positions on their executive board.

By the end of April their executive board was

chosen, and they had narrowed the number of contending beneficiaries into the single digits. It was all leading to that day in McTrib 3-107, when the decision would be out of Parish and Radoff’s hands.

A Big Day Ahead When McCormick junior Monisha Appalaraju stepped into the brightly-lit conference room, she knew only a handful of the 21 people surrounding her. Having been a photographer and member of the technology resources committee for DM 2013, she was now one of two technology co-chairs responsible for running and updating DM’s website.

Appalaraju may have been new to the executive board, but she knew what would be expected of her on that day. She’d been sent copies of three long applications, and she, like everyone else sitting around the table, was told to study them all back and front. Other advice followed: Be ready for a long day. Come prepared to think critically and collaborate. Bring snacks.

“It was really humbling, and kind of terrifying, especially after reading these three amazing applications,” Appalaraju says. “It’s like, I’m a computer science major—what makes me qualified to make a decision like this?”

Appalaraju and the other exec members—with the exception of Parish and Radoff, who would more or less sit back and watch—would spend the day going through each application, envisioning an entire year working with each beneficiary, bringing up points from the perspective of each co-chair and the committee they’d soon be leading. The deliberation wouldn’t end until all 20 members came to a unanimous decision in a heads-down vote.

As they sat down that morning and opened their laptops to get started, returning members of last year’s exec board noticed a familiar application in front of them, titled “Dance for the Kids who Can’t.” At the same meeting one year earlier, which had ended in a decision to pair with Chicago-based Danny Did Foundation, this application had been in the running, too. It came from a small philanthropy started by a suburban mother in Michigan, whose son was battling a fatal but little-known form of muscular dystrophy.

A Mother and her Mission From the time her son was three years old, Marissa Penrod noticed something strange about the way he moved. The youngest of three children, Joseph was sluggish and heavy on his feet. He went up steps two feet at a time, instead of one. He never quite learned how to run. In 2008, right around his fifth birthday, Joseph’s pediatrician suggested that his problem might be a developmental delay. When the doctor made an appointment for them to see a neurologist the next day, Penrod got the sense that her life was about to radically change.

Before the doctor told her the diagnosis, she, like most Americans, had never even heard the name “Duchenne.” When she asked about treat-

ment options, he frowned and gave her grim news.

Caused by a mutation in the distrophin gene, Duchenne muscular dystrophy disrupts the body’s ability to strengthen and rehabilitate muscles over time. Most boys with Duchenne (the disorder is rarely diagnosed in girls) are confined to a wheelchair by age 12. By 18, they’ll need a full-time attendant to help them eat and use the bathroom. Few Duchenne patients live past 25.

“At that moment you just want to stop the clock,” Penrod says. “You want to say somebody made a mistake, and start over.”

Penrod went home and allowed herself one full day to cry, bemoan her fate and wonder why bad things happen to good people. Then she got to work.

“The first thing I did was research everything I could about Duchenne, and all the science behind it,” Penrod says. “I immediately started emailing my whole family and everyone I knew, saying it was all hands on deck.”

Late one night, when Penrod was writing an email to her family asking for support, she absentmindedly signed the message not with her own name, but with “Team Joseph.”

“I realized I’d never be able to change the outcome for Joseph by myself—the only way to make a difference would be to reach out to people, and I knew it would take a team to make it happen,” Penrod says. “When there’s no treatment or cure for most common fatal genetic disease in the world, it means everything is on the table, no stone should be un-turned. That’s the epitome of a team approach.”

Together, Penrod and her newfound cadre of followers found a number of Duchenne research projects in need of funding. They established the Team Joseph Duchenne Research Fund at the University of Michigan, where they connected with a doctor running clinical trials on the possible impact of some FDA-approved drugs on Duchenne.

The team set up a charity golf outing and planned Jammin’ for Joseph, an annual benefit concert in Detroit that partners with musicians and a local country radio station in the name of fighting Duchenne. Penrod co-founded the Duchenne Alliance in 2011, a network of 36 organizations coordinating muscular dystrophy research projects all over the world. By 2010, Team Joseph had achieved 501(c)(3) not-for-profit status and was involved in six different Duchenne research projects, including one in Italy. Her non-stop campaign, she says, was never a matter of choice.

“Eventually it all comes down to my instinct as a mother,” Penrod says. “It’s a feeling like Joseph is standing out in the middle of oncoming traffic, and for the past six years I’ve been running out to try and scoop him up. That’s the only way I can describe it.”

It was in 2012 that one of Team Joseph’s board members, a Northwestern alumnus, suggested that they might be a good candidate for one of the largest student-run philanthropies in the nation.

‘My Kind of Crowd’ It must have been block five or six, some time on the morning of Saturday, March 3, 2012, when NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM |

39

“ Penrod got her first-ever tour of the sweat-filled tent that housed the thousand-or-so students participating in Dance Marathon. That morning Kunal Joshi and Scott Ritter, DM 2012’s executive co-chairs, led a group representing dozens of prospective beneficiaries on a tour of the musty, neonspotted party that would, by the end of that night, raise more than $1.1 million for the B+ Foundation for pediatric cancer research.

“Seeing all that energy and enthusiasm, all I could think was that this was my kind of crowd,” Penrod says. “Our mission has always been to find a cure and have a lot of fun along the way, and this just seemed to go hand-in-hand with that perfectly.”

She didn’t know it at the time, but also present on that tour was Tom Stanton, whose 4-year-old nephew Danny had died less than three years earlier from a little-understood condition called Sudden Unexpected Death from Epilepsy.

“All I could remember thinking was how incredible it all was—like you’re walking into a concert and the band isn’t even there yet, but everyone is so insanely excited,” says Stanton, executive director of the Danny Did Foundation. “Then I remember they played a song—I think it might have been ‘Sandstorm’—and everyone just went nuts.”

Stanton had applied for the Danny Did Foundation to be the DM 2012 beneficiary, but it had been ruled out by Ritter and Joshi at some point in the narrowing-down process. Two months later, their successors, Larsen and Amys, presented their new executive board with four final beneficiary options 40 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

“

Right: Members of NUDM’s executive board meet in Norris. Left: Anna Raddoff and Josh Parrish listen to Marissa Penrod speak to the DM committees.

This is such a crippling disease— some of these kids can barely even move. If any of them gets up on stage, all you have to do is listen to two words from them, and it’s like a kick in the ass. You’ll be like, ‘Let’s go.’

for DM 2013, including Danny Did and Team Joseph.

Going into their selection process, each year’s new pair of executive co-chairs stresses a slightly different set of criteria for what kind of beneficiary they choose. One criterion Amys and Larsen decided to focus on was the strength of each organization’s potential “liaison.” The liaison, appointed by the beneficiary every year, is responsible for representing the organization to DM and attending each week’s meeting of the executive board.

“We were really looking for a good liaison from the beneficiary to DM—someone who would always keep us updated and be bringing up new ways for us to help their organization,” Amys says.

Another major criterion for Amys and Larsen in a beneficiary was its ability to participate in DM’s “hero program,” which connects individual dancing teams with families affected by the beneficiary’s cause. What they were searching for, Amys says, was “a base of people who can connect with dancers and let them know how they’re helping.”

After two full days of thoughtful questions, passionate appeals, raised voices, mixed emotions and emergency voting procedures—separated by a quick break to see A&O’s production of Dr. Dog and Anamanaguchi—Larsen and Amys’ executive board voted in unanimous support for Danny Did as the 2013 beneficiary.

Jas Baziuk, then a Communication sophomore and just beginning her first of two years as productions co-chair, was one of the last people arguing for Team Joseph before it was eliminated.

