By Sue Byun, News Editor -

BC Students for Sexual Health (BCSSH) have been offering  “Responsible Party Kits,” comprised of a bundle of solo cups with a condom taped to the bottom of each and flyers that provide safer sex information on a range of topics, from condom use, STIs, and consent. Continue Reading

By Andrew Schofield, Features Editor -

Vacated by current US Senator Scott Brown, the open state senate representing the towns of Norfolk, Bristol, and Middlesex attracted several experienced lawmakers from both sides of the aisle.

Continue Reading

Video: Photography: Gabrielle Chwazik-Gee; Editing: Justine Burt & Rodaan Rabang

By Eliza Duggan, Layout Editor -

Conte Forum was packed with thousands of people eager to see the dance talent of fourteen culture clubs and dance groups on Saturday night. Hosted by Jarick Walker, Alex Mancebo and Joe Erichibo, the competition was organized by the AHANA Leadership Council, who received a huge crowd for the event.

After the audience filed in to the earth-shaking bass of the DJ, the hosts announced Lil’ Phunk, the Official Junior Dane team of the Boston Celtics. This talented group of youngsters got the crowd going with a high-energy performance with plenty of attitude. They received a standing ovation, starting the night off with a bang.

The first BC club to perform was the Brazilian Club of BC, who showcased their skills in the Afro-Brazilian art of capoeira. A combination of dance, martial arts, and acrobatics that engages two players, the art form was very entertaining. Next up was Sexual Chocolate, the all-male step team that had a theatrical performance with a vampiric theme. Phaymus danced on the stage next, with an energetic hip hop routine that involved some tricky rope work in addition to the dancing.

The Hawaii Club continued the culture category, and pleased the crowd with an engaging hula dance. Next was Aero-K, Boston College Korean Student Association’s dance troupe. Their clever combination of traditional Korean elements, such as fans and masks, with modern hip-hop made for an exciting and unique experience. Their talent and ingenuity won them first place in the culture category.

Following Aero-K was F.I.S.T.S. (Females Incorporating Sisterhood Through Step), the all-female step team. Wearing short bobs and hot pink dresses, their exhibition piece showcased their energetic step abilities. Finishing up the first act was Synergy, whose innovative, provocative and well-executed hip hop routine won them first place in the dance category of the competition. With an airport theme, Synergy incorporated full group numbers, solos, partner segments, and a unique section using only lights on a dark stage.

After intermission, the South Asian Student Association’s dance troupe called Masti took to the stage in colorful Indian costumes and performed a fun combination of traditional Indian dance and modern elements. Next up was the Philippine Society of Boston College, which performed traditional pieces that involved dodging bamboo poles as well as hip-hop fusion routines.

The highly anticipated Latin dance team Fuego del Corazon, last year’s champions of the ALC Showdown, took to the stage. With the theme of naughty schoolchildren, Fuego members began in modest school uniforms. But, they soon cha-chaed into sparkly outfits and heated up the stage with a compelling routine.

Next up was PATU (Presenting Africa To U) of the African Student Organization, which specializes in traditional and modern African dance styles. Then the Swing Kids came twirling onto the stage in an exhibition that featured their skills in complex lifts. Rounding out the night was the Vietnamese Students’ Association, who made its first appearance at the Showdown, and Conspiracy Theory, a hip-hop dance troupe who presented its dance “in the truest form.” Over all, it was an entertaining night full of amazing talent, highlighting the talents of BC students and the growing support for the arts on campus.

By Christina Koutsourades, Gavel Writer -

This past week Boston College was especially green. Not only was it a week dedicated to the festive green of St. Patrick’s Day, it also happened to be BC’s second annual Green Week. Continue Reading

Video Credits: Photography: Sean Meehan;  Interviews: Justine Burt;  Script Writing: Matthew Gavin;  Editing: Sean Meehan

By Eliza Duggan, Layout Editor -

On Thursday, April 18, Welch Dining Hall was full of students ready to cheer on their favorite contestant in the Mr. BC competition. Continue Reading

Column by Lorna Greene, Gavel Writer -

I left school uniforms behind the day I graduated from my Catholic secondary school. I hoped I would never have to come across one again, unless I happened to pass children on their way home from school. Imagine my surprise when I arrived on Boston College’s campus only to soon realize that I had once again been thrown back into the world of the school uniform. Continue Reading

By Andrew Slade, News Editor -

For many college students with Facebook profiles, recent weeks have brought a new and unfamiliar sort of information into news feeds. This is the result of the virally popular Web site www.formspring.me, which allows users to create question boxes in which site visitors can anonymously post questions directed at the page’s owner. The owner may then opt to either answer or ignore the questions with which they are presented. Should they choose the former, the question and answer will appear below the question box for all to see.

