OPINION
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COLUMNS
How to voice your vote in Alachua
By TJ Pyche | Aug. 21, 2018Welcome to Alachua County, Gators!
Opinion | Columns
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Feeling stuck
By Sophie Feinberg | Aug. 8, 2018College is a time of big changes for anyone. There are a lot of major decisions to make.You have to select your area of study and decide how you’re going spend your time on campus. The moves we make during these years on campus can outline the trajectory for our future. Making concrete and life-changing decisions can feel overwhelming. Things in and out of your control can affect your life path. Choosing one club or class can feel insignificant. But, on the other hand, one experience can illuminate a dream you never knew you had. Conversely, one class or club won’t make or break your life. A failure or a misstep can be a chance to learn or find what’s right for you.For me, this year has been especially crushing. I’ve felt stuck and frustrated due to how sick I’ve been. This summer, I wasn’t able to take on an internship. I’ve been in and out of the doctor and stuck in bed unable to focus on anything. I’m scared how sick I feel now is going to impact my future.Writing my columns for this Summer semester was really my only connection to a world outside of my phone, class on my laptop, bedroom or doctors’ offices. Sometimes I wrote what I needed to hear myself. Other times, I wrote about something impacting me in real time. Some things were reflective.For me, I’m glad I made the decision to write this summer for The Alligator. It taught me a lot about myself. I’m stuck on more than one decision for the Fall semester and grappling with the realities of what I can and can’t take on. More decisions being made by my body without my input.I can’t tell my body to give me more energy and magically function at its best. I wish it was up to running down Stadium Road or past Century Tower under a curtain of Spanish moss. I wish I could spend late nights on campus working in the newsroom or at The Alligator. I wish I could do more outside of my dorm bed and fill my UF bucket list to the brim with things other than going to UF Health Shands Hospital multiple times a week, not for an internship, but for visits.These decisions are made for me, by my doctors or by my health. I can’t change them as much as I want to. What I can do is make the most of the decisions left for me to make. College has taught me many lessons beyond the classroom, most of them about life. I may not have had my dream internship or campus experience yet, but I do have wisdom from my unique experiences that I might not have gotten any other way. And I do have wonderful professors, doctors, mentors and friends who have given me something that’s one of the most important parts of college to me: community.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Why moving out of my dorm made me ugly-cry
By Layla Soboh | Aug. 8, 2018Today, I moved out of the dorm I’ve been living in for two years. I secretly liked living in a dorm, and I feel a little sentimental leaving it for a house. Once you get past the embarrassment of telling people you’re a sophomore living in a dorm, it’s not too bad.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Try listening to the Turlington crazies
By Stephan Chamberlin | Aug. 8, 2018We all know the walk through Turlington Plaza. It’s a veritable minefield of distractions. People handing out pamphlets, students trying to get you to join their clubs, doughnut sales for the nexus of evil: the Alachua County Humane Society. But there are also those who have a less-than-appealing message. Some of the Turlington heralds preach a very religious message of fire and brimstone, and some go way overboard on the rhetoric. The next time you walk through Turlington try to keep an open mind and listen to what they’ve got to say.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
See you later, Alligator — Stefano’s goodbye column
By Stefano Ferreyros | Aug. 8, 2018Throughout the semester, I’ve read and edited some pretty bad columns, so I’m hoping I’ve learned how to write a good one.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Things that make you go ‘hmmmm’: how we lost our 24/7 Library West (Part 5)
By Zachariah Chou | Aug. 8, 2018Given this is my final column for the summer, I wanted to go over everything that went wrong in the way Student Government handled juggling Newell Hall and Library West. Well, perhaps not just everything that went “wrong;” maybe also things that make you go “hmmmm.”