“Yeah, I think I was the last to let down … I was really taken by Joseph’s story, and I liked the idea of dancing for someone who’s right there in front of you, instead of for someone who’s passed away, in terms of motivating people,” Baziuk says. “But eventually everyone else helped me understand that, for that year, Danny Did was the right beneficiary for us—and Marissa and Team Joseph still had some work to do in their application.”

In the deliberation process for DM 2013, Danny Did had hit all of Amys and Larsen’s major criteria: Mike Stanton, Danny’s father, was an Evanston Police officer at the time, giving the organization a strong tie to the city. Rather than appointing a liaison to DM, Tom Stanton would sit in on every executive board meeting and be directly involved during each step of the 10-month process. Danny Did had built a large network of epilepsy-affected families who could be “heroes” for participating teams.

When Larsen and Amys told Penrod that Team Joseph hadn’t been selected as the 2013 beneficiary, she asked for advice on how to improve her application the next year and got to work immediately.

“I think in that first application we had held back a bit,” Penrod says. “But once we understood how much time and effort [the DM executive board] put into reading every word of every app, I knew we had an open door the second time around to say everything that we wanted to say, to really pull out all the stops.”

The Final Countdown

By April 2013, the “suitcase” of beneficiary applications Larsen and Amys had handed off to Parish and Radoff included an appeal from Penrod that really did, in every way, “pull out all the stops.” It comprised personal stories from Duchenne-affected families, detailed financial records from the organization’s six-year history, glowing letters of recommendation from business partners and accounts of scientific breakthroughs from medical professionals. All in all, it was 83 pages long.

Penrod’s application for Team Joseph to be the 2014 Dance Marathon beneficiary stood out immediately to Parish and Radoff, but they learned the true depth of her character the first time they spoke over the phone. Penrod’s voice may be calm and nurturing, smoothed out by a white-bread Midwestern accent, but everything she says about Duchenne carries an undercurrent of extreme urgency. In particular, Parish remembered being struck by her rallying cry that the current generation of boys with Duchenne “will either be the last to die, or the first to survive.”

“The first time we heard her talk, she was just so eloquent,” Parish says. “You get the sense that she’s more than just a mom with a sick kid—she’s concerned for everyone, she’s taking the entire world of Duchenne and putting it on her shoulders.”

The urgency inherent in Team Joseph, and its overall message, Parish says, made it an ideal organization for motivating dancers through the 30hour trial of Dance Marathon.

“This is such a crippling disease—some of these kids can barely even move,” Parish says. “If any of them gets up on stage, all you have to do is listen to two words from them, and it’s like a kick in the ass.

You’ll be like, ‘Let’s go.’”

Parish and Radoff also noted the improvements Penrod had made in Team Joseph’s application since the previous year: Where the first app hadn’t named a specific liaison to DM, this one put forward Peter Ulrich, who had participated in a mentoring program at Northwestern’s Sheil Catholic Center, and included nearly a dozen letters of recommendation vouching for his ability to work with students. And in the year between applications, the Duchenne Alliance had grown its international reach and Team Joseph had widely expanded its network of local families who could serve as “heroes.”

Penrod, in turn, also noted the professionalism of the executive co-chairs and the way they led their 20-member board. Radoff, chipper and outgoing but firm and direct, constantly keeps her team focused. Parish, terse and soft-spoken, never seems to smile unless he’s surrounded by other exec members. Whenever he has something to say, the rest of the room quiets down and listens.

By the time deliberation day in late May 2013 rolled around, when Parish and Radoff collected their new board into McTrib 3-107, the co-chairs were confident that Team Joseph would be an excellent beneficiary. But then, they felt the same way about the other two options they were presenting to the board.

In the first couple hours of the discussion, the group went around the table presenting their individual criteria and impressions of each application.

The finance co-chairs discussed each group’s fiscal records, and how each one doled out its money. The Northwestern and community relations co-chairs brought up how closely-tied each organization was to Evanston and the University. Productions, whose co-chairs were responsible for drawing up the 30hour weekend-of schedule, considered whether each group would be able to provide someone to speak and motivate dancers during each block.

Technology discussed their web presence. Public relations, their national reputation and reach.

“After we’d spent all this time making the decisions on our own, it was so cool to suddenly hear everyone bring up all these points—some of them, we hadn’t even considered,” Parish says. “It’s sort of a sense of relief that it’s out of your hands, and it’s nice to hear fresh perspectives on it. It was validating.”

After each chairman was done presenting, people would raise their hands to bring up points, and Parish and Radoff would call on them. But after a few hours, people became comfortable enough to simply speak up when they had something to say.

Younger members like Appalaraju, after sitting and listening for a long time, built the confidence to start bringing up their own points. By the afternoon people were furiously g-chatting one another, trying to silently sway those across the table while verbal discussion happened at the same time.

“Sometimes in a situation where you have 20 outspoken people in a room, it can be easy for the loudest person there to take precedent,” Appalaraju says. “So I think [the co-chairs] encourage us to gchat each other as a way of having more people get their views out there.”

By all accounts, this year’s deliberation was a shorter, smoother, more resolute process than the year prior. Five people in the room had been on the previous year’s executive board—Baziuk, public relations co-chair David Harris and finance co-chair John Park, in addition to Parish and Radoff, had all been through this process before—and were able to bring wisdom and clarity to the discussion. Instead of taking two days to deliberate, the group made its decision in one 10-hour go. Even though Radoff and Parish weren’t allowed to argue in favor of one organization or another, they made more of an effort to step in and focus the conversation when it became circular.

But that doesn’t mean the discussion wasn’t a long, painstaking, gruelingly emotional process.

“We’re told from the very beginning that we have to be totally logical about it, and to try to divorce our emotions, but at the same time, you have to be passionate about your choice and not let up unless you’re truly convinced,” Baziuk says. Representatives from the final organizations were on call to answer questions all day, and more than once the group dialed up Marissa and the other two reps for clarifications. “You’re spending all day listening to these emotional appeals, and hearing their real desire to be the beneficiary definitely has an emotional impact—there’s a feeling of guilt for the

organizations you don’t choose, like you’re letting them down.”

But for Harris, it’s important to remember that the process was about comparing organizations, not their causes.

“At the end of the day you can’t say that one cause is more important than another, because they’re all important—you run into trouble when you ‘oh, this disease is fatal, so it’s more worthy of our attention than another,’” Harris says. “You have to look at it in a sense of which organization best aligns with our goals, which one we could most help, which one would work the best with DM.” As the day dragged on all the members of the group, one by one, started to make up their minds.

Most chairmen found themselves convinced during the discussion, but for Weinberg junior Ander Aretakis, a dancer relations co-chair, his moment of clarity came during a 10-minute break in the discussion.

“I felt like I had personal connections with all these organizations, and it was hard to imagine saying no to any of them,” Aretakis says. “But during that break I stepped back and thought, and I prayed, and I started to think about it more objectively— and I came back being pretty confident.”

The sun had been down for hours by the time the board came to its final vote. Remembering that moment, when she saw 20 hands shoot up in air, Radoff beamed at her co-chair.

“Everyone’s heads were down, and there was this moment where Josh and I made eye contact, and it just felt like it had come full circle, back to when we were the only ones in the process,” Radoff says. “And I looked at him, and he just gave his little shrug—” “I knew you wanted to be the one to say it,” Parish flashed her one of his rare smiles. “I knew you wanted to say it.”

So, she said it.

“Team Joseph will be the beneficiary of Dance Marathon 2014.”

Some people around the room bear-hugged their co-chairs. Others broke out into delirious laughter. More than a few, including Aretakis, couldn’t help but cry.

“We were all so physically and mentally fatigued from talking all day, but all I can remember feeling at that moment was energized,” Appalaraju says.

“It’s like the reality was hitting—like, these are the 22 people I’ll be working with all year, and this is our purpose. Suddenly, we’re all bound by this cause.”

