Fellow students: While President Aoun speaks in his annual state of the university address about the unprecedented donation to the newly minted D’Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern’s international vision, national rankings and unmatched experiential learning opportunities, I’d like to draw your attention to some other issues that may strike you as more important than those lofty abstractions.
The renovated Curry Student Center is proving to be a hit. We’ve now got tables above our tables so if you can’t find a table you can just go upstairs. Those stairs are now made of glass which will be far cooler than last year’s carpeted ones until December when that first kid comes in with snowy boots on.
The new dining options are truly first class. While you’re all stuck deciding between UBurger’s “Yuppie Burger” and the nine-dollar popcorn shrimp meal at Popeye’s, you can find me at Sweet Tomatoes no-line Neapolitan Pizza grabbing a slice the size of Rhode Island for under five bucks.
Two years ago, printing something at Snell and getting it to your professor before graduation was just short of miraculous, and now with the marvels of modern technology you can print from anywhere on campus and just swipe your card and out comes the essay.
We have a magical archway between Snell and Snell Engineering that offers a truly unique experience to anyone who passes through it. By the time you reach the other side, you have experienced the fullest form of waste this great university has to offer. And if you happen to be traveling to Shillman Hall, you get to visit the second-greatest addition to the campus since the moat around AfterHours: @ShillmanCat, whose excellent Twitter account is sadly almost 850 followers short of catching up to @PresidentAoun himself.
The good men and women of NUPD keep us safe around the clock and are desperately searching for funding to assign an officer to personally safeguard every Apple device on campus so their rightful owners can leave them unattended anywhere and everywhere. You can imagine their disappointment when the university opted to build the archway to excess instead of funding that proposal.
There are problems, too. Years after their completion, we still didn’t have sponsors for the West Village buildings, so every freshman is doomed to sound like a disgruntled kindergartner roaming around the quad looking for G and H.
We still haven’t figured out if there is really a way to navigate the Nightingale-Lake-Holmes-Meserve gauntlet. The Bank of America booth next to Forsyth still smells like something died in it, and I’ve begun wondering if it’s the burial place for the numerous students who have died of old age in the sandwich line at Rebecca’s.
The Springfest organizers, despite their best efforts, still can’t seem to book anyone who found fame this side of the ‘90s. And while we can get two dropout business students to give us $60 million for the business school, nobody’s heard back on whether Shawn Fanning, inventor of Napster and Northeastern dropout, plans on giving us the Napster Department of Music Industry. The irony would be so strong, the music industry kids’ skinny jeans might start popping, which wouldn’t be a problem given the extensive selection of socially conscious clothing available at the cost of only a limb and two digits at the Northeastern University Bookstore.
– Taylor Dobbs can be reached at [email protected]
