Political polarization and the case of gun control

Opinion PAGE 5 • MONDAY, MARCH 19, 2018 TECHNICIAN Political polarization and the case of gun control

It is no secret that we live in a politically polarized time in the United States. While this approach is both exciting to be a part of and very effective at generating votes, it is not so good at getting things done. Students across the country walked out of their classrooms last week to demonstrate their opposition to the lack of action that their respective governments have taken on helping ensure school safety. Everyone wants school safety. Yet, when negotiations and ideas hit the table about how to make this happen, we end up with toxic arguments, name-calling and rights groups like the National Rifle Association being thrown under the bus.

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The Second Amendment is exactly the reason why we cannot enact sweeping policies as other countries have. Most gun control advocates fail to provide support against the fact that the right to bear arms is written into the supreme law of the land. They turn to name-calling, labeling a rights group like the NRA from anything between an insensitive group of gun-toting Americans who care nothing about school shooting to a pseudowhite supremacy group. The right wants schools to be safe too.

It is no better on the other side. Part of the main pushback that Second Amendment supporters give to the notion of gun control is concern about a tyrannical government. The basis of the Second Amendment was from the oppression that Britain exacted on the colonies by restricting weaponry and posting soldiers in the streets. People on the right today fear that if our government were ever to go that far, the first thing they would do is take away the weapons from the people. So they turn to name-calling, labeling gun control advocates as tyrannical Marxists who want to turn America into a socialist wasteland. The left wants schools to be safe too.

The issue of gun control is not an easy one. Although there are some weapons that civilians have no business needing or wanting, like M60s, RPGs and grenade launchers, the constitution is sacred, and the Second Amendment is broad. The problem also is not going away quietly. The people of this country are keeping it front and center, even though it has been a month since the shooting in Florida.

In a step in the right direction, President Trump has taken action on certain weapon modifications like bump stocks, announcing, “I signed a memo directing the attorney general to propose regulations that ban all devices that turn legal weapons into machine guns,” while also pushing for better responsiveness from law enforcement agencies and more thorough background checks. While his propositions face some opposition, it seems that Trump is taking as neutral ground as possible in order to make positive change happen in the short term.

In Florida, a bill was passed to raise the minimum age for buying a weapon to 21, among other limitations. The NRA filed a lawsuit hours later to block the measure, one that will likely succeed. The right to bear arms can be restricted for minors in the same way as they are restricted from voting, but citizens between the ages of 18 and 21 are not minors. Even if that part of the measure fails, it still contributes to the conversation on how we can increase school safety without infringing on the rights of the people.

The discussion has already led stores like Walmart choosing to not sell guns to people under 21, a decision that any business has the right to make. This is an important piece to note because progress does not have to be imposed from the national government. Businesses can make changes too, and so can school districts and the states. It may be that the solution to this problem can be found by trying every option and seeing which works best.

But the bottom line is this: something

must be done. When attempts to move forward are blocked and bombarded with insults, shutting down dialogue, the result is inaction. Whatever pleasure people get from taking part in a negatively charged and heavily polarized poConnor Fraley litical system is not worth the sludge that our legislatures and executives have to dredge through to make progress on an Correspondent issue that literally everyone agrees on. It’s infuriating. In Federalist Paper No. 1, Alexander Hamilton calls upon the citizens of the country to not demonize their political opposition. He denounces “that intolerant spirit which has, at all times characterized political parties” and calls for moderation in political discourse. Like school safety, Hamilton is someone everyone can agree with. His claims were foundational to how he wanted his readers to change their approach to the incredibly divisive political discourse that deciding upon a new constitution represented in that time. I encourage you to embrace his message, and do your part in making the political process a more respectable and productive one by informing yourself about the issues instead of ignoring them, by treating your opposition as other human beings instead of heartless monsters and by taking part in the timeless American tradition of arguing — not against your opponents, but against their ideas.

For a prospective employer, you are a piece of paper: your resume

It is the job hunting time of the year, whether for full-time or part-time positions. I have full faith in the education that our university imparts and the skill set of the Wolfpack, but there is a great deal of competition in industry. You are often only judged at first glance by the quality of your resume, whether you apply online or you attend a career fair. While you may get a chance to interact with the recruiters from a company in the fair, do not assume that interaction to be an interview itself.

Your resume, dazzling as it may be, is just one in a pile of resumes. This implies that out of the huge number of job applicants, a very small percentage ever get interview calls based on this interaction. This is primarily because a lot of students are applying for jobs, which makes it difficult for an individual to remember names and profiles.

I had the opportunity to have dinner with a family as a part of a cross-cultural interaction program. The person whose house I was invited to was a part of the recruiting committee of Lenovo. He told me that a recruiter does not read a resume for more than 10 seconds, owing to the

huge number of applications. This means that if you wish to apply for a job, you must highlight your skills properly, or else the recruiters will lose interest in you immediately. The resume should be a clear and concise document Paritosh of your skills and projects in which you Gaiwak used those skills. Staff Columnist A good approach to build a resume is

Opinion

TECHNICIAN

PAGE 6 • MONDAY, MARCH 19, 2018

We can do better than GroupMe

OTHER SERVICES OFFER IMPROVEMENTS ON USER EXPERIENCE

Sometime during the first semester of my first year in college, many of my classes were starting to assign group assignments. We all, as college students, are well aware of the fact that group assignments and projects can get a little exasperating, since looking for a time period where around four to five individuals are available all at once is a tough job. Of course, to keep in touch with one another, a group chat is a necessity.

