Snapshot
Goal...?
Comments are permanently closed.
Comments are permanently closed.
At Bowdoin, there are two kinds of people: varsity athletes, and everyone else. Colloquially, this second group is commonly referred to as “NARPs:” Non-Athletic Regular Persons.
True or not, the idea that a student’s sport (or lack thereof) defines his or her life on campus is so pervasive that even last year’s National Association of Scholars’ (NAS) report on the College discussed the notion of two distinct spheres on campus: the athletes and the non-athletes. This conclusion was largely based on information gleaned from decade-old Orient articles and the College Prowler book “Bowdoin College 2012: Off the Record.”
But contrary to the NAS report’s conclusions, this divide—if it exists—is not an academic one; the differences in athlete and non-athlete GPAs is negligible, according to an April 2013 Orient article.
“We see them in our sleep.”
This is how Ben Smith, Coach of the 1998 U.S. women’s hockey team, described the team’s Canadian rivals in an interview with the New York Times leading up to their Olympic matchup.
It’s fair to guess that some Bowdoin hockey players may spend tonight similarly fixated on an opponent from the North, though the rival in question is Colby, not Canada. Today the Polar Bears will defend the first of last year’s decisive victories over the Mules. The rivalry between the two teams is a classic grudge match, and this year’s games continue a long and storied tradition.
Last week, the Orient circulated an anonymous survey to students investigating health and eating at Bowdoin.
Of the 538 respondents, 61 percent were female and 39 percent were male. Eighty-four percent of students said that they felt Bowdoin created a healthy eating environment, while 55 percent of female students reported that they think they need to lose weight, and 45 percent of female students were worried about a friend’s eating habits. Six percent of students reported that they had been diagnosed with an eating disorder.
According to Director of Health Services Sandra Hayes, issues of disordered eating are more complicated than a black-and-white diagnosis.
When President Obama cold-called Richard Blanco and asked him to be the 2013 inaugural poet, he gave the poet three weeks to write three potential poems. Working from his home in Bethel, Maine, Blanco said he circled and circled until he landed on the first line of “One Today,” the poem he read to over one million people at Obama’s inauguration last January in Washington, D.C.
“I kind of compare it to tuning an instrument, where you hear that right chord and something amazing happens—and, for me it was that first line, ‘When the sun rose on us today,’ which was when I was watching the sun rise over Bethel and the mountains, or the pines actually,” he said. “From there, the poem sort of started writing itself.”
Blanco visited campus last Friday, October 25, headlining Family Weekend with a day that included a student poetry workshop, public book signing, and an evening reading that filled the seats of Pickard Theater. His visit was funded by the Office of Student Life, Office of Multicultural Student Programs, the Resource Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity, and the Latin American Studies Program.