In browsing the FormSprings of friends, one is likely to come upon assurances from the page creators that they know the concept is a bit odd and borderline creepy, but that it is a new and intriguing way to waste time through Facebook or other social networking Web sites. FormSpring has set up its site so that users are able to link their question pages to their Facebook accounts and have their responses automatically shared with friends through status updates. This is in addition to users’ manually posted statuses that often state something to the effect of, “formspring.me … ask me anything!!!”

By connecting their Web site to Facebook without simply making themselves another application, FormSpring seems to have latched onto the all too common concept of “Facebook stalking,” positioning itself well for expansion of its user base.

The general idea of anonymous correspondence, however, is not entirely new to Facebook. Formspring.me expands upon the idea of Honesty Box, a well-established application that allows one to send others with the Honesty Box app secret questions or com¬ments, and this application has nearly 2.5 million monthly active users. What sets FormSpring apart is the idea of allowing anyone to see the dialogue — albeit partially the work of an unknown party — between the two others involved, and that one not need have a Facebook account to use the site.

On whether the site concept is too invasive to prompt most people to create FormSprings, the jury is out. “I think it’s cool, but I would never do it. I just read other people’s answers,” Khushboo Pelia, A&S ’13, says.

Laura Ahn, LSOE ’13, says that the site has potential, but that people aren’t necessarily using it the right way.

“My friends have it, and some use it to make comments as a joke,” Ahn says. “I like the concept, but I wouldn’t make one given how I’ve seen it used.”

By Lauren Costello, Gavel Writer -

Imagine living under a roof occupied by a soldier 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This soldier stands idly by as your house is attacked, as the steel rods over your windows are hit with large rocks, trash is thrown into your yard, and even when your house is invaded by illegal settlers who believe that God is on their side. Imagine this soldier intimidating visitors, listening in with his machine gun clearly visible and reporting their conversations.

This is exactly what life is like for the Palestinian family that I met in the contested city of Hebron/Al Khalil in the occupied West Bank. I was among a group of Boston College students that visited the area at the beginning of January. I was shocked and disturbed by the horrendous conditions in which Palestinians are forced to live.

No amount of reading in class could have prepared me for the experience of going through a checkpoint in the West Bank, for hearing anti-Arab racism casually, unselfconsciously expressed, or for seeing the daily injustices of life in “the world’s largest open air prison,” as one woman described her society.

One night we were abruptly awakened by an Israeli soldier yelling outside, demanding that the family car be moved to accomadate road closings. Seeing the silent exasperation on their faces quickly let me know that this was just another inconvenience that they had to accept.

Before my trip, I could have explained to you the history of the conflict and how the map of Palestine has been steadily decreasing since 1967 due to the checkpoints and the separation wall. I would have been able to argue which sociological framing of the conflict (apartheid, sociocide) made the most sense to me, and I could have made a convincing argument as to why I believe a one-state solution is the only just possibility for the region at this point. While this ‘conflict’ may appear to be a war between people – a war shaped by different religious and cultural beliefs – it is actually about power and control shaped by political interests that use racist ideology to breed hatred among its citizens.

Imagine, however, what it’s like to be a Palestinian child walking to school daily past graffiti that says: “What’s the difference between an Arab and a trampoline? You take off your shoes to jump on a tram¬poline.” Additionally, less than five minutes away a Palestinian market functions as usual, except for the steel mesh overhead designed to protect shoppers from the bricks, trash and sewage-filled plastic bags that Israeli settlers throw down on the market.

I could not have foreseen what we would learn during our home¬stays in the Dheisheh refugee camp in the holy city of Bethlehem. We met families who could not feed their children and had lived in Dheisheh for three generations but still managed to hope that one day their lives would be different.

In my host family, the parents now have two different identification cards, and the father will not be able to see the birth of his third child because he is banned from entering Jerusalem to go to the hospital ten minutes away from his house.