Soon they’d have to go about telling the good news to Penrod and her team, and the bad news to two finalists who weren’t chosen, which would be an unconventional and emotional process all its own. Baziuk and her productions team would have to begin preparing a beneficiary reveal video to announce their decision. The marketing team would need to start making solicitations for food vendors.

As they thought about all the steps that came next, it became clear to the group that the time for emotions was over. One by one, the 22-person team wiped away their tears, took a deep breath and filed out of McTrib 3-107. Dance Marathon was only 286 days away, and they had work to do.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 41

From T he Outside Look ing In One writer confronts her various identities and their place in the Northwestern community.

Yunita Ong Photos by David Zhang & Jenny Starrs

O

n May 12, 2013, in the cool darkness of a sound-recording room, I decide I hate my voice.

I’m reading a narration into my voice recorder, the last bit of audio to record before I edit it into a clip for journalism class.

Playing back the recordings, I hear my voice exposed in its full, naked glory. My tongue forgets to roll its ‘r’s, my ‘th’s’ are deflated and my flat and unsophisticated Singaporean accent grates on my nerves. I sound like a parody of the professional newscasters we’ve been taught to emulate.

My voice is a puzzle piece that doesn’t fit.

As I give up and rewrite the whole script to exclude my narration, the realization hits me.

I am a puzzle piece that doesn’t fit.

— Back home in Singapore, my high school teacher once praised me for my public speaking skills, and as a theater kid, I’d always loved the reverberations my voice would make in an empty auditorium during rehearsal, the rhythms and rhymes when I read a poem aloud in class.

Here in the U.S., my voice instantly flags me as different to an audience with whom I’m supposed to communicate effectively as a journalist. It happens when I speak up to reach out to a stranger, to make a new friend, to just say “hi.”

It makes me wish I were different from who I really am, a foreign-born,

42 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

third generation Singaporean Chinese who grew up in a humid Southeast Asian urban jungle, a foreign-born who spent many an afternoon as a child poring over the great American and British classics, who fluidly switched between speaking and writing English and Mandarin Chinese in school, who ate fish and chips and burgers but also loved dumplings and fried rice. Still, even with my student visa tucked in my drawer, there’s always something lost in translation between Singapore and Evanston, always something reminding me I’m an outsider.

— Usually, those reminders are subtle. Sometimes I’ll be listening in on conversations filled with terms of endearment, celebrity gossip or even units of measurement—terms I have to surreptitiously Google. Or it’s those moments when, upon hearing my accent, people instantly ask me where I’m from.

But sometimes, they come as a slap in the face. Once, someone told me he’d figured out what he called a “social hierarchy” of Asians based on how well they dressed. He said he could tell Asians apart because Asian-Americans were the most fashionable, while international students from China—and Singaporeans, he added, when I challenged him to place me in his system—were at the bottom of the pile for their frumpy clothes and awkwardness.

Another time, I overheard a group of people making fun of a Beijingborn international student for her accent, enthusiasm in class and cheap clothes. I wondered what they thought of me.

People tell me to “just be myself” and not worry about what others think.

I know my most notable character traits are my strong work ethic, my fiery ambition, my fierce passion for what I put my mind to. Now at Northwestern, I wonder how people perceive me. I wonder why, on occasion, they wrinkle their noses in disapproval when they see me wildly annotate a poem with my thoughts and ideas. I wonder if they know I apply for committees and leadership positions just because I like being involved and busy.

To them, am I just one example of the hardworking Asian stereotype?

Am I allowed to be the usual geeky literature fan I always was without people attributing it to my “Asian-ness?”

It’s so much harder to figure out what makes me unique, what personality traits I can be proud of, when there are parts of me that people have demarcated as typical of some stereotype.

I don’t want to be ashamed of myself. But what can I be proud of?

— In the spring of 2012, a group of Northwestern student leaders started the Asian NU Project (ANUP) to answer that question about identity for themselves.

Photograph by DAVID ZHANG

It is May 24, 2012 and the atmosphere at the Northwestern campus is charged. About 200 students are marching up and down Sheridan Road, chanting for Asian pride and solidarity. High above their heads are signs emblazoned with phrases like, “I support the Asian community” and “Proud to be Asian.”

This march is a culmination of ANUP’s bi-weekly discussions and workshops in May, a nod to AsianAmerican and Pacific Islander Month.

ANUP aimed to bolster unity and pride among Asian-American students about their identities. Although they targeted mostly Asian-Americans in their advertising, international students and students of other minority ethnicities also attended to share stories about their experiences as minorities.

Two weeks before the rally, ANUP also hosted a dinner attended by 150 students and administration members including President Morton Schapiro. The discussion of the night revolved around the question, “Why do all the Asians sit together?”

Yunita Ong Photograph by DAVID ZHANG

became a hot-button issue on campus. An open ASG-held forum on the issue attracted nearly 200 students.

To add fuel to the fire, on the evening of May 8, 2012, two then-seniors in Weinberg Sasijaree Rianterawongs and Priyanka Seshadri were at the outdoor tennis courts by Colfax Street when a man threw eggs and an open water bottle at them and shouted, “Fuck you, Asians.”

ANUP was not started as a reaction to these events, but they were alive in the minds of its participants.

— Looking back, Weinberg junior MJ Kim says that as a freshman, being an ANUP rally organizer was his greatest learning moment in college.

“ANUP provided a safe space where we could all discuss our identities,” he says. “We could talk about our lives, share our stories and become friends.”

Kim grew up in South Korea before moving to Marshfield, Wis., for high school. Living in a majority-white town meant that Kim had to quickly assimilate into American culture.

ashamed about it.”

Through sharing his experiences and listening to others at ANUP events, Kim says he learned to be proud of who he was, but he also realized the problems within the Asian and Asian-American communities and stereotypes about Asians continue to persist at Northwestern.

He also learned the Asian-American community was segmented along fault lines, with people of some ethnicities preferring to hang out with those of the same background.

“There were deep, clear borders visible to all,” he notes. “There was a need to unite the Asian community with the Northwestern community, and unite the separate groups within the community as well.”

— For Weinberg junior Rex Tai, participation in ANUP his freshman year showed him the immense diversity of experiences within the Asian-American community.

Attending high school in Kansas, he found himself in good company as one of 150 Asian students among

remember walking 10, “Ithen 20 steps ahead

of my parents when they came to the United States with me during Wildcat Welcome, wishing they would not talk so loudly in their broken English about craving fried rice.

— On the night of April 21, 2012, the Northwestern Ski Team hosted a party now seared into the collective Northwestern memory as the “Racist Olympics.” About 50 students dressed in offensive mock-ups of several cultures: headdresses and war calls for Native Americans, white tops and black pants to symbolize the “South Africans” and the country’s apartheid regime.

Photos and social media posts spread like wildfire and the incident

44 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

of shame, and share with them your sense of pride,” he says.

Given the ongoing tension surrounding the ethnicity-related incidents on campus in 2012, Tai says reactions from the student body toward ANUP were mixed. There were some who stood in solidarity. There were many who were apathetic.

And then there were also those who opposed ANUP, Tai says, because they thought having students talk so openly about their ethnicity would only make their minority status more prominent, adding fire to the existing tension.

“But we felt we just couldn’t not talk about it,” Tai says.

ANUP petered out before Fall Quarter 2012, right as I entered Northwestern as a freshman. Many in the core organizing group had graduated and felt the group had accomplished what it had set out to do that year. Without a tangible project or direction, it was hard to reorganize in the new academic year, Kim explains.

— Out of 451 international student

”

Although he felt close to his classmates by graduation, he also realized along the way that displaying his ethnicity on his sleeve could attract attention for the wrong reasons.

For his first high school homecoming, he dressed in hanbok—a vibrantly colored Korean dress worn during traditional festivals and celebrations—and found himself sticking out amid a sea of dresses and blazers.

