Salim Salim
Number of articles: 5Number of photos: 5
First article: October 28, 2016
Latest article: February 24, 2017
First image: November 4, 2016
Latest image: February 24, 2017
Popular
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BWICS attends computer science conference, hopes for consistent funding
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Rose, panelists contemplate significance of common good at the College
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Bowdoin students tie for first in Maine Food Innovation Challenge
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Curling keeps eyes on Nationals qualification as season progresses
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Eloy '15 tackles police violence in folded paper exhibit
Longreads
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Curling keeps eyes on Nationals qualification as season progresses
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Rose, panelists contemplate significance of common good at the College
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BWICS attends computer science conference, hopes for consistent funding
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Eloy '15 tackles police violence in folded paper exhibit
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Bowdoin students tie for first in Maine Food Innovation Challenge
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Rose, panelists contemplate significance of common good at the College
A panel on Wednesday evening contemplated the meaning of the common good at Bowdoin, and the existence of the philosophy as a means to easy self-gratification versus a legitimate way to give back.
The panel, held at Howell House, included President Clayton Rose, Director of the Joseph McKeen Center for the Common Good Sarah Seames, McKeen Fellow Marina Affo ’17, Director of Religious and Spiritual Life Bob Ives and Assistant Professor of Education Alison Miller.
“I think it’s important [to have conversations like this] because Bowdoin definitely uses the common good as a way to advertise the school to the world,” said Kay Torrey ’19, a McKeen fellow who helped organize the panel.
Torrey said that, despite her work at the McKeen Center, she and other McKeen fellows felt that they did not have a clear understanding of what the common good is.
Seames described the common good as a two-part conceptual framework of discussing the common good and then putting it into action. Rose said he found the common good to be more of a journey rather than a specific set of actions and emphasized the importance of sincere work.
“If we don’t engage in the work that we do with respect to the common good with a pure heart, is it really for the common good?” he said.
Ives defined the common good through the lens of religion and spirituality. He hypothesized that Joseph McKeen brought the idea of the common good to the College from religious texts.
The panelists were asked to respond to a wide variety of queries and comments, including how they would respond to “someone who tells you that Bowdoin uses the common good as a means of easy self-gratification rather than to selflessly give back.”
“I am really interested in thinking about—instead of students being selfless about what they do—thinking about their work in terms of reciprocity,” said Seames.
She added that thinking about reciprocity also means students must contemplate their own privilege.
“If you think you’re being altruistic … you’re still thinking of yourself as having something that someone else doesn’t,” she said.
The moderators also asked panelists where they see the common good at Bowdoin.
Miller said that she sees the common good in what Bowdoin students choose to do outside of the College.
“When I see our teachers who are out in communities … choosing to go and teach in underserved communities and really take a difficult path beyond Bowdoin,” she said.
Oratile Monkhei ’20, who attended the panel, questioned how the common good manifests at Bowdoin outside of the McKeen Center.
“Beyond just saying we have, for example, the McKeen Center, and that’s the area for the common good, how does that same conviction of integrity play out in other departments?” she said.
Students said they found the discussion interesting but wished more students had attended.
“The panel was very transparent in their feelings and sentiments,” said Monkhei. “I just wish or desire that more people had come to hear it … [I] started questioning as to who self-selects to come to such talks.”
Despite having a small crowd, those who did attend said the panel was informative and engaging.
“I thought that it was an incredibly interesting and incredibly relevant topic,” said Sara Caplan ’20.
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Curling keeps eyes on Nationals qualification as season progresses
Bowdoin’s curling team is enjoying a strong season, with a mix of veteran leaders and first years. The team attended a tournament, or “bonspiel,” at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY this past weekend.
In a round-robin style tournament, the Polar Bears won the first three rounds, setting a new best record in club history and advancing them to the semi-finals of the championship bracket.
The curling team has found success despite the graduation of two skilled senior members last year, due to a high level of interest from the first-year class. The first years’ energy and dedication to the game has impressed the older members.
“With the compensation that we’ve gotten from the freshman class and the energy we’ve gotten from just everyone in general … we’ve been able to make up for [the loss of the former seniors],” said Max Sterman ’17, who has been playing for the curling team throughout his time at the College.
For the most part, the curling team is self-guided, with organization provided by the upperclassmen. Its official coach, Douglas Coffin, helps run the Belfast Curling Club in Belfast, Maine. He provides the team with advice on both on-ice strategy and organizational set up. However, the team attends tournaments without Coffin. Despite this challenge, the players uphold their rank as second in the region.
“Everyone is very excited to play … in some ways we get in the minds of other teams because we’re so excited to play and we’re very happy on the ice that they sometimes wonder why they’re not as happy,” Sterman said.
