Caron McGuill, Sophomore, sitting on her bottom bunk bed studying because her desk is cluttered.

Jake Chouinard, Sophomore, playing video games in his Patterson dorm room.

Livia Raducan, Sophomore, studying in her messy Brett dorm room.

Amy Chaunt, Sophomore, watching TV in her Patterson dorm room while her roommate is at class.

Andrew Iannitelli, Senior, taking some time to think before continuing with his assignment in his Patterson dorm room.

Andrew Iannitelli, Senior, uses an empty cardboard box as a table next to his desk, in his Patterson dorm room.

Ned Dumas and Tyler Brisbois’s mini-fridge, which according to them, was so full.

Ned Dumas, Freshman, in his dorm, Cance, located in the Southwest Area Residence Halls on the UMass campus.

The UMass Softball team huddles up with two ball girls at the game versus Boston University on April 27, 2011 at the UMass Softball Complex.

Sara Plourde, 9, hit the 1,000-strikeout mark for her career during the April 27, 2011 game versus Boston University.

Teea Rogers, 22, sprints to first base.

My Response: Wait..How did you know it was my birthday?

What a weird coincidence.

Being a Journalism and Communications major you would think I would possibly be on TV as a reporter. Reading off a teleprompter for the rest of my life doesn't sound intriguing though, then again I've never tried. I could love it.

If my calling isn't in broadcasting I would like to think I would have some version of a reality show. It would be interesting to have a Real World like show, minus the absolute ridiculousness of drunken kids that should already have jobs.

I would just like my life to be documented. I could crop out the boring stuff and have the good memories recorded for later days. People would appreciate some of the situations I've found myself in and I would just have to hope the producers allowed me to share what I wanted and not my entire life.

Let's be honest have of the reality shows are scripted somehow anyway. I should be able to pick and choose how I want to be portrayed but in the end it would be interesting.

For years now, social networking websites have been criticized for their lack of privacy and with backlash, comes acceptance.

Facebook tells people too much information, which you volunteer, but that is a whole other topic. Twitter is constantly updating followers about what you are doing and where you are doing it. Both networks became a little creepier when they enabled GPS coordinates from which you are posting and tweeting. But even with that said, people have embraced the GPS location sharing. A site such as Foursquare is solely based on the location and incredibly successful.

So, there is obviously a love-hate relationship with social networking. There is obviously a twisted concept of privacy in our culture. Both issues are based on the responsibility of the parties involved. Some people don’t care what they share; others care too much.

With that said, the new mobile photo application, Color, for those with nifty iPhone and Android phones, is pushing the limits of social networking and privacy a little further.

The idea of Color is based on people in public places with Smartphones. The GPS, along with a bunch of cool things you didn’t know were possible, such as using the camera to determine lighting and the microphone to pick up noise, the device “connects” you with people around you. Connection is used in the loosest form possible here; you are not actually following them, friending them or any of that real relationship kind of stuff. The connection is purely digital. When you step out of the 100-foot radius of them, your connection is over. While within the radius though, your connection is possibly one of the most personal, as Color shares the photographs stored on the phone.

Public is the default for Color.

Think about the kid sitting next to you looking at your photos on their phone right now. It is scary to think what you could see.

Think about showing the pictures on your personal password-protected phone with your parents – it could end very badly.

On top of that, because you are not actually friends with these people, there is no way to regulate who sees what. Friend lists cannot be created to make sure some pictures are available to everyone and some only to a limited group, like the photo privacy settings currently in use on Facebook.

Privacy is practically thrown out the window with this application, and again, like I said, some people could not care less about what other people know about them. This application would be for people in this category but even then, things can get creepy and weird.

As most college students do, living in the dorms or in apartments would quite possibly allow you to spy on the people down the hall or next door without ever speaking to them. I totally understand people who live on Facebook and constantly creep around from profile to profile, but at least there is some sort of regulation and protection.

Color is fundamentally encouraging voyeurism. There are no rules. You don’t know who is looking at you. Isn’t this how murder mysteries start?

Maybe I’m exaggerating, but downloading the application would be essentially like constantly looking through the peephole in the wall at your neighbor. But then think how twisted things just got when your neighbor actively notices the peephole is there and does nothing about it.

First off, why would anyone be comfortable with that? Secondly, this could create a whole new culture of everything Sut Jhally has ever taught in his online classes about the so-called “gaze.” (If you haven’t taken Sut Jhally’s class, look into it.)