“I thought it’d be great to share my culture with everyone,” Kim says.

“I got teased a bit for it, and felt pretty

a student population of 1,600. He considered himself proud of his identity—he listened to K-Pop, watched anime and ate East Asian food.

At Northwestern, he realized that not everyone grew up with a similar sense of pride toward their identities, but he soon learned the merit of simply listening to the personal accounts of their struggles.

“Even if you don’t feel the shame that other people do, by being part of the community, you can support those who do struggle with issues

MJ Kim Photograph by JENNY STARRS undergraduates enrolled in Northwestern during my freshman year, 302 hailed from South Korea, China and Singapore. One in five students in my class identify as Asian-American. Both ASG presidents during my Northwestern career—the incumbent, Ani Ajith, and predecessor, Victor Shao identify as AsianAmerican.

Yet, I still felt like a fish out of water. In the absence of a safe space where I could share my experiences, I struggled.

It was hard to know who to turn to when I was told I spoke English well for an international student, when people told me to my face that they didn’t expect me to know the meaning of certain words just because I was Asian.

I didn’t know if the feelings of alienation, shame and confusion toward my identity were normal.

I always felt like I was sitting on the margins watching an elaborate football game where I was expected to know the rules. I was always figuring out my next game plan to blend in.

Michelle Ki Photograph by JENNY STARRS

ing in a chatter of their home languages. I stepped aside, slightly out of the line, just to make it clear to an invisible audience that I was different.

Every time incidents like these happened, I felt guilty and confused about my own actions.

But still, I hesitated to raise my hand to read a poem in class. I avoided mentioning my hometown during start-of-quarter class introductions. I joked about people who are “fresh off the boat” (FOB).

I stopped being honest with myself about who I really was.

immigrants who have historically faced systemic barriers as they tried to convert the professional accreditations they obtained at home for employment in the United States.

As a high schooler, Ki struggled with a sense of shame toward her parents, heightened by feelings of socioeconomic and ethnic disparity.

“I used to be embarrassed that parents owned a beauty supply store while my friends’ parents worked as doctors and lawyers,” she says.

But in that sociology class, Ki found a way to place herself and her

“It’s harder to speak

out and share your experiences, to ignore that racehorse heartbeat, that dry throat, to tell someone else, ‘I felt that way too.’

— So in this murky game, I started playing dirty.

I realized it was much easier to pretend not to be different than to admit who I really was. I internalized my sense of alienation and shame, but with a cruel twist.

I remember walking 10, then 20 steps ahead of my parents when they came to the United States with me during Wildcat Welcome, wishing they wouldn’t talk so loudly in their broken English about craving fried rice.

When they visited me again in the middle of Fall Quarter, they brought me a treat from home. My mother had cooked my favorite dish: Indonesian fried chicken with her special chili sauce and coconut rice. They had figured a way to store it carefully in a vacuum-sealed bag and flown it halfway across the world for me. Yet, all I remember was wishing they’d kept it—kept themselves—out of sight.

I remember standing at the Norris Wildcat Wok station in line with other Asians I didn’t know. They were speak-

transformed his Northwestern experience and how he viewed his race and ethnicity.

And then I realized. By speaking out about our differences, we make it easier for ourselves and easier for those around us to come closer to understanding who we truly are. We learn from one another about what living in a multiethnic, multicultural society means and how we can treat each other with more respect in our daily lives.

We learn we’re not alone, and that there are threads of similarities linking

”

— I didn’t realize there were different ways of dealing with the pain of being an outsider, that I could speak out and defy social expectations dictating who I was supposed to be.

SESP senior Michelle Ki did. Her family moved from South Korea to Memphis, Tenn., when she was eight years old in 1999, and then to a primarily white suburb in St. Louis, Mo, in 2001. In the U.S., she found that many people expect her to translate for her parents even though they speak conversational English.

“When I was with my parents, people would look to me to speak for the family,” she says. “I’d force people to talk to my parents and stop ignoring the fact that they’re clearly there.”

Then in her Introduction to Social Inequality class Fall Quarter of her freshman year, Ki discovered how she could put her experiences in a broader perspective. She learned about immigration and realized that her parents, South Korean computer science majors, were just among many

experiences within a greater historical narrative.

“For the first time, I found the vocabulary to express the thoughts I had always had as a 1.5 generation Korean living in a white suburban environment,” she says. “The thoughts and struggles I had were suddenly validated.”

I used to think it was easier to keep silent about the hurt and confusion.

It’s harder to speak out and share your experiences, to ignore that racehorse heartbeat, that dry throat, to tell someone else, “I felt that way too.”

I can’t pinpoint what made me realize I had to see things differently.

Perhaps it was the sad confession from my high school best friend this summer, that in college on the East Coast she, too, wished people didn’t label her as a FOB. Perhaps it was the inexplicable excitement rushing through my veins when I met a Thai-American Northwestern alumnus who described how his Asian Pacific American Coalition (APAC) presidency and on-campus activism

Rex Tai Photograph by JENNY STARRS our experiences. We discover ourselves within other people. We turn our differences into pillars of strength.

There is a tiny spark within each of us that could turn into a fire of passion, of introspection about ourselves and who we are, if we let those flames grow. Those firestarters can be engaging in discussions with each other about your identity, taking a class about your ethnicity or someone else’s. It can be unlearning the behaviors of silently othering people who are different from you.

For one and a half years in my Northwestern career, I’ve kept silent about this struggle when it needs to be spoken aloud. Four months ago, I decided I had to start something.

I reached out to MJ, Michelle, Rex and countless others. I researched on the Internet. I filled notebooks and Word documents of interview transcripts, doodles, notes detailing my reflections on my identity.

And then, I wrote this story.

Out of Sight, Never Out of Mind Fifteen years after the murder of Northwestern basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong, his legacy still echoes throughout the community.

By GIDEON RESNICK

E

very summer, they think about Ricky Byrdsong.

Each Father’s Day, thousands of runners gather in Evanston for the Ricky Byrdsong Memorial Race Against Hate. This year marks the 15th anniversary of the event started by Byrdsong’s widow, Sherialyn Byrdsong, after her husband was shot and killed in a hate crime near their home in Skokie. The money raised from the event benefits the Ricky Byrdsong Foundation and the YWCA of Evanston, an organization dedicated to eliminating racism and empowering women.

“It really is a gratifying feeling knowing the race has a legacy that is continuing,” Sherialyn says.

Photograph by CHRISSY LEE

“I thought he was a person of dignity and grace. It’s not easy to be fired from your job. He understood that these things happen in collegiate athletics.”

- Henry Bienen

photos: courtesy of dewey hentges (byrdsong); chrissy lee (street sign)

Before the race begins, Sherialyn steps up to the microphone to address the thousands of participants in the event she created.

“Normally, I just try to make a connection between what Ricky stood for as a person and why the race is important and that it continues to have relevance because unfortunately, hate crimes continue to happen every day,” Sherialyn says. “So people come to the race for a lot of different reasons.

Some come just because they are runners and walkers. Others come because they remember Ricky, they remember the events of that weekend and it’s a way for them to commemorate that and renew their commitment to turn hate into love.”

Trimmy Stamell, the events and grants manager at the YWCA of Evanston, is already planning this year’s race. Her organization took over planning the race in 2009 when Sherialyn moved back to Atlanta with her daughter Kelley. Stamell anticipates a larger draw than the 5,300 participants who attended last June. The race’s goals have broadened to combat hatred in all forms.

“It’s not the most effective money-maker,” Stamell says. “But, it is a fundraiser. It’s a wonderful messaging tool for us. It allows us to speak to the issues that really are embodied in the message of this race.”