Bowdoin’s curling team has been around for seven years. Curling is an emerging sport at the collegiate level, and with the high interest from the first year class, the Bowdoin curling team hopes to have skillful members who can potentially move up through the ranks and lead the team in the future.
“Our team is pretty young, which is nice because then we can build on that and really become really a top tier competitive team,” said Kylie Best ’19, the only team member who had previous curling experience before coming to Bowdoin.
Current members expressed that last year’s seniors not only helped the team on the ice, but also provided an understanding of how to better manage the team.
With the influx of new first years who needed training, the upperclassmen felt challenged when it came to arranging positions in the team and accommodating the first year members.
“There’s a little bit of pressure of who’s going to be in charge just because we have so many valued and experienced curlers and only so many spots,” said captain Cole Hamel ’18.
As of now, the team’s ultimate goal is to play hard through the remaining three tournaments in order to qualify for the National bonspiel.
Teams ranked in the top 16 nationally get to attend the tournament, which will be held in Utica, New York this spring. Bowdoin’s team, which is currently ranked eighth in the country, qualified for Nationals last year.
“Our record at Nationals last year was not as great as we would have liked it to be. But at the same time that was our first time going to Nationals, all of us. So we gave ourselves a little bit of leeway there,” said Best.
After winter break, the team will attend a tournament in Belfast, Maine, on their home ice. More experienced team members hope to step back a bit in the home tournament to let the first-years get some performance time to practice. The second tournament will be held at Yale.
Hamilton is the only other NESCAC school with a curling team, making them Bowdoin’s greatest rival.
Despite the challenges faced by the team in training and accommodating the freshmen, members feel the team has a lot of potential for growth. For them, having fun and enjoying the game is just as important as winning and competing for the top brackets and the national championships.
“I think we’re succeeding with that challenge because we’ve been hearing … stories of kids on the team. Their roommates would talk about how our teammates … [are] obsessed with curling. To us, that means we have succeeded so far in probably the biggest challenge this season so I think I would like that to continue,” Sterman said.
“We know we’re all there to have fun and that’s the point of curling,” Best said.
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Bowdoin students tie for first in Maine Food Innovation Challenge
Last weekend, a team of five Bowdoin students tied for first place in the second annual Maine Food System Innovation Challenge for their proposal to turn wasted grain from breweries into flour. Bowdoin hosted the event, which brought college students from all around the state to create new ways to reduce food waste in Maine and support the local food production and distribution.
Eliza Huber-Weiss ’17, one of Bowdoin’s team members, explained that much of the grain waste produced at Maine’s craft breweries is edible and can be turned into flour and used for other purposes if processed correctly.
“We talked to breweries about how much waste they were actually producing. We talked to farmers who were taking that waste already and seeing what the issues were,” Huber-Weiss said.
Teams came up with their ideas before the competition, then spent the weekend refining their pitches before ultimately presenting a business plan to a set of judges.
The Maine Food Innovation Challenge first took place last year, bringing college students and community members who had ideas and some experience with production, aggregation, processing and marketing that would help improve local food production.
Emeritus Professor of Biology and Biochemistry Thomas Settlemire was one of the founders and a facilitator of the event.
“The whole purpose of this thing is to try and create awareness within bright minds [of students] as to what this problem is all about, how can we create a new economic incentive to make it work, what’s that economic incentive and do it in a constructive positive way,” he said.
This year’s competition tasked students with coming up with an idea to reduce food waste.
In the United States, it is estimated that about 40 percent of food produced is wasted, according to Settlemire. This is due to several factors including the poor harvesting and losses in the supply chain and in the market.
Huber-Weiss acknowledged that the group’s brewery plan would only make a small dent in the major problem of food waste.
“Our business does not solve food waste, but it does maybe aid in the process of reducing food waste,” she said.
She also felt that the event helped her connect with people outside of Bowdoin who work in the same field she aspires to someday join. She plans to continue meeting with the Bowdoin group, and has thought about the possibility of starting a flour business after she graduates.
Settlemire was also pleased with the event.
“It’s a wonderful way to take a real problem … [and] create an enterprise that Bowdoin students actually run,” he said.
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Eloy '15 tackles police violence in folded paper exhibit
Daniel Eloy ’15 returned to campus on Wednesday evening to exhibit a towering display of red, white and gold paper flowers highlighting racial violence in America. Eloy’s installation is the first event of No Hate November.