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Targeted ads will save advertising
By Stephan Chamberlin | Aug. 6, 2018You search Google for “sunglasses.” You browse for a while. You look at a few on Amazon, a few on Ray-Ban’s website and ultimately decide to leave the purchase for another day. But now every website with Google AdSense, like the sidebar on Facebook, offers you sunglasses. It’s called targeted advertising, and even if you might think it’s annoying, computers seem to know us better than we know ourselves. I’m okay with big data as long as it’s good data.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Make money to live, dont live to make money
By Layla Soboh | Aug. 6, 2018Since I was young, I was always taught to save my money for a rainy day. I got piggy banks as gifts and learned to pick up pennies on the street (only the ones faced heads for good luck). I knew that if I saved up enough, I could buy my own house just like my mom did. But somewhere along the line, the messages I was receiving about penny-pinching became inconsistent.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Exhaustion shouldn’t be a badge of honor
By Sophie Feinberg | Aug. 6, 2018As the end of the Summer semester approaches, weeks of hard work are coming to fruition.Libraries across campus fill with hordes of students. Amid the silence of focus, small hums of conversation focus on lack of sleep, cups of coffee and hours spent studying.It’s almost a competition. Who took the most credit hours, who did the most extracurricular activities or logged the most hours at work. Life is a never-ending game of quantity over quality. Our world often focuses on numbers. They define our acceptance into college, whether we move onto the next class and seemingly if we worked hard enough. Increasingly, life is about quantity over quality. That’s not to say numbers as a form of quantifying work is bad. However, our society seems to take this to an extreme. Sometimes these numbers feel like our worth. Sleeping less and doing more is rewarded in this world that revolves around work. It’s thought to bring more productivity. More tasks complete. More ideas. More effort. More progress. More money for a company. More job advancements. More and more and more. But what happens when there’s nothing left to give, like when at the end of the semester students are often sleep deprived and burnt out?Students should evolve the way they see their work. More isn’t always more.Working to the extremes of fatigue is dangerous. Numerous articles appear when you look up “overworking.”Overwork leaves your body run down and low on sleep. This leaves you as an easy target for illness. Stay on campus for a semester, and you can tell when people are getting tired. Everyone is sick.You’re likely emotionally, mentally and physically exhausted. Overworking can lead to less productivity for this reason. There’s a point when continuing to work or study ceases to be worth the loss of sleep.Studies on this topic go as far as to find that overwork can even lead to early death. This jarring statement shocked me to my core. Since I was an elementary student, the school system I learned in enforced the reality that more work equals more success. We were made to be test-taking machines, competing against one another for the highest grades and recognition.I think this is dangerous and needs to change. I’ve been on the receiving end of burnout. In a particularly tough school year, I was hospitalized four times. I have a chronic illness. Stress and lack of sleep make it worse.However, in my life, sleeping less and doing more was met with reward, which reinforced the need for my behavior. If I wanted to be successful, I needed to work more — even if it was at the cost of my health.Even outside of the school system, into college and onto the world of the job market, the same message of working more often permeates.I think adjustments should be made so people take care of themselves and don’t see time spent away from work as a consequence of more work or less sleep later.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
(Un)willingness to pay: How we lost our Library West (Part 4)
By Zachariah Chou | Aug. 1, 2018Students here at UF pay a fee of $19.06 per credit hour called the “Activity and Service Fee.” Multiply that by however many credit hours students are taking, and this is how Student Government gets its $21 million budget.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Goop is a scam, but I can’t stop reading it
By Layla Soboh | Aug. 1, 2018Wellness, where health and happiness intersect, has become a trillion-dollar industry. It’s come at the cost of science and truth.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Facebook is a mixed bag for mental health
By Stephan Chamberlin | Aug. 1, 2018Ever wondered if your constant browsing of social media is depressing you? Here’s the science.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
I’m not faking it: the shaming of invisible illnesses
By Sophie Feinberg | Aug. 1, 2018Periodically, this story makes the rounds through headlines: Someone with an invisible illness has been publicly shamed for using accessible parking or other aids.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Addiction is a symptom of mental illness, not a personality flaw