The course begins at Long Field at Sheridan Road and Lincoln Street and winds its way through Northwestern’s campus, prompting some students to get involved in the yearly tradition. The race is a reminder of the legacy of its namesake, a bittersweet celebration of the values of the Byrdsong family. It represents the story of the Byrdsongs over the last fifteen years, an emergence from tragedy into proud remembrance, a transition from horrific shock to muted understanding, an annual eulogy for a life taken too soon.

Ricky’s Murder

“I was just fucking horrified,” Ricky Byrdsong Jr. says.

The now 23-year-old Missouri State University student went for a walk with his father and sister Kelley on the night of July 2, 1999 near their home in Skokie.

Byrdsong, the first African-American basketball coach at Northwest-

ern, came home to spend time with his kids as he always did after work, seamlessly transitioning from the pressures of his professional life to his role as the father of three children, Ricky Jr., Kelley and Sabrina.

“He was just my dad,” Ricky Jr. says. “He didn’t really talk about work at home. He was just focused on raising us and having fun with us. It wasn’t ever really about the job for him.”

Ricky Jr. says his parents valued school and church, ensuring that they went as a family every Sunday. Other times, he would go to Bulls games with his dad or play at the Northwestern gym. His older sister Kelley made it a weekly tradition to shoot hoops with her dad every week after church.

On July 2, Kelley was playing basketball at her neighbor’s house when Byrdsong wanted to go on one of his nightly walks in the neighborhood around the Skokie-Evanston border near their house. According to Kelley, he had first asked Sherialyn to join him but she needed to run an errand, so Ricky Jr. and Kelley came along instead.

Around the same time, Anya Cordell and her husband had taken sandwiches to eat at the nearby Central Park. Cordell lived on the Byrdsongs’ street but, at that point, had never met the family before. During their picnic dinner, the Cordells recall hearing what sounded like fireworks from local kids pre-emptively striking for the upcoming holiday.

Right by his father’s side, Ricky Jr. heard gunshots, then saw his dad start to go limp and fall.

“I just went to the nearest house next to me,” Ricky Jr. says. “I called the police and watched my dad from inside the house in total shock. It seemed like it took forever for the ambulance to get there.”

“It was very scary,” Kelley says. “I had never had that kind of encounter with guns or violence. I didn’t realize what was going on until my dad was yelling, ‘Help, help.’ I rode my bike back home. My sister was in the house and I told her to call the police.

I started crying and she called the police. It was just terror.”

Upon returning home from her errand, Sherialyn saw her oldest daughter Sabrina running down the street.

“She was the one who—when I got out the car—told me that Ricky had been shot,” Sherialyn says.

Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, then 21 years old, shot Ricky Byrdsong on the sidewalk at the corner of Hamlin Avenue and Foster Street in front of his two children. Smith was a member of the Creativity Movement, a whitesupremacist group classified under the Neo-Nazi label. He had shot and wounded nine Orthodox Jews in Rogers Park before driving his blue Ford Taurus to Skokie. After he shot Byrdsong, Smith went on to wound an African-American minister in Decatur and to kill a Korean doctoral student in Bloomington. Smith took his own life during a police chase days later.

Byrdsong died from gunshot wounds in the hospital just hours after the shooting “No 8-year-old was supposed to see something like that,” Ricky Jr. says.

“I just remember being numb,” Sherialyn says. “It seems like the world stands still even though you keep moving. It’s just hard really for your mind to comprehend that. It’s definitely an unforgettable moment.”

Byrdsong’s Legacy

Ricky Byrdsong was the head coach of Northwestern’s basketball team from 1993 until 1997. On the court, Byrdsong had a mixed reputation, struggling to pull wins together for the team and known for a particular day when he let emotions get the best of him.

On February 7, 1994, Northwestern was facing Minnesota away, trying desperately to avoid their eighth consecutive loss. In the midst of impending defeat, Byrdsong grew so frustrated that he marched to the opposite end of the bench and isolated himself from the other coaches. He grew increasingly upset with the way the Wildcats were playing and he walked onto the court to make complaints to the referees numerous times.

Byrdsong refused to join the huddle with the players and decided to turn management of the team over to one of his assistant coaches, Paul Swanson. He then walked into the crowd and took a seat in the stands

until an usher requested that he move.

“He had told me before that game to make sure that I was listening to the game because he was planning to do something,” Sherialyn says. “He didn’t tell me what he was going to do.”

Sherialyn described Ricky as a risk-taker and says the incident was a coordinated plan to motivate his struggling team.

It was an isolated incident indicative of Byrdsong’s growing frustration with the organization. Aside from his role as Northwestern’s first AfricanAmerican basketball coach, Byrdsong’s impact extends beyond the confines of the game.

In January 1995, during Byrdsong’s tenure with the basketball team, Henry Bienen took office as the new University president. He got to know Byrdsong as a coach, father and friend.

“Our team was really not

ticipate in community service and reach out to underprivileged children, according to the 1999 story in The Daily. He would often lead tours for grade school children around the corporation’s office. In 1998, he organized 750 Aon employees to participate in a company fundraiser walk for pediatric diabetes research.

Aon’s founder and retired chairman Pat Ryan, who hired Byrdsong after he got fired from the Northwestern basketball coach position, spoke at the First Presbyterian Church memorial service, honoring the man’s values and inspiring ideals.

“Forget the court, forget the playing field,” Ryan had said, according to an August 1999 story in the Chicago Tribune. “You were an impact player in life.”

Healing as a Community

The day after his tragic murder, the Cordells opened their home to begin a neighborhood discussion addressing how everyone could cope with the recent events.

“We sat and we talked about what had happened,” Anya Cordell says. “It was totally shocking for this neighborhood.”

She says the conversation in her living room brought all sorts of different people together that wouldn’t ordinarily have spent time together. The following day, as the media began to swarm their street, Cordell finally met Sherialyn. The two of them discussed their plans, and Byrdsong says she planned on walking in the upcoming July 4 parade. Cordell assured her she would walk with her. There was a moment of silence before the normally jubilant affair began.

Then Cordell decided to start the walks. The nightly walks began at 8 p.m. and anyone in the neighborhood could join.

“It created this opportunity for people who wouldn’t normally connect to connect in a deeper way,” Cordell says. In the summer and fall of that year, two other hate-crime shootings in Los Angeles prompted more residents to participate, with attendance on some nights swelling to about 100.

The group would traverse the very sidewalks where Byrdsong was shot, discussing their feelings and holding silent vigils for the man they lost.

“It was a way to connect with other people who were also in shock, also grieving, also angry,” Sherialyn says.

The walks were emotionally challenging for everyone involved but showed the collective spirit that emerged in the face of tragedy.

“I used to go on those with my buddies,” Ricky Jr. says. “I remember.

I went on those walks. They were kind of sad.”

Ricky Jr. says it was hard to initially join the neighborhood in its collective mourning for his father, but he acknowledges the walks were healthy for everyone involved.

“I thought it was necessary for everyone to come together and wake up, which unfortunately was at the expense of my dad,” Ricky Jr. says.

Currently studying communications at Missouri State, Ricky Jr. appreciates that his father’s legacy is kept alive, even if it means that he has to think about the night he died.

“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve kind of become more numb to the pain,” Ricky Jr. says. “But yeah, I think about it every day. Each year, it’s less painful I guess.”

Kelley, now 24, works as a youth coach and coordinator at the Atlantabased educational program Create Your Dreams. She says she has coped with the loss of her father through deep faith. Ricky Jr. had left for college at Missouri State, while Sabrina was finishing her undergraduate degree in film and television at Clark Atlanta University.

“I don’t think about the shooting every day,” Kelley says. “I think about my dad every day. I can go a month without thinking about the actual shooting. But I don’t think there’s a day that goes by when I don’t think of my dad. I don’t get sad about it anymore. Eventually, you can use it to help people.”

Kelley says she feels bad for

Smith, the man responsible for taking her father’s life.