Sponsored by the Bowdoin Student Government (BSG) and held in the the Lamarche Gallery of David Saul Smith Union, Eloy’s installation, titled “The Garden of White Imagination,” is a collection of 374 flowers folded from paper, each flower symbolizing a person killed by police in 2016. The red flowers symbolize unarmed individuals of color, while the golden flowers represent children of any race.
“Each flower is constructed and its bloom comes forth because of someone being killed,” said Eloy.
Each flower is constructed from eight pieces of paper. Eloy folded nearly 3,000 total papers for the exhibition.
“It took a really long time,” he said. “It felt like a necessary reflection on what [is] going on.”
BSG first began No Hate November programming four years ago as a means for the community to stand in solidarity with students who experience bias on and off campus. Throughout the month, the programs focus on engaging students in dialogue and conversation, using different platforms to discuss contemporary issues like police brutality.
“Something that really mattered to me is that we had some sort of creative piece of art because I think art can be such a powerful way of moving towards justice, and … bringing people together,” said current BSG President Harriet Fisher ’17, who helped coordinate the exhibit.
Eloy emphasized that the focus of the exhibit was justice.
“This isn’t about hating police,” Eloy said. “If you’re a police officer, I would hope that we would think that you can handle situations that are going to be unpleasant. That’s the whole point of having them. If anybody can have a gun and police their own community this would happen, and yet it’s still happening, and we have a force that’s dedicated to learning about their communities, or should be, [but] they aren’t, and that is abusive.”
Eloy created the art to engage with the Bowdoin community about the current issues regarding police violence and people of color. Fisher noted that bringing the installation to Bowdoin was a “powerful way of moving towards justice and … bringing people together.”
“I think Bowdoin has a lot of white kids who are very privileged, who haven’t had to feel uncomfortable about a lot of things before … [Through] a piece of art maybe they’ll feel just the right amount of uncomfortable to start doing some research on educating themselves about why people are being killed on the street by police,” Eloy said.
Fisher believes Bowdoin has been heading in the right direction in taking initiative to make this community more aware of contemporary issues, although the College still has work to do.
“It’s a space that’s much more willing to have a conversation than it was when I was a freshman,” she said.
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BWICS attends computer science conference, hopes for consistent funding
Last week, 14 members of Bowdoin Women in Computer Science (BWICS) attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Houston, Texas—an annual conference exclusively for female computer scientists. The trip, largely sponsored by alumni donations, is a key element of BWICS strategy to show Bowdoin women that they, too, belong in computer science.
“Before this conference I wasn’t planning on applying to any internships within the computer science field this summer,” said Sam Valdivia ’19, a first-time conference attendee. “Now because of going to this conference, I feel that I can actually do it.”
The conference also doubled as a career fair. Students submitted their resumes beforehand and interviewed with companies on site. Three Bowdoin attendees were offered full-time jobs at the fair, while two others received summer internship offers.
The conference featured notable female computer scientists from major companies such as Google, Twitter, Amazon and IBM. Students expressed their awe after being in the presence of so many accomplished women.
“I had no idea that there were going to be 15,000 women and over 300 companies all in this one building in Houston,” said Maddie Bustamante ’17, co-founder of BWICS. “It was very overwhelming, but also so empowering to be in this space with all these really intelligent women.”
Of 76 current juniors and seniors who have already declared to be Computer Science majors at Bowdoin, just 26 students—34 percent—are women. Bustamante co-founded BWICS during her sophomore year to support her female peers in computer science.
“[BWICS is] trying to pave a path for future students,” she said. “It’s going to be a much easier process.”Associate Professor of Computer Science Laura Toma recalled coming to Bowdoin to interview in 2003. When she delivered a computer science lecture, all the attendees were male.
Toma first attended the Grace Hopper conference with two Bowdoin students in 2009. She believes the conference helps encourage women to stay in computer science.
“A lot of peer institutions have been sending their students there for many years. And there’s research that shows [attending] helps enormously with retention,” Toma said.
Due to shortages of interest and funding, no Bowdoin women attended the conference again until last year, when 10 students went. This year, Toma accompanied 14 students. She hopes that Bowdoin students can continue to attend in the future.
“We are not sure what is going to happen next year. We hope we can keep it going because everyone said it was an amazing experience,” Toma said.
However, the Student Activities Funding Committee only provides enough funding for club leaders to attend conferences like Grace Hopper, according to Director of Student Activities Nate Hintze. This year, BWICS group members attended with the help of alumni donations and scholarships that they had received from the conference itself.
Bustamante expressed her hope that Career Planning or the computer science department could help future funding, so the group doesn’t have to rely on alumni. Toma echoed this sentiment.“Success of women depends a lot on community-building, on social [connections] and this conference manages to do all of this,” Toma said. “My dream is that we can do this every year.”