Along with the horror, we also saw enterprise and hope embodied in the Palestinian Fair Trade As¬sociation that brings organic olive oil to a Whole Foods near you. We saw the amazing persistence of a Prisoners’ Rights NGO (Adda¬meer) that continues to fight injustice despite the fact that they are working within a prejudiced court system and 70 percent of Palestinian men will spend time in jail.

Mostly, there is an incredible gallantry of daily non-violent resistance. The attempt to live an ordinary Palestinian life amid the checkpoints, land seizures, road closures, and daily insults is truly admirable. While Palestinians nev¬er get used to the daily assaults on their lives, large or small, they meet these difficulties with “sumud.” This means a mix of forbearance and steadfastness that my host family explained in this way: “You have to just do it and move on with your day, because if you let it get to you all the time, you’d go insane. You can’t stop living.”

In some ways our trip can be viewed much like every other service or immersion trip; we saw poverty, resilience, and the requi¬site number of cute, photogenic children. And like most service trips, we are now challenging ourselves to find ways to put our knowledge and our experience to work in service to the world.

This trip is distinguished by the fact that the injustices we saw were not produced by a natural disaster or the slowly unfolding consequences of our capitalist system. The gross injustice we witnessed is produced by an illegal occupation that is crucially supported by American foreign aid, your tax dollars and mine.

We also found that as Americans of conscience, we have strong partners in both Palestine and Israel. A broad array of Palestinian organizations (representing rural and urban, secular and religious groups, academics, professionals, craftspeople, folks in the West Bank, Gaza and the refugee camps of the diaspora) invite us to join with them in a program of boycotts, sanctions and divestments against Israel that would impose non-violent but real costs on the illegal occupation (with the full support and encouragement of Israeli NGOs and human rights organizations, such as Who Profits and Zochrot). We all left Palestine with a clear message: time is running out, and this issue could not be more urgent. The question now is this: how do we, at BC, take up this call to action?

By Lauren Viola, Asst. Features Editor – (Photo courtesy of hrch.files.wordpress.com)

Santa,

ZUP

BC UR J2G hrs 2 tkts 2 Aruba 4U n ms Claus 4t mth of dec

O n mayB Rudy n d boyz cn join U

TTYL d Grinch

A quick translation:

Santa,

What’s up? Because you are just too good, here’s two tickets to Aruba for you and Mrs. Claus for the month of December. Oh, and maybe Rudy and the boys can join you?

Talk to you later,

The Grinch

Though this may not be the typical Christmas letter you wrote as a kid to Santa Claus, language like this is rapidly becoming the norm for all sorts of communication. Originally, it began as a short hand way to type to a friend on AOL messenger or send a quick text message without going over a 160-character limit. However, shorthand, abbreviations and minimized words have taken over the globe. Their latest captive: resumes.

New social networking sites seem to spring up daily, as their popularity seemingly increases by the minute. Whether used for reconnecting with old friends or colleagues, keeping in touch with people who are far away, sending fun messages to your friends down the hall or posting pictures to share with friends and family, there is no doubt that the online social network phenomena is quickly expanding to cover it all.

However, with information on the internet being globally public even with the use of certain privacy settings, there has always been a concern as to what is posted on these Web sites and who can potentially see them. For a college student, this concern usually winds down to two very important people: mom, and the person from whom your future paycheck will come.

But if we look past these concerns, and the precautions that need to be taken to make sure a potential boss does not see what you did last Friday night, we find that social networking sites can actually be helpful in finding a new career or in starting one.

A recent article in Newsday, entitled “Why U shld hire me!” says, “Job hunters who’ve whittled their resumes down to one page have a brand new challenge — getting them down to 140-character Tweets; make that 120 if you leave room for retweeting.”

Impossible? Kristin Borrero, CSOM ’11, thinks it might be. “Even trying to keep my resume to a page for me is extremely difficult, but to try to make it 140 characters I would find virtually impossible,” she said.

With such intense competition these days for every position on the market, resumes are an extremely important tool for students and older job hunters alike. A job seeker is trying to get their personality and qualifications across to a potential employer, especially since resumes are normally looked at before an interview process even beings.

“I usually try to get across something completely distinct and unique in that individual point while keeping it extremely strong and action based,” Borrero says what she tends to highlight on her resume. “I also try to incorporate some sort of numbers into it or some sort of quantitative measure of how I per¬formed in that job or activity so that the perspective employer can get a good picture of the actual benefit of the task that I was working on … a lot of employers only spend the first 30 seconds looking at your resume.”