“My heart breaks for him too,” Kelley says. “It’s like, what made him get to the point where he could take another life? I feel like if my dad maybe had a conversation with Benjamin Smith, he could have changed his life.”

It’s with this same grace that Sherialyn speaks to the crowd at the annual Race Against Hate, which Kelley, Ricky Jr. and Sabrina attend every year.

“It’s awesome, because it grows every year and it keeps the legacy alive,” Ricky Jr. says. “It’s just good to see everybody having a good time and smiling. I think it’s awesome.”

This year’s race is a week before graduation, which Stamell hopes will encourage the Northwestern community to get more involved in the yearly Father’s Day tradition. Runners like Lisa Stein, a 47-year-old writer in Evanston, attend each year to join the community in their collective remembrance. Stein remembers the first time she ran in the Race Against Hate.

“For me, I felt like the atmosphere was very emotional,” Stein says. “When his wife spoke, everyone around me had tears in their eyes.

And it just felt very important and it felt like the right thing to do.”

Until June comes around again, Kelley and her family keep their father in their thoughts, ensuring the legacy of a man tragically murdered never fades as the years go on.

“Each time there’s an opportunity to share the experience, I think it’s a good thing,” Kelley says. “I appreciate the legacy that my dad left and it just reminds me that we can always ask: What legacy we are leaving?”

Sherialyn lives by an adage she learned from her husband, a turn of phrase that guides her on a daily basis to love and to spread healing.

“His legacy is always about turning around the bad to get the greater good,” Sherialyn says. “He used to say that, ‘life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you respond to it.’ And I think the 10 percent is the fact that Ricky was killed but the 90 percent is just the unifying impact it has had on our community.”

The Byrdsongs are continuing to respond, pounding the pavement in a perpetual race against hate.

“I thought it was necessary for everyone to come together and wake up, which unfortunately was at the expense of my dad.”

-Ricky Byrdsong, Jr. 48 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

photo: courtesy of ricky byrdsong, jr

a strong team to say the least,” Bienen says. During the 1994-95 season, the Wildcats went 5-22. In the following two years, they were 7-20 and 7-22.

In 1995, Byrdsong asked to extend his contract, but Bienen refused and released him from the position.

“I thought he was a person of dignity and grace,” Bienen says. “It’s not easy to be fired from your job. He understood that these things happen in collegiate athletics.”

Byrdsong took the firing as an opportunity to reprioritize his time, Sherialyn says.

“He just looked at it as a sign and a time to do some other things that he had always wanted to do, which coaching basketball had prevented him from doing,” Sherialyn says. “He had definitely wanted to be in the community more and do more things for high school kids, middle school kids. It really just kind of freed him up to pursue other dreams that he had.”

After Byrdsong was fired, Bienen says the two remained friends. The former president thinks his legacy was equally, or more so, defined by his engagement in the community.

Players and students alike remember his dedication and optimism.

“I don’t know how much he influenced me on the court,” former Northwestern basketball player Nate Pomeday (SoC ‘99) told the Daily Northwestern in a story published a week after the murder. “But he was the first person besides my father to teach me to respect everyone I met.

He was always putting everything he said into practice.”

After leaving his job at Northwestern, Byrdsong became vice president of affairs at Chicago-based insurance company Aon, where he developed programs for the corporation to par-

ONE LAST THING.

PLUS:

CHECKOUT CSO DORM DIARIES pg.50 | BUSTING THE BURN BOOK pg.51 | BOOK BUGS pg.51 | IF NORTHWESTERN WERE HOGWARTS pg.52 | A DAY IN THE LIFE OF TOWNES PRESCOTT IV, FRAT KING pg.53 | THE REAL CAMPUS TOUR pg.54

CSOs secure all our dorms, making sure we are safe every night. They see us walk into the dorm triumphantly after acing a test or a ‘Cats athletic victory. But they also see us at our worst, late in the night, saying and doing things we may not remember.

Photograph by CHRISSY LEE

EXTRA

CSO Dorm

DIARIES T

These gatekeepers see everything. BY CA ROLINE LE VY hey witness you in your darkest hours. From 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. every night, Campus Security Officers (CSOs) see NU come alive. Here are some of the most bizarre moments they’ve witnessed throughout the years.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle In Ayers several years ago, a male resident walked downstairs, dressed as none other than a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. The boy explained to the CSO, “It’s my twentieth birthday. This is my last year as a teenager, so I’m dressed as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.” The boy went out for the night and while he was gone, the CSO found out the police were looking for a boy dressed up in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costume who threatened a pizza delivery man.

Eventually, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle returned to his lair, recounting his evening. “Well, my friend,” the CSO interrupted, “I have news for you. The police are looking for you.” Shocked, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle explained he didn’t make any threats—he simply asked the man for a slice of pizza. The CSO advised the resident to return to his room and, if the police came, to just explain what happened. “But first,” he said, “Get out of that costume.”

Dillo day Wardrobe Malfunction Once upon a Dillo Day, a CSO was sitting at the entrance of McCulloch when a group of female residents entered the building. The CSO was reading when the CA beside him said, “Why is your bra out?” He looked up from his book, but didn’t notice anything. The CA repeated the question. The CSO glanced up again and noticed that the girl had indeed removed a red bra from beneath her white tank top and was holding it in her hand. She had her reasons: “I got spilled on.”

Dillo Deer Day At about 3 a.m. one Dillo Day, a man from Facilities Management walked into Plex and asked the CSO for a box and blanket, explaining he had found a fawn outside. Earlier in the day, her mother had been killed, and the man was trying to protect the orphan. The Plex lobby then became a temporary baby deer shelter.

The One-Liner 50 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

QUICK COMMUNICATION From late-night debauchery to orphaned animals, dorm CSOs see it all.

On the first day of Wildcat Welcome one year, a girl in BobbMcCulloch came downstairs at about 4 a.m. in a black dress, waving around a wad of cash.

“I have money. Where can I get food?” she asked. Taken aback, he suggested going to Burger King, but she wasn’t having it. “I don’t know where that is!” The CSO showed her a map, explaining the glamorous restaurant was about a mile away. When the girl exclaimed she definitely couldn’t walk that far, the CSO offered some of his food.

The girl refused, saying, “No, I want real food. I want chips,” which prompted the CSO to hold up his bag of Sun Chips. He said she could take it to her room, but she sat down in front of his desk, opened the bag and said, “We’re going to talk and be best friends.”

Puzzled, she finally asked, “Am I in McCulloch?” The CSO said she was in Bobb, which is connected to McCulloch so she could access her room without going outside. The girl went upstairs, but after a few minutes, the CSO heard the distinctive sound of Sun Chips crunching from the stairwell.

When asked if she needed help, she replied, “I’m lost. I don’t know how to get to my room.”

She knew her floor, but not the room number. The CSO patiently walked her up the stairs, saying to look for the door with her name on it.

One time a boy, who didn’t live in the building, entered McCulloch, shouting, “WHO WANTS TO SMOKE SOME HERB?”

photo: chrissy lee, illustrations: priya krishnakumar

Wildcat Welcome Delirium

Busting the Burn Book

Could Aaron Samuels even go here?

BY N O R T H B Y N O RTHWESTERN STA FF

E

vanston or, “the only cool city north of Chicago” (thanks, Urban Dictionary) has forever been memorialized in chick flick history, thanks to 2004’s instant classic Mean Girls.

But how realistic is Mean Girls’ portrayal of the North Shore? We factchecked every Evanston reference in the classic film to find out.

REALISM SCALE:

3 = Pretty possible. Grool.

2 = Sort of possible.

1 = Pretty impossible. Like the possibility of “fetch” happening.

The Plastics shop at Old Orchard

when “the animals are in heat.” At the real Old Orchard, such a fountain does exist—outside, just between the Talbots Woman and Clarks Shoes— so Cady’s watering hole ruminations aren’t too far-fetched.

