Month: July 2020

Essays: The Little Stuff

Essays: The Little Stuff

Part 3 of 3. Most colleges ask applicants to respond to several shorter questions that are unique to their school. Hannah and Mark discuss what officers look for when reviewing responses to Yale-specific questions. Admissions officer Reed joins to share the admissions office’s process of writing and reviewing those questions at the end of each admissions cycle.

Yale Experts on the Parallel Crises of COVID-19 and Systemic Racism

Yale Experts on the Parallel Crises of COVID-19 and Systemic Racism

Anti-black violence, racism, and injustice are all too ubiquitous in our nation today and throughout history. As people called for actions to solve this crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed striking, long-standing health disparities in our nation. President Peter Salovey discussed the role Yale and other universities play in moving our society past these entrenched problems through our mission of education, research, and scholarship. He was joined by Elijah Anderson, Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies, and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, associate professor of medicine and of epidemiology.

Ep. 34 – Daniel Pauly on why overfishing is a Ponzi scheme

Ep. 34 – Daniel Pauly on why overfishing is a Ponzi scheme

Born in Paris to an African-American GI and a French woman at the end of World War II, Dr. Daniel Pauly rose from a difficult and extraordinarily unusual childhood in Europe to become one of the most daring, productive, and influential fisheries scientists in the history of the field — and the first to illuminate the global extent and significance of overfishing. A professor and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Pauly has devoted his career to studying and documenting the impact of fisheries on marine ecosystems and advocating for cutting-edge policies to address it. The software, scientific tools, and methods he and his research team developed have transformed understanding of how humans are impacting oceans. His research makes very clear that fish are in global peril — and so, in turn, are we. If our species manages to reverse course and avoid the “watery horror show,” as he calls it, for which we’re on track, it will be thanks in large part to his and his colleagues’ vision, courage, and decades of tireless work. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Pauly about the “toxic triad” that characterizes modern fisheries (catches are underreported, science is ignored, and the environment is blamed when fish populations collapse as a result), how “shifting baseline syndrome” — a term he coined — results in slow and inadequate responses to overfishing and climate change, why fish are shrinking and struggling to breathe as oceans warm, and why we need to end high seas fishing and government subsidies of international fishing fleets.

Chris Webby: Connecticut’s homegrown star isn’t afraid to lean into environmental activism

Chris Webby: Connecticut’s homegrown star isn’t afraid to lean into environmental activism

Chris Webby is an American rapper from Norwalk, Connecticut. Chris Webby has released many mixtapes such as the DJ Drama-hosted Bars On Me (2012) and his EP There Goes the Neighborhood (2011), which peaked at number 101 on the Billboard 200. He has worked with various artists such as Freeway, Mac Miller, Joell Ortiz, Big K.R.I.T., Method Man, Prodigy, Gatzby, Bun B, Tech N9ne, and Kid Ink. In 2013 he and his label, Homegrown Music, signed a deal with E1 Music. He then released Homegrown, another EP, in November 2012. Webster released his debut studio album Chemically Imbalanced on October 27, 2014. Most recently, Webby has released the compilation album, Next Wednesday, that features some of the many tracks he released throughout 2018 as part of his Webby Wednesday series.[1] In 2019, Webby released the third entry of his Wednesday mixtape series, Wednesday After Next.

Essays: What Doesn’t Work

Essays: What Doesn’t Work

Part 2 of 3. Application essays are an opportunity to speak directly to admissions officers and share meaningful insights and reflections. Unsuccessful essays miss that opportunity. Hannah and Mark share some of the ineffective choices that regularly appear in essays and discuss why each choice doesn’t work to the student’s benefit.

Cooking your way through the COVID-19 lockdown

Cooking your way through the COVID-19 lockdown

Remaining productive while staying at home can be difficult for graduate students who live and breathe experimental science. In this episode, Mai Ly overcomes that challenge by exercising her scientific skills through the art of cooking. Similar to the scientific method, Mai Ly envisions a dish with certain characteristics, does some prior reading on ingredient substitution, designs a protocol, and systematically modifies variables to make her vision a reality. And just like any good experimentalist, Mai Ly makes sure that her products are reproducible!

Dr. John Francis, “The Planetwalker,” on how we treat one another is how we treat the environment:

Dr. John Francis, “The Planetwalker,” on how we treat one another is how we treat the environment:

John Francis was in his twenties when a 1971 oil spill in San Francisco Bay jarred his comfortable life. Even as he joined the volunteers who scrubbed the beaches and fought to save birds and sea creatures poisoned by petroleum, he felt the need to make a deeper, more personal commitment. As an affirmation of his responsibility to our planet, he chose to stop using motorized vehicles and began walking wherever he went.
Several months later, on his 27th birthday, fed up with the arguments his decision to walk seemed to create with friends, John took a vow of silence lasting for 17 years.
During that time, he founded Planetwalk, a non-profit environmental awareness organization, received a B.S. degree from Southern Oregon State College, a Masters degree in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana-Missoula, and a PhD in Land Resources from the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ending his silence, John served as project manager for the United States Coast Guard Oil Pollution Act Staff of 1990, in Washington, DC, where he assisted in writing oil spill regulations. For this work, he received the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Public Service Commendation.
Over the years, John Francis has walked across the US, walked and sailed through the Caribbean, Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. He recently began a walk studying organic agriculture and sustainable development in Cuba, and is developing Planetlines, an environmental education curriculum based on the walking pilgrimage for high school, college and civic organizations. In 2005, he published Planetwalker: How to Change Your World One Step at a Time. The National Geographic Society will republish Planetwalker, April 2008.
Since John Francis began using motorized vehicles to return to and from his walking pilgrimage he speaks and consult with a variety of audiences around the world, including redefining environment for the travel and tourism industry, introducing the role of ethical advisor for civilian/military humanitarian operations, and encouraging diversity and inclusiveness within traditional conservation and environmental organizations.
On Earth Day 2005, he began a walk retracing his route back across the United States, looking for differences in the landscape and the conversations. His goal is to redefine the environmental problems we face into an inclusive concept, and to form partnerships among Native and non-Native people, cultures, businesses and organizations across America that might traditionally feel they do not share the objectives and values of environment and conservation. His thesis is that if we as human beings are an integral part of the environment, then how we treat each other and ourselves directly and indirectly effect the physical environment.
Today, Dr. Francis is visiting associate professor at the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is teaching both graduated and undergraduate seminars in environmental studies. He is also the first education fellow at the National Geographic Society where he has published two books, Planetwalker: 17 Years of Silence, 22 Years of Walking, and The Ragged Edge of Silence: Finding Peace in a Noisy World. They are partners in developing the Planetlines curriculum based on John’s walking experience that lasted over two decades.