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MAY 6, 2009 | THE MEREDITH HERALD • Educating Women to Excel \ VOL XXVI • ISSUE 16
Meredith College
Goes Global
(SEE PAGE 2)
INSIDE
3 Events
■ Meredith College
Goes Globa! ,
4 Science & Technology
« Kindle 2: For Me and You?
5 Arts & Humanities
■ ! Am Charlotte Simmons
By Tom Wolfe
■ Bonjour de France:
Welcome Back to Reality
6 Sports
■ Meredith College
Intramurals
. 7-8 Opinion & Campus Life
■ Meredith Moments
■ JackAstor’s
■ The Dalai Lama and
The Tibetan Secrets to
Youth and Vitality
Green Tip for
the Week of
May 6
Find the size of
your ecological
footprint by visiting
www.myfootprint.org.
During tiie 2008-09 academic
year, Meredith College’s cam
pus theme is “Sustaining our
Environment: Developing
our Greenprint.” To help the
Meredith community make
daily choices that are ben
eficial to the environment,
Angels for the Environment
have compiled a year's worth
of tips for greener living.
To view green tips from
previous weeks, visit www.
meredith.edu/campus-theme/
environmental-tips.htm.
END OF AN ERA:
NEW BEGINNINGS
Beth Mulvaney
Contributing Writer
You’ve made it to graduation. Now what? You’ve com
pleted Gen Ed, your major(s), minor(s), rounded up and
turned in those twelve convocation forms, and it ap
pears that you will get to participate in that grand rite of
commencement! It will be exhilarating and emotional.
You have made wonderful friends here and you have
participated in numerous time-honored Meredith tradi
tions, but you know it’s time to move on to the next
phase of your life. On May 11th, when you wake up a
graduate of Meredith College, what’s next?
The last few weeks of each semester, I spend a lot of
time with seniors, asking them about their accomplish
ments at Meredith and what their next steps will be after
graduation. This year, a year dominated by persistent
headlines of economic doom and gloom, has created
more obstacles for students intent on assuming their
place in the world, testing out the skills they honed in
their semesters at Meredith. April Rummage, a graphic
design major, remains cautiously optimistic while not
ing she has had to revise her job hunt strategy. While
she would like to start in a large design firm or an ad
vertising and marketing agency with a variety of clients,
she realizes she will probably need to target a business
that does in-house design as an entry-level position. Al
though she has gained a variety of experiences at Mere
dith working on different publications like the Meredith
Herald and the Colton Review, she cannot get her foot
in the door of the larger design firms. She needs more
experience. Jobs that once might have gone to the new
ly-graduated now are being sought by those with more
Photo Courtesy April Rummage
experience who have been laid off or squeezed out of
other positions. As she moves toward May 11th, Rum
mage ponders how to make herself stand out from the
other applicants. She urges underclasswomen to seek
out as many internships as possible and to get experi
ence out in the community before they graduate. Great
advice, but getting and keeping internships is difficult.
I have also spoken to seniors and underclasswomen
who were laid off from internships. In each instance, it
was a painful experience, but one that gave them time to
reflect. With this loss came a new recognition that they
needed to be flexible and ready to reinvent themselves
to take advantage of whatever opportunity they could
find. Claire Keane had wanted to work a couple years
in an architectural firm as an interior designer, but the
architectural world has suffered greatly this past year.
Some firms have laid off 50% of their staff while others
have reduced the staff to 80% time (and money). Keane
has done all the right things, networked through people
she knows, applied to numerous jobs close and far, and
she also looked to graduate school as an option. She
has been offered admission to UNC-G’s MA program in
architectural interior design, which looks increasingly
like a possible haven for her to wait out the recession.
Senior Math major, Anna Morgante had always
planned on graduate school, and long ago picked her
top schools, but this year graduate programs have been
affected by shrinking pools of funding for graduate stu
dents. When Morgante realized her top choices would
See BEGINNINGS, PAGE 2