Rating: 2 CAPTION LEADIN Aaron Samuels becomes a Dummy text here.

WildcatThis is the caption.

The person in this At the end of the movie,Maybe Aaron attends photo is great.

Northwestern after agraduating it’s not even person. from North Shore High. help NU’s ThisHe is could a radio!

College Prowler dudes ranking, right ladies? Not so fast. Desperate to start a conversation with Aaron, Cady asks for his help in calculus class, wherein he reveals that he thinks factorials and summations are the same thing.

Wrong. So wrong.

Later, hoping to expose Regina’s affair with Shane Oman, Cady, Janice and Damian trick Aaron into going to the auditorium projection room for

swim practice. If Aaron can’t distinguish his factorials from his summations and thinks swim team practice could take place in a tiny storage space, we’re not convinced he’d make the cut.

Rating: 1

The North Shore doesn’t offer much in the way of wild animals other than the occasional skunk. It’s a safe place, where tiny animals can’t rot your body from the inside out.

Unless, of course, you’re a book.

Here’s the problem libraries face: The older the book, the more likely the binding is made of natural substances, like hide, animal glue or starch. Certain insects like silverfish, psocids (known as booklice) and dermestids (you know their relatives as flesh-eating beetles) find these materials delicious. Left to their own devices, they’ll devour old book bindings and pages.

For Northwestern, which maintains important collections of books, this is an unwelcome option.

Maintaining and preserving book collections has only recently gotten easier. Until the 20th century, doing so meant keeping books in a cool, dry place and hoping for the best. Now, the library brings an arsenal of modern tools to fight pests.

The primary tool of IPM is a small

white triangle of paper called a bumble trap. It’s non-lethal, so as not to harm students or books. It lets preservation librarians figure out what animals are eating. These traps are left at strategic locations throughout the library, where most will hopefully trap nothing. If insects have managed to scuttle their way into the library, then they’ll go under a microscope and be identified—“the fun part,” Risseeuw says.

Preservation makes recommendations to Facilities Management about how to adjust the temperature or humidity, and the library hums along.

Of course, not everything is quite so simple. Though most pests can be repelled by keeping the area cool and dry, some are harder to repel. Students are a grubby lot who tend to eat where they aren’t allowed (“I’ll look in the trash and see edamame and think, you know, that’s not an appropriate library food,” Risseeuw says).

Once, a piece of Ghanaian art intended for the Africana collection was found to have wood-boring beetles inside that were eating away at the innards of the

Headline Here tktktktk Please Put Something Director Mark Waters tweaked Skokie’s Westfield Old Orchard Mall into a standard indoor shopping complex, complete with a fountain that reminds Cady of African watering holes

Book Bugs The library is an unlikely home for Northwestern’s pests. B Y S A M N II RO

K illustration: priya krishnakumar

atie Risseeuw pulls out an ancient German book from its specially made protective sheath. It’s a sad little book, the sort of thing you find in a dead relative’s basement.

“You can see it here,” she says, pointing to a series of ant farm-like tunnels running through the binding. “They ate through the hide cover and kept boring through.” A preservation librarian, Risseeuw is in charge of the University Library’s Integrated Pest Management (IPM) system. It’s a fancy way to refer to one of the library’s most basic purposes: keeping the books safe from d e s t r u c t i ve forces.

Gretchen gets diarrhea in the downtown Barnes & Noble Remember when Gretchen had irritable bowels in the Barnes & Noble bathroom and Karen told everyone about it? Yep, we have that Barnes & Noble and it’s right in the middle of downtown. Even though nothing is actually filmed in the store, the Barnes & Noble on Sherman Avenue does have a spacious restroom in which to take care of any diarrhea emergencies.

Rating: 3

Shirley likes coconut.

And Andrew Garfield.

AndSpring Matt Damon.

The Fling King and Queen each win two gift certificates to Walker Bros Elected by a popular student vote and enthroned with a plastic crown and tiara during the annual spring dance, the Spring Fling King and Queen automatically become heads of the student activities committee and receive two gift certificates to Walker Bros.

Original Pancake House. Although Walker Bros. is in neighboring Wilmette and only gives out gift cards— not gift certificates, as the movie suggests—it’s definitely possible these could have been given out as prizes.

Walker Bros. gift cards never expire and can be loaded with up to $250.

Rating: 3 Want more Mean Girls? For the rest of our fact-check, visit northbynorthwestern.com/library

painting. A painting, of course, can’t be rebound the way a book can, so librarians were forced to take the more drastic measure of freezing the painting.

Not all pests can be dealt with as swiftly. When psocids have eaten through the binding or flesh-eating beetles have wrecked a cover, a book worth preserving must be whisked away to the preservation lab. Tucked away in the Main Library basement, the lab contains the sort of tools necessary to make old books new again.

A corner of shelves in the Preservation Department is devoted to books that have gotten too worn down to circulate. Most of them have indentations on their spines, where the binding has worn away to reveal string and paste, caused by students pulling books off the shelves by their tops.

When asked if students are the library’s biggest threat, Risseeuw is quick to rebut.

“It’s good. They’re using books.

That’s why we’re here.” She pauses.

“But also, yes.”

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 51

CHECKOUT

If Northwestern Were Hogwarts H

AlohoMorty! BY ORKO MANNA ogwarts is real. It just goes by a different name these days: Northwestern.

All things considered, the two schools share more in common than just the Gothic architecture of Deering Library. Take a look at what makes our beloved similar to the school of our dreams.

THE SORTING HAT

Hogwarts has four houses. Northwestern has six undergraduate scools. Never fear, math is not needed here.

Bravery and nerve. What’s more brave than taking on the Dark Lord?

Majoring in philosophy, that’s what.

Weinberg students possess the stones needed to commit to whatever goal they choose, which takes the most bravery of all (because art history? Really?).

Ravenclaw: McCormick

Intelligent and focused. The engineering students take some of the most challenging course loads on campus, so it’s not surprising McCormick would be the house that prizes learning, wisdom and intellect above all else.

THE PROFESSORS

We know and love all (well, at least most) of the faculty and staff at Hogwarts and the same could be said for the faculty and staff here at Northwestern. But who is who?

Dumbledore: Morton Schapiro

The white-haired leaders of their respective institutions both have their own sense of style: Morty rocks the purple button-downs, and Dumbledore kills it in his half-moon spectacles.

Hooch: Pat Fitzgerald

Sports. Madame Hooch teaches students how to fly on broomsticks. Fitz, however, doesn’t teach any academic courses—but I wish he would teach us how to win more games.

Pomfrey: anyone at Searle In an ideal world.

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McGonagall: Renee Engeln

These two are strong female professors. Everyone loves them, and both are down-to-earth and truly in touch with the student body (literally for psychology professor Engeln because

Snape: Gary Morson

Hogwarts students fear Snape, but he’s actually extremely helpful. Similarly, students fear Russian literature professor Morson because he’s a philosophical genius. Also, Snape and Dumbledore often seem to butt heads, and Morty and Morson teach a class together in which they argue and even fist fight a little.

Hufflepuff: SESP, SoC, Bienen

Hard work and fair play. You think your problem set is hard? Try learning interpretive dance numbers, mastering an instrument or teaching algebra to squirmy adolescents. They have their shit together and no one else can do what they do.

Slytherin: Medill

Ambitious and cunning. Medill students are intense, very much like the Slytherins of Hogwarts. Journalists do whatever it takes to get the facts.

Other students cringe in fright when a Medill kid approaches them for an interview, much like Hogwarts students fear the Slytherins.

FROM CASTLE TO CAMPUS

Hogwarts is beautiful 24/7, 365 days of the year. Northwestern is beautiful when it’s not snowing or freezing cold or terrible. But what places do both schools share?