By Layla Soboh | July 30, 2018Pop star Demi Lovato’s drug overdose has triggered an ongoing debate over whether addiction is a choice or a disease.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Disability in the 21st century
By Sophie Feinberg | July 30, 2018On July 26, 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed. It recently passed its 28th anniversary, which means it’s been almost three decades of the official reshaping of society’s accommodation, perception and admission of disabled people.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Inclusion isn’t a check mark
By Sophie Feinberg | July 25, 2018Everyone is a different person with different needs. Diversity and inclusion are important. In journalism, there are so many stories to tell. But often, some voices go unheard.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Stand your ground stands for legal murder
By Layla Soboh | July 25, 2018Last week, a 5-year-old watched his father die in a gas station parking lot. The shooter, Michael Drejka, will likely face no charges because of Florida’s incredibly lax stand your ground law. The victim, Markeis McGlockton pushed Drejka to the floor after he came back from the inside of the gas station to find Drejka arguing with his girlfriend. Little did McGlockton know that making the mistake of pushing too hard as defense of his family would lead to his death. Drejka shot from the floor at McGlockton who as evidenced in a security video was not lunging at him after the first push.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Rain is far more than a hardship for the homeless
By Stephan Chamberlin | July 25, 2018The drone of rain on the car roof is almost deafening. It comes through to the inside like loud TV static. If you peer out the window at the mute downtown scene, between the droplets, you can see that white water pours off storefront awnings like an avalanche. On the flooded sidewalk, huddled in a shallow doorway, a faceless man’s fingers hold a cardboard shield in defense against the damp. The problem of homelessness is never so striking as it is in a rainstorm. An increased supply of short-term shelter is a more immediate solution to this problem which statistics fail to capture.
OPINION
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COLUMNS
Clear eyes, empty chairs, students lose: how we lost out 24/7 Library West (part 3)
By Zachariah Chou | July 25, 2018It started out innocently enough. “24/7 Study Space Survey” says the subject line for the email that flies into my inbox from former Monroe County Detention Center inmate/Student Body President Smith Meyers. “Your responses to the attached 5-minute survey will be invaluable as we prioritize support for the overnight study spaces needed for your academic success.”
OPINION
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COLUMNS
I’m a 20-year-old geriatric
By Sophie Feinberg | July 23, 2018I’ve had dozens of doctor’s appointments this summer.My medical chart classifies me as someone with high-risk medication usage.The people at my pharmacy know my name.I have more than five diagnoses, and they keep coming.I appear out of place in specialists’ waiting rooms and in society.Expectations for my peer group don’t align with the lifestyle I live or want to live.When I’m not in class, doing extracurricular assignments or studying, I’m at the doctor or recuperating with heat pads and ice packs in bed. I’ve never been out to Midtown or even a football game yet because I’m scared about my health and accommodations. An outing can cost me a semester if I’m not careful. Pushing myself doesn’t make me better. It can leave me in the hospital. But I keep doing it anyway because I want to be with friends, gain experience in my major and be a part of the UF community.It’s hard to balance society’s expectations with how I live. What is even harder is how I balance my own expectations and goals with where I’m at. I’m constantly at odds. Even in doctor’s offices, I’m misunderstood. I’m accused of lying or am not taken seriously. “You’re too young to have these problems,” isn’t an uncommon message from doctors. No kidding.Wishing or wondering won’t make my circumstances change. Pushing onward has a silver lining. I’m learning to find my voice, be an advocate and reason with professionals. It’s given me a different kind of strength amid my physical weakness. I hate pity. I just want understanding, especially in health care. If there’s anything my life has shown me, it’s that there is a health care gap. There’s specialized care for older patients but not for young ones with similar issues. That’s a problem.Worse than feeling alone and in pain is going to get help and being refused or unheard.This is a widespread problem. I’ve had to wait months for a diagnosis. I’m still waiting for solutions to other problems. That could take years. Worse than fighting to live “normally” is fighting to be heard and waiting, feeling sick and knowing something is off but jumping from doctor to doctor until someone finally listens. Then it’s waiting for test results. Then it’s becoming your own doctor. It’s turning to Google and scanning medical research and asking for, or demanding, tests. It’s researching at-home treatments.