Back to the peepshow analogy again: People now know others are watching them. Everyone engaged in this application would be putting on a show.

Color would be adding to this show culture that somewhat exists on Facebook, where people that want all the best pictures to convince others that they do cool awesome things and look pretty all the time.

Has anyone thought about the consequences of this application? Your identity can be stolen by putting too much information up on your Facebook page. You can die from sharing your location and personal photos with random strangers around you. This is not hard, people.

Free shots are dispensed to Spring breakers celebrating St. Patrick's Day at Senor Frogs in Nassau, Bahamas.

The Harp attracts a very diverse crowd, during the day and week nights it caters to “townies” like Randy (left) who has been returning for years.

v
Harpo, the owner of The Harp, is very involved int he local community, supporting several UMass athletic teams.

Harpo laying out the rules of Trivia to the forty plus people in attendance.

Students order pitchers by raising their hand and shouting the type of beer to Harpo during Trivia on Tuesday nights at The Harp.

Reviewing the menu while waiting anxiously for the next Trivia question to be asked by Harpo.

On Friday nights The Harp hosts various artists that partake in a Traditional Irish Seisiun (session).

Students and faculty gathered outside of the UMass Student Union for a rally on Wednesday, March 2, to voice opposition to Wisconsin’s proposed changes to workers’ rights.

The University of Massachusetts boasts that over 90 percent of its faculty holds some of the highest degrees in their field of instruction and that all sounds great when you’re reading it off of a computer screen. But in the classroom or lecture hall, things can get muffled.

Although we have some of the most intelligent people here at UMass – people who have been all over the world, and have done it all – it doesn’t necessarily mean they can teach. Without at least a minimal grasp of how to structure a class, communication skills and a grip on instructional strategies, passing the class can become a puzzle for students.

The classes that continuously jump around from one topic to another and then return to the previous subject matter are mazes. Everyone gets lost. Some structuring would do the class well by reorganizing the schedule a little so all this isn’t so confusing

But class structure is sometimes the least of your problems. The classes where the professor is standing in the front of a cavernous lecture hall on a podium accompanied by a poorly executed PowerPoint presentation are perhaps the worst. I swear that ten minutes into the class the audience has been lost, and the professor’s voice turns into that “Blah, blah” that echoes in the background of Charlie Brown cartoons.

These classes often come with the monotone professor who mumbles while looking down at the podium the entire time, while reading from notes that probably have not changed for years. Other times, it is simply a mere lack of enthusiasm. Students pay thousands of dollars a semester to learn the subject matter offered through these classes and the professor cannot adequately communicate the information. It is truly the most frustrating aspect of classes when you actually want to learn and just can’t because of an awkward speech disconnect.

It is ironic, too, that most professors encourage students to take public speaking classes, not realizing that they should practice what they preach.

The professors that are not exactly the greatest at communicating don’t offer as much advice either. It is like that older man mumbling to himself and occasionally addressing you at the bus stop. You attempt to answer shortly and hope that he doesn’t ask you any more questions. Professors who don’t speak clearly are less approachable, no matter how intelligent they are – it is just harder to understand what they are attempting to get across. There is no doubt that they posses a vast amount of knowledge just waiting to be released to their students, if only they knew how to communicate it effectively.

Supplemental instruction by teaching assistants is an available back-up option, and changing the PowerPoint slides every time the professor signals is probably not what they signed up for anyhow. While graduate students are also smart, without good communication skills and a clear, confident voice, nothing changes.

At least public speaking should be required and maybe a class on how boring a plain PowerPoint can be for the human brain. The same applies to textbooks and notes; they should be supplements, not the main lifeblood of a class because students aren’t getting the clarification and guidance from the professor.

The bar for requirements to be a professor and teaching assistant needs to be raised. Scraping by with poor people skills and less than acceptable supplemental material is hurting student’s grades, not to mention futures. Walking into an internship claiming you took a class and then not knowing the material is bound to cause disappointment and frustration.

Everyone learns differently. PowerPoint’s are great, but maybe some hands-on lab time would be beneficial (and maybe some videos), just to mix it up. It couldn’t hurt. Anything that doesn’t make a student feel like their time would’ve been better spent at home copying down bullet points.

Ultimately, many students come to college without any idea as to what they want to do and wait for that moment of inspiration in the classroom to judge where they will go.

Just think back to class that you enjoyed so much that you decided there and then to declare your major. The professor most likely was highly organized, and the class was mentally and visually stimulating, rather than a chore to attend.