Chamber of Secrets: Pancoe

Great Hall: Alice Millar Chapel

Dungeons: Tech

Hogwarts Express: the El

Hogsmeade: Evanston

Quidditch Pitch: Ryan Field

“Wait … what’s Pancoe?” Direct quote from anyone ever. What’s inside? Einstein’s.

It’s pretty self-explanatory.

All the delicious food.

Both are aesthetically pleasing and hard to miss.

Except the El is dirtier and scarier.

Duh.

illustration by steph shapiro

Gryffindor: Weinberg

someone for doing what’s expected of them. Write that down.

Other things for you to write down: 1. My name—fucking remember it.

2. Never let someone inferior tell you anything—it’s not worth hearing be cause you’re better than him.

3. Be huge, in all facets of the word.

4. Use dope-ass words like “facets” so the weak-minded in your presence can’t keep up.

5. Always play the game. Always play to win.

A Day in the Life of Townes Prescott IV, Frat King Thanks, pledge. B Y TO WN ES PRESCO TT I V

I

photo credit: priscilla liu

wake up, kick off my Ohio State bed covers and drink the protein shake waiting on my nightstand. Thanks, pledge.

When I take a shower, I use Axe, because of course I do, and you bet your ass I wear the letters—for every king a crown, bitch. It’s cloudy but I wear the aviators, because even in winter there needs to be a barrier between me and my inferiors.

I step outside. If I were in a movie, you’d hear gangsta rap as I walk down Sheridan (N.W.A., because you know I don’t give a fuck). Oh, wait, you think I’m going to class? Hilarious, brah. I’m going to SPAC. Beneath the frat-tee is another ripped-up frat-tee that I work out in.

It’s low-cut, high-cut and sleeveless because my pecs, tris, bis, delts, abs, traps, lats, cats, hats and bats all need to breathe when they’re getting huge.

Not that they aren’t huge already. Just when they’re getting huger. Because I’m really huge.

When I’m done with the daily pump, I drink protein shake number two (thanks, pledge) and head to Norbucks

because some chick wants to buy me coffee. I order the second-most expensive thing because I have to prove I have standards but also that I’m not a fucking asshole. She asks me if she can pay, and since I’m a gentleman, I allow it.

Gotta give the people what they want, brah.

I dump the baggage at Norris and head to Blomquist. It’s time for my intramural basketball game. My team is called All the King’s Men, and to give you an idea of my play style, picture the Miami Heat but take away all the scrubs. Just like in life, I’m the number one seed. Before warm-ups I walk through the cardio area so all the sorority babes can confirm I’m there. They follow me like a flock of foxy sheep, because missing a chance to see me play basketball is like missing a chance to see Jesus Christ play basketball—in both cases, you’re bound to see a fucking miracle.

We win thanks to my “Give Me the Ball” game plan. Foolproof.

I don’t eat lunch because that’s what people do when they’re too mentally weak to wait for dinner. Instead,

I pound down shake number three.

Thanks, pledge. Time to go to the house.

If you’ve never been in my frat house, picture Leo’s swank-ass pad in The Wolf of Wall Street with all the chicks and babes and shit. If you haven’t seen that movie, quit being a

They follow me like a flock of foxy sheep, because missing a chance to see me play basketball is like missing a chance to see Jesus Christ play basketball—in both cases, you’re bound to see a fucking miracle. bitch and picture it anyway. I’m not here to make comparisons for you. I turn on Eastbound and Down (so frat) and call a pledge. He comes and kneels in front of me so I can put my feet up. I don’t say thank you, because you shouldn’t thank

I have a mixer tonight. To prepare, I do nothing, obviously. I check my phone, and underneath the missed calls from Pat Fitzgerald, Chris Collins and Morty Schapiro (Pretenders think they can come up in my shit? False.) is the usual slew of texts from all the top-tier babeage I’ll see tonight. I respond to exactly none. They’ll show up just on the faint possibility that I’m there.

I tell the pledge to go upstairs to check on the beer. Serving warm brewskis at one of my mixers is like serving warm brewskis at a mixer for Jesus Christ—in both cases, we’ll tell you to go fuck yourself.

The beer is nice and cold, so I try one. Fucking perfect. The scrubs who buy the beer usually go for Bud Light or Pabst Blue Ribbon, but as soon as it crosses my threshold, it might as well be the elixir of life. Beer tastes better in my house—my aura of high standards can have that effect. You’ll see what I mean when the girls come over.

I assume the throne. In my basement, the throne faces the entire party, and I always keep one or two pledges by my side to make beer runs or lay claim to a pong table. When I claim a table, they hustle over and set it in front of me so I can shoot from my throne.

My current beer pong record is 524-1.

The one loss was to Jimmy “The Master” Sanderson. He is now deactivated.

Girls can approach me—for a fee, naturally. It’s a constant reminder that interaction with me is not a right, it’s a privilege. If they’re lucky (and hot), I’ll let them kiss my frat ring. If they’re really lucky (and really hot), they can sit on the throne with me. No pictures allowed.

After the night’s conquest, I turn in. Under my Ohio State bed covers, I look out the window and down onto all that I rule. Every night, it’s the same final thought before I crash—it’s pretty damn good to be King.

— As told to Tyler Daswick

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 53

EXTRA

For the full map, visit northbynorthwestern.com/library

The Real Campus Tour

North Beach

Our friends at Sherman Ave give us an honest look at campus.

B Y S H E R M AN AVE

Patten Gym

AWKWARD EYE CONTACT AVENUE

BAR NIGHT LOADING DOCK The third-nicest gym at Northwestern’s Evanston campus.

Blomquist

THE ESTROGYM Welcome to Lululemon Laboratories!

DOUCHEBAG’S DELIGHT Here be merpeople!

SPAC

RESOLUTIONS GRAVEYARD Self-Gratifiers and Self-Congratulators, together at last.

Garrett

THE ONE THAT ISN’T GARNETT Garnettis a street, Garrett is both a street and a theological seminary.

Kellogg

JOLLY RANCHER JOINT Just read through this real quick, sign your name at the bottom and you’ll be paid after you complete the study.

Lakefill

INSTAGRAM NATIONAL PARK Look at Lake Michigan! It’s so pretty.

Isn’t it great? Cool.

Let’s go inside. It’s fucking freezing.

Shakespeare Garden Plex

WHY? JUST WHY? Riot-proof never felt so brutally devoid of communal interaction!

TONGUING TERRACE Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou OH MY GOD is someone getting a beej over on that bench?

Fisk

MINIMUM WAGE BREEDING GROUNDS Glory Glory Hole-lelujah!

The Rock

Clock Tower

LOSSINGTON MONUMENT Feel free to urinate on me as you walk home drunk from BK.

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Lake Michigan

INDIANA SMOG SIGHTSEEING CAPITAL OF THE NORTHERN SUBURBS Yeah, jump on in! It’s nice and warm. I promise.

HAHA LOL JK HAVE FUN WITH HYPOTHERMIA.

illustrations: chrissy lee

DWAYNE JOHNSON Like a rock.

Trade in the snow for the sun this Spring Break.

It’s just an

away.

Premium shuttle service to and from O’Hare and Midway. Book now!

www.nuairhop.com

MEDILL

“

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Journalism • Media • Integrated Marketing Communications

The Medill Undergraduate IMC certificate has been so much more than a piece of paper to me. My professors who were industry leaders, not only taught me the fundamentals of marketing and communications that I use every day, but also inspired my passion for what I hope to achieve in my career.”

Kimberly Lee (BSJ13, IMC-Cert13) WeChat US Marketing Communications Specialist at Tencent

Medill offers a five-credit IMC certificate program for undergraduates. Students develop skills for understanding and analyzing consumers in traditional markets and evolving digital communities and networks. Students must apply to be accepted to the certificate program and complete the prerequisites.

For more information and to apply: http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/ experience/imc/certificate/index.html