This highlights how long we have to get our uniqueness, qualifications and important background informa¬tion across before our resume gets tossed to the side.

What the new wave of online resumes, or “twesumes” seems to be doing is forcing us to beat the employers to the punch, and only give them 30 seconds of information to read.

“Those who see Twitter as a job-search tool need a succinct but compelling ‘twesume,” Allison Hemming, founder and president of Manhattan talent agency Hired Guns, said in Newday. “It calls for focus and editing, and, if your story is neither short nor compelling, people won’t share it with others. And that’s networking death.”

So what can you actually say about yourself in less than 140 characters (about the length of this sentence) that would give any sort of true picture of who you are?

“I think I would try to highlight my passions as well as how I’d like to put those into work at a specific job or position,” Borrero says. “I don’t think that in 140 characters you can talk about your educational background, your extracurricular background, interests, your technical skills and your past work experience, you couldn’t even list those things in 140 characters.”

“Twesumes” seem to be about focus and branding yourself. “Whether it’s in written form or in an elevator pitch you need to have a brand and have that be a unique something,” Borrero says. “Something that’s unique and different about you, that sets yourself apart from somebody else that could easily say the very same things about themselves or has a lot of the same experiences.”

Though they may be a challenge for many to write, “twesumes” can be used for other purposes, such as a tagline on the back of your business card, or a starter for your cover letter or resume.

But with a “twesumes” present or not, and no matter whose tweets you are following, technology seems to have spread its grasp even deeper into the realm of job hiring and recruitment.

By Stafford Oliver, Gavel Writer -

Over winter break, I, like many other Boston College students, participated in a service trip. I know how many students partake in the “service culture” and that you may be thinking, “Yeah, I know. You’re going to talk about how your trip was so great and so special and so life changing, and blah blah blah.”

So what new information or perspective do I have to offer that you haven’t heard from countless friends? Continue reading.

I started the whole process in March of last year when I was selected to co-lead an Arrupe International trip to Agua Prieta, which is right on the border of Mexico. The whole thing feels like a whirlwind, from the information sessions, the hours of interviewing, and group selection to the weekly two-hour meetings. There was so much material to talk about and information to cover. If I uttered the words “let’s go over some logistics” one more time, the Arupe group would probably have mutinied against me. We did so much reflecting throughout the pre-trip phase, I felt like I was a CURA leader.

After submitting my last paper with the arrival of winter break, the thought that I was actually going to a different country within the next few days finally dawned upon me. Late in December, it was unclear if we would still go due to increased levels of violence in the nearby city of Nogales. Growing up in Baltimore (which is not exactly like The Wire, please don’t ask me if it is), I did not bat an eye upon learning of the shootings and drug deals, but our itinerary was indeed changed at the last minute. I returned to BC hoping and praying that I would be ready to accompany 12 others on a complete roller coaster.

The trip was organized by Borderlinks, an organization from Tucson, Ariz. Borderlinks was founded to educate groups about the conditions and the multiple perspectives of living at the border. I spent seven days rolling around in a van stuffed to the ceiling with book bags, sleeping bags, and 12 other mostly unwashed bodies. We slept at migrant shelters, visited a horrifying low-wage factory, met with a multitude of social justice organizations working on the behalf of migrants, visited a coffee co-op, witnessed a mass-deportation trial and were stopped by border patrol.

The most heart-wrenching moments came when we were putting those foreign language core classes to good use, talking with people who were deeply affected by the border wall and its many implications. My heart plumeted when I saw a 17-year-old youth group leader who had us singing and dancing on a Friday night, robotically working on an assembly line Monday morning. I can’t describe the shock of learning from a minister that the man I sat next to at Church used to smuggle human beings for a living. This comes after completing a seminar class and writing a research paper on human trafficking.

This trip went beyond meeting gracious people in Mexico, being inspired by dedicated folks who are actually making a difference, and engaging with an academic subject beyond a book or an essay. I was able to get real (in a way that is difficult inside of this ivory tower) with 12 incredible and insightful people that I would probably not have otherwise known. Not only did we share lots of disinfectant and powder, but lots of songs, hugs and most importantly, friendship.

I’m not sure if what I did or how I feel is representative of all those who have or will go on a service trip. I am, however, sure that I am too engaged and too inspired to let go of my experiences and simply move on.