As I was getting started with the first team project of the semester, I was required to install GroupMe, to surrender to the majority of all of my group members who were using it. Sure, I could have used text messaging on my own device to GroupMe-chat with my teammates, but it is definitely easier when everyone is on the same platform.

I was surprised that most people I have met in the U.S. preferred GroupMe to so many other solid apps that exist in the store, and that offer both private and group messaging. GroupMe is a messaging app that mainly focuses on the group messaging aspect of texting. Since texting plans are often relatively cheap and unlimited, the user audience in the U.S. isn’t quite as driven by high pricing, compared to international markets where plans are expensive.

This diminishes the motivation to use any other private messaging apps that may provide cost-reducing benefits, since GroupMe provides easy group messaging. However, there are certain features that GroupMe doesn’t support that makes it incompetent in comparison to its competition.

There is no way of accessing the phone number of a group member in case you need to skip the messaging and give them a call in case of an emergency, like a fast-approaching deadline. Though it is an attempt to preserve the privacy of the individual, one can always choose to block an unwanted person who has their contact information through their service provider.

Personally, I have been using WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, for the past four years, and so tend to prefer this app the most. It allows you to view the phone numbers of your contacts and vice versa. Luckily, I haven’t encountered any breaches in privacy because of this; in fact, it has only been more convenient.

Speaking of privacy, GroupMe doesn’t provide end-to-end encryption, which is a technique that uses cryptographic keys to protect content from unauthorized eyes. This ensures that nobody except for the sender and the recipient can view or mess with the content — not the internet service provider nor the application service provider.

As someone who highly values privacy and security, GroupMe would not be the path I’d pick, if it weren’t for the majority of my classmates, with whom I was and will be working. WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal are excellent alternatives that provide endto-end content encryption. Another thing about GroupMe that seems tedious is that you don’t have the option of searching for specific keywords to look for a particular message in the event that you need to look something up. You are not even able to save or bookmark a text to view later.

A few weeks ago, I had to scroll back through two months to look for a mes-

sage in a group chat in which a member had posted her new phone number. Since I needed to call her immediately and could not wait for a text conversation, I needed her phone number — of course, this could have been entirely avoided had Shivani Shirolkar GroupMe just allowed me to view her new number through the app. My scrolling would have been reduced Staff Columnist only if enough members had “liked” that particular message in order for it to be classified as “popular,” or most liked. WhatsApp and Telegram are apps that let you avoid this problem by providing a search bar. It’s true that GroupMe doesn’t require users to log in through a SIM card, unlike WhatsApp and Telegram. However, Facebook Messenger operates in the same way, while offering a better user experience. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger support more languages than GroupMe does, which is important on a college campus, where diversity is at its peak; NC State has students from all over the world. Most students in college are bound to have a Facebook account anyway, so using Facebook Messenger doesn’t take much of an effort. Collectively switching to a single alternative that’s far better than GroupMe would prove to be useful for all college students still struggling with group assignments.

“However, there are certain features that GroupMe doesn’t support that makes it incompetent in comparison to its competition.”

Opinion

TECHNICIAN

PAGE 7 • MONDAY, MARCH 19, 2018

RESUME

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to mention your skills immediately after your name and contact details, rather than later on in the document. This ensures that anyone who reads the document gets an idea of your skill set immediately and may proceed if your skills match their requirements. Analysis of the skill set of an applicant is the primary filter applied by recruiters. If your skill set matches their requirements, you will easily cross the first screening of the resumes, and will probably land an interview.

The second main section in a typical resume contains the projects. Proper description of projects, including the specific skills and tools used and your contribution, is essential to make your candidacy stronger and appealing to the recruiters.

A resume should also be job specific. You cannot apply to a data scientist’s job on the profile of a communication engineer. Students especially need to keep this in mind. We often think that highlighting all our skills and projects is a good approach to designing a resume. Tempting as it may be, this approach has multiple disadvantages. It shows a lack of focus on the part of an individual and a student may end up skipping relevant projects in a bid to include major projects from different streams.

I had the opportunity to discuss my resume with some industry professionals. The information I got is quite useful for all students, who may not know it owing to a lack of experience. Most companies use the Application Tracking System to keep track of the applications they received. The latest strides in artificial intelligence and natural language processing have been used innovatively by industries in their screening process. If a resume does not contain some of the keywords (generally given in their job description), the candidate is automatically rejected. The only way for students to get past this form of screening is to read the job description of the major companies and customize their resume accordingly. I can say from my experience that this approach is successful much of the time, and many of my friends who customized their resume in this fashion ended up landing an interview. What kind of job you are applying for is another thing to keep in mind when tailoring your resume. If an undergrad student in our uni-

“We often think that versity wishes to apply to a research highlighting all our skills position, for inand projects is a good stance, the best approach would be approach to designing a to highlight their research projects resume. Tempting as it and publications in their resume. If may be, this approach has on the other hand multiple disadvantages.” they wish to apply to a more industryoriented job, they should highlight their industrial internships. The resources offered by the university should be utilized properly. The Career Development Center is always ready to help job applicants to improve their resume. Its team is experienced and can work along with students to polish their resume and make it ready for the industry. These resources can be put to great use by the students. Remember that the world is not as supportive as the Wolfpack, and competition is inevitable. You need to put your best foot forward, and if your resume is lacking in the crucial aspects mentioned above, your chances are diminished from the outset. Make your resume as striking as possible and enjoy the fruits of your hard work.