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 Asian Night I think that something that is important in a college search is the food quality, so I wanted to offer my opinion on our food options. Englar Dining Hall, Glar for short, has a lot of cool options. Honestly, it never ceases to surprise me.
This year they have already had so many theme nights. There was a backyard barbeque event where they turned off all the lights and had candles lighting the room. They had hot chocolate AND s’mores. What more could I possibly ask for at dinner?
My favorite so far has been the Asian food night that they had. I had sweet and sour chicken, fortune cookies, and most importantly, SUSHI! I really love sushi, so I could not have been happier. I went back to get more about five times. It was an awesome night for me!
 F’real lids always have fun sayings! Another of my favorite eating options at McDaniel is getting smoothies at the Green and Go. They have a F’real machine, and it mixes up the pre-made smoothies or milkshakes for you. My favorite smoothie is the mango one. They have tons of options, and they are great to have on a hot day. I also like F’reals because the lids have silly saying on the inside. They always make me smile.
McDaniel has plenty of cool eating options, and these are just two of my favorites.
In the last week, the Men and Women’s Cross Country teams were both victorious at the Penn-State Harrisburg Invitational, the Women’s Volleyball team continued their winning streak, the Men and Women’s soccer team had draws in their games, Alex Philo got 88 points in golf (a career low for her), and Ryan Salomon was victorious at No. 3 singles in tennis.
As a McDaniel Athlete, I’m proud of how well the other athletes are doing on campus. Are we perfect? No, but we’re a determined bunch of hardworking students intent on improving ourselves in our games (or meets or matches) and succeeding academically, as well. Balancing athletics and academics is always something that needs continuous practice and planning to be done successfully, and it’s amazing that so many McDaniel student-athletes are able to meet their goals.
Personally, I’m a member of the Women’s Cross Country and Indoor and Outdoor Track & Field Teams, but I focus on Track. Therefore, I’m excited that fall break is next weekend, which means winter sports get to start and I get to have my track practices and start training for the things I really want to do: pole vault and throw.
I’m excited that the basketball teams get to be back on the court playing their hearts out, the swimmers get to be back in the pool seeing how fast and far they can swim, the wrestlers get to be back on the mat, and fall athletes are coming up to the last weeks of their seasons, when they get to see how far into playoffs they can get and how much they can push themselves to be better.
McDaniel Athletics is a small but proud population on campus, and we really appreciate the strong support given to each other by other McDaniel students.
Today, I went to the Westminster Oktoberfest to volunteer with the Roteract Club. I volunteered last year as well, so I already knew I was going to have tons of fun. Oktoberfest is a German celebratory festival. The one we have here involves vendors, food, and live music.
 Live music! As a volunteer, I got to work parking, which is surprisingly fun. You get to greet people as them come in and help direct them. They also give us donations, which go toward our club and Rotary as a whole.
I love seeing the people in the town getting all dressed up in lederhosen. There are always tons of kids coming in and out, which always makes me smile.
On my break, I went go inside for a bit. I ate a pretzel with delicious coffee. The pretzel was less fully than the ones we are used to, but it was very sweet.
 My pretzel and coffee combo next to my donation bucket. I think my favorite part of this festival is getting to interact with people of Westminster. There are some really cool people in the area, and this is a fun opportunity to get to meet some of them.
All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed my day of volunteering. Go Roteract!
One of the classes I’m taking this semester is called New Media Writing, a fun 3000-level class offered by McDaniel’s English department. I took this class, in part because it would fulfill the last requirement I needed to fulfill for my writing minor, but also because I’m pretty darn interested in new media and writing for digital contexts.
New Media Writing is not your average English class. While we do have some discussions in class, we also have discussions on Twitter using class hashtags. Each week, we use a new hashtag (this week’s hashtag was #eng3307wk6–the last number in that hashtag changes depending on what week of class it is, so we’ve had weeks 1 through 6 now) and everyone is assigned a new role. Some people are assigned to tweet terms, others are assigned to connect what we’re learning to other related articles they find online, and others are assigned to be critics, meaning that they tweet critiques on what we’re reading and watching for class. Regardless of my assigned role for any particular week, I tend to tweet as all three roles because I think tweeting for New Media Writing is a ton of fun. I’ve also been known to tweet important points from class lectures and class inside jokes.
 Here’s some Almond Breeze coffee that accompanied me to New Media Writing on National Coffee Day earlier this week. One of our major projects for this semester has been to create what our professor calls “nichepertises,” areas of “expertise” related to McDaniel or Westminster in some way that we’ve created Twitters and Tumblrs for. We’ve also been given the choice between Pinterest or Scoop.it as a third social media platform to promote our brands on. The goal of the project is to learn how these different social media sites work, how to write and create texts for them, and to create a brand across these platforms. There are students writing about things from hammocks to study spots to how to survive a zombie apocalypse on campus.
My chosen niche has been coffee, and I’ve appropriately titled it “McDaniel Coffee.” While my original plan, in part, was to go around and write about and review local coffee places, because I had to send my car to the shop for a few weeks, I retooled my focus to be on just learning more about coffee instead. I’ve also tried to figure out and document what sorts of coffee people on campus are drinking.
I’ve created a Twitter, a Tumblr, and even a Pinterest for the class, and you should totally follow me!
Overall, I’ve learned a lot from taking New Media Writing–and all of that learning hasn’t been just about coffee. I’ve learned strategies for blogging (strategies that I hope to use for blogging here), I’ve learned about social media sites I’ve never heard of, and I’ve learned a lot about what new media is and how it works. Before taking this class and my senior seminar (which also has a tech/new media bent, being about webcomics), I hadn’t even realized that new media studies is an entire field and an academic one at that.
These days, everyone is surrounded by digital media. And knowing about these media and how to use them is invaluable.
Because I give myself permission on Thursday evenings to take a break from hitting the books too much, right after I finished my two-hour shift at the Writing Center, I met up with some friends in Red Square so we could walk over to the theater to watch McDaniel Theatre’s production of Buried Child.
I knew I had wanted to see Buried Child as soon as I heard about it because the show is dark; the theatre department tries to put on shows from a variety of genres from musicals to things that are completely serious. McDaniel College theatre hadn’t done a show so macabre during my time on campus, so I figured that this drama, written by Sam Shepard, was one worth seeing. I also have a number of friends involved in the theatre, so I also wanted to support them by going.
With a cast of seven talented students, Buried Child was certainly interesting to watch. The play deals with a dysfunctional, poor family living in rural Illinois who have a dark, mysterious secret. The first half of the play kept me and the rest of the audience guessing what exactly the family was hiding and why no one seemed to have any idea who anyone else was. And when the big secret was revealed in the second half of the play, my friends and I still weren’t quite sure what to make of it–how truthful was the big revelation?
Overall, Buried Child was a great show and it definitely had my friends and I talking as we left the theater. The show left us with a lot of questions, but in a good way–the kind of way that made us think and think hard. I know that if I can find some time this weekend, I might find myself looking up some scholarly criticism on the play to see what ways people who are more versed in theater and literature than I am have interpreted this play.
If you’re local, there’s still two more chances to see Buried Child: Friday October 3 and Saturday October 4, both nights at 7:30 p.m. in McDaniel’s WMC Alumni Hall. Want to learn more about the show? Read this McDaniel Free Press article written by two first year students.
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