The College Contemporary

“The virtual workplace is the ultimate nightmare for young professionals trying to successfully kick off their careers,” argues Aurora Weirens. “Even in-person roles usually don’t specify that the rest of the office works remotely, which defeats the entire purpose. Interns working in an empty office space lack the opportunity to receive the same mentorship and education that they would have gotten from the day-to-day interactions and feedback from their superiors. This is the kind of training that makes an internship valuable, but it has been effectively zapped from our modern internship experience.”

Aurora Weirens is a student at Cornell University. You can read more of her work at

“An important piece of the puzzle has been left out of climate action — removing carbon dioxide directly from the biosphere”, argues Tyler Ory. “The sheer complexity and cost of scaling DCC to the necessary capacity presents significant challenges. These technical and financial hurdles make it clear that the private sector is not equipped to deal with a problem of this magnitude. While the commercial development of these DCC facilities is encouraging, there is little economic incentive guiding DCC towards cheaper and more efficient methods.”

Tyler Ory is a student studying meteorology and government at Harvard. You can read more of his work .

Ivy League institutions are starting to lose their luster, argues .dunson . This is, in part, because the idea of ‘merit’ has proved impossible to accurately quantify: “what constitutes skill, intelligence, and hard work is narrowly defined, leading to the inevitable exclusion of knowledge that doesn’t come from recognized institutions like the Ivy League.”

Caleb Dunson is an economics and political science student at . You can read more of his work at the .

Stricter STEM requirements may be the key to making majors in the humanities more valuable, argues: “We should treat the mathematical sciences, and the skills they develop, as flexible tools that can be used in a variety contexts. In the same way that writing an essay on the Aeneid does not make one a classics major, writing a Python script does not make one a computer scientist.”
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is an economics and computer science student at the University of Chicago. You can find more of his work at the

Technology-oriented majors can no longer expect easy access to high-income jobs after graduation, argues . “The tech industry is no longer a hotbed for idealistic college grads who want to ‘change the world,’ and the internal attitudes and cultures of technology firms may change to reflect this—a veneer of meditation pods and in-house therapists may remain, but with harsher competition and a slower flow of funding, I would expect tech companies to become somewhat less tolerant of employees taking ‘mental health days’ or working 30 hours per week.”

“There’s immense pressure to feel special and to constantly to constantly draw lines in the sand of identity about what us special—and therefore valuable,” writes Tanaka-Kekai. “But sometimes, we just need to sit back and relax and appreciate the centuries if people who have led us to where we are now.”

“In front of me are years of opportunity broken further open by the rise of the horizontal work model,” writes soon-to-graduate student Khira Hickbottom. “I expect to labor and quit and reassess over and over again, and the possibility of fluidity is, surprisingly, comforting.”

In the words of the author John Warner: “Students are rewarded for, at best, regurgitating existing information. Now we have GPT3, which, in seconds, can generate surface-level correct prose on just about any prompt. That this seems like it could be a substitute for what students produce in school is mainly a comment on what we value.”

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” -Stanley Kubrick

“In order to garner admission to elite colleges, young adults are forced to find a way to stand out from the crowd, isolating themselves from their peers,” writes Aliza Fassett. “This widespread apex-predator mentality is antithetical to what makes a strong community.”

We’re thrilled to launch our student-run literary magazine, . There, you’ll find short stories, satire, poetry, nonfiction and other creative work. Give em’ a follow.

“Parasocial attachments form when a media persona ‘becomes a source of comfort, felt security, and safe haven.’ They are functionally similar to regular social attachments, and come with the same feelings of grief when severed,” writes Bobby. “Every, young adults are mourning their connection to an artist they once loved. It’s the process of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance playing out on a massive scale.”

One day our instagram will settle on a font style I promise.

Let him in, coach.