Whether it’s your first day ever or your first day back, one of the first things you’ll want to do now that you’ve made it to UM is check out the seashore. With so many miles of coastline, it can be hard to decide where to settle down, but get to know each beach and…
If that French class is full and Chinese doesn’t fit your schedule, you might want to flip through the computer science or engineering course catalog and pick up a class on programming instead. Programming languages, like C++ or Java, aren’t natural languages. They didn’t develop without premeditation, like English, which has been evolving for centuries,…
Diaphanous, ephemeral, hackneyed, ignominious – once known (and dreaded) as “SAT words,” these arcane adjectives are now just, well, words. Or so they will be when the College Board releases the revised SAT in 2016. The new SAT, according to the College Board website, will ask students to interpret “relevant words,” such as “empirical” or…
By the time I had to tutor on the day after my oral surgery, I had not recovered quite as much as I’d hoped. I didn’t just look like a chipmunk – I looked like a whole colony of chipmunks had crawled inside my cheek and died there. When the student walked into the Academic…
When I heard someone say, “He literally bit my head off,” I did a double take so fast that my skull nearly wrenched free of my vertebrae. Yet she stood there whole. Clearly, her head had not literally been bitten off. I might be excused for my misunderstanding, considering that “literally” originally meant the opposite…
While most New Year’s resolutions seem to entail caring more—about family, health or charitable causes—mine requires caring less, specifically about grammatical mistakes. That’s right. By 2015, my friends will no longer have to cringe in frightened anticipation of my rage when they let slip an incorrect preposition or mix up the verbs “lay” and “lie.”…
After returning to the familiarity of the school year, some students will look back on their summers and feel grateful for the future security conferred upon them by their new business contacts. Others may try to conjure up the memory of the adrenaline rush from hang gliding for the first time. Instead, I will reflect…