"Absent Mind" by Josh Gilligan

The summer of my junior year I had the opportunity to go to Greece with a group of my classmates. It was a ten day trip through EF Tours taking me around Greece. We visited Athens, Turkey, Santorini, Crete, Mykonos, Rhodes, and Paros. The experiences and memories I made in these ten days was something I will never forget.

Across the country, many people have mixed opinions about the use of nuclear energy. The oppositions have arguments ranging from waste disposal to radiation effects, when most of the claims are fueled by false or inaccurate beliefs. The fact of the matter is, nuclear energy is vital to powering our country. There are certainly some incidents that have happened in the past that have given the nuclear industry a bad name, for instance Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island. The NIRS has an article with their Top 11 Reasons to Oppose Nuclear Power, with six of those reasons containing connections to nuclear waste. Now, while nuclear waste has been a huge topic of discussion since 2011 when the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository site was closed due to the end of Federal funding. Finding a new way to handle the waste has become a prominent discussion within the field, but has also been mentioned to be a political problem as well.

As a '90s baby who has grown up into a world that feels the need to categorize weight into clean-cut categories, when I saw that Barbie had released a "curvy" Barbie, I was ecstatic. I called my mom to tell her not to yell at me when she saw that some of my allotted food money was going to purchase a Barbie doll... at age 20. But then I began to investigate further and realized these dolls were a little to good to be true. While Barbie is certainly on to something with varying sizes, shapes, hair color, and means of expression for young girls, we are all still living in a Barbie world.

Most people who know me learned pretty early on that I LOVE to talk. However, one thing that a lot of people don't know is that I struggled with a speech impairment growing up. If you've ever heard a kindergartener talk, it is clear that they haven't learned how to say everything correctly yet. Most kids' speech improves as they get older, but for some, like me, talking the right way was really hard. I didn't even realize it until I began speech therapy in elementary school, but I couldn't even say words like "dog" or "cat" correctly. I also talked really fast, so that certainly didn't help anything. I never expected, though, that I would need speech therapy.