Monday November 2, 2009
Well, we may still end up with a nation of unemployed 20somethings, but at least they'll be a really well-educated jobless group. According to Inside Higher Ed this weekend, grad school and Fulbright apps are up, wayyy up. Fulbright fellowships are US State Department-sponsored grants that send 1,500 college grads to study, teach or do research in 140 different foreign countries and by last week, some 8,500 students - 1,000 more than last year - had sent in their 2010-11 applications. Grad school applications are soaring too and Teach for America has never been so popular. Certainly seems like a good way to spend one's time, when there are so few jobs to be had. How's your new college grad faring?
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Thursday October 29, 2009
H1N1 vaccines have begun arriving on college campuses - and the very idea of a live vaccine nasal spray, which is what landed at my younger son's school, completely freaked him out. But just as those vaccines arrived, the rate of college swine flu cases nationally jumped by 34%, according to the American College Health Association. Some 8,861 new cases (including 20 students who were hospitalized) were reported the week of Oct. 17-23, including a surge on campuses where the disease seemed to be on the way out. Not good. On the positive side, the virus is continuing to be fairly mild, and campus health centers are urging students to come in and get immunized. Here's hoping my kid actually did so. He just kept repeating, "Live! Live?!"
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Sunday October 25, 2009
This may be the first Halloween in decades that I'm not carving a pumpkin. Talk about a rite of passage. We've gone through the baby costumes, the pint-sized pirates and wee witches, and then the gory, less-than-savory costumes. And my family has spent many a late October night carving pumpkins. But this year? Our youngest child is a high school senior and unless she suddenly gets the urge to carve up one of the beautiful, Martha Stewart-caliber squashes on the porch, this will be our first jack o'lantern-less year. And that's OK. We've decorated a little, we've got our stash of Reese's laid in and we'll welcome all those little trick-or-treaters with delight. But in many ways this feels like a turning point, an unexpected rite of passage into empty nesthood. And I'd be sad, had I not just read Peter Mayle's entertaining New York Times' piece on Halloween in France. "Do you mean to tell me," Mayles' French friend says in tones of utter outrage, "that pumpkins all over America are massacred, with all that good honest flesh tossed away, simply to provide a primitive decoration?" Don't those barbaric Americans know, he goes on, about pumpkin fritters and pumpkin risotto? Pumpkin gratin??
Ooo, merveilleux! Our failure to carve pumpkins this year doesn't stem from Halloween Grinchiness. We're being French! (We're also trying Mayles' friend's recipe for pumpkin risotto. And maybe whipping up some pumpkin chocolate chip bread too to pack off to our college kids.)
Thursday October 22, 2009
Got a college or high school athlete? Scary news about the risks of concussions and long term brain damage in the New York Times today. Seems the same type of brain injuries seen in boxers - and eight NFL football players who died in their 30s, 40s or early 50s - has popped up in a former college football player who didn't go pro. In other words, it's not just the intense, physical atmosphere of pro football games that causes chronic traumatic encephalopathy. And it's not just concussions. Now researchers are looking at football's "repetitive subconcussive blows" and youth sports and the possible impact on the brain.
"The focus of the discussion of brain-trauma issue has been on the NFL. It really needs to be on youth players," Sports Legacy Institute co-founder Chris Nowinski told the NY Times. "Ninety-nine percent of football players in this country are college and below. They're not being paid. They don't have as good access to medical people. And the fact that they're at risk for this disease should give us great pause."
Scary. Do you have a football player? Is this something you worry about? Or was the possibility of injury the reason you encouraged your child to try a different sport? (So asks the mother of swimmers and water polo players...)
