Features

Being the new kid on the block is never easy. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the 3rd grade or in your third year of college. Change can be one of the hardest things to deal with. Lauren Pyle, a transfer student from Irvine Valley College, Coastline College and Golden West College has experienced an educational path unique to most of us: being home-schooled from kindergarten through high school, going to community college and then transferring to UC Irvine. The thing is, she doesn’t see her challenges as something to keep her down. She sees them as things to help her learn and grow.

Turkey is a notoriously difficult animal to prepare. Thanksgiving turkeys tend to weigh in between 15 to 20 pounds, taking forever to cook through and the thighs and the breast need to be cooked to different temperatures and everyone is deathly afraid of undercooked fowl. This often leads to dry breast meat ruining everyone’s meal, requiring diners to pile on the gravy and the cranberry sauce.

It’s no secret that Irvine isn’t exactly known for its crazy nightlife. In fact, the talk is usually about the opposite: Irvine doesn’t have one. Still, even if the campus seems empty at night, there are quite a few places in Irvine to chill with friends and enjoy each other’s company at night.

Nutritionists say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It gives you the nutrition necessary to function the rest of the day. Without it, our bodies don’t run as well and we can be met with fatigue and moodiness. Knowing this and studying to be a nurse, I still didn’t eat breakfast, until one day I found myself waking up to breakfast at a friend’s apartment after a night of late-night studying for a final.

On average, Thanksgiving dinners have more than 3,000 calories, and it's easy to see why, with all those scrumptious pies, candied yams, endless turkey stuffing and creamy casseroles. Many of us sit back, get comfortable, and consume over 6,000 calories during turkey day. This definitely will not do your waist line any good.

There’s nothing better than a perfect burger. A properly prepared one is comprised of plenty of pleasurable mouth feels from warm crusty ground beef, velvety melted cheese and lightly toasted bread. When done badly, however, burgers can quickly descend into an unappetizing mess of ingredients that barely go together. As simple as putting some meat, cheese and vegetables between two pieces of bread may seem, putting together burgers presents some interesting problems not normally present in other dishes.

“Spontaneity” is defined as behavior that is the result of impulse, not planning. I spent one year as a Boy Scout when I was in second grade. I never learned to tie complex knots or survive in the wild a la Bear Grylls, but my impressionable mind locked the motto “Be prepared” into my young memory.

One particularly memorable moment back in high school, I was walking behind this guy whose pants were sagging so low that he had to walk like a penguin in order for them not to fall down completely. At the time, I thought that it was ludicrous that he was willing to go to those lengths just to make a statement about his own identity and style.

Technology has played a vital role in improving our lives, affecting many different areas, from medicine to engineering to media and so on. With our dependency on technology growing, it's not a wonder that it's also been changing our education system. As time passes, more and more teachers invest in different forms of technology in order to better their teaching strategies. The issue is if these investments are really helping students move forward or if they're simply hindering the learning process.

Job interviews have a lot in common with blind dates: You sit down with a previously unknown person, talk for a while and exchange some details before ultimately deciding on whether or not you will start seeing each other much more frequently in the future. Granted, interviews are much more one-sided, but the analogy still holds. You go to interviews and blind dates with a similar mentality. Anxious. Excited. Hopeful. You want the person on the other side of the desk (or café table, all the same) to like you. You cautiously poke around a blind date’s life like you feign casual glances around the office as you walk to the interview room, watching to see if you’d fit in.

My aunt used to babysit me after elementary school and my mom always had this rule that if I didn’t have a page written to give to her, she wouldn’t pick me up or take me home. Those pages began as wide-ruled paper covered in six to seven oversized, disconnected words written in agonizing torture (“BIG CORN JUMBO COB YUMMIE GOOD”). But by high school, I was writing for my own pleasure, making me realize that somehow, whether it was due to my mother’s unusual mandate or my own manifestation, I loved to write — and that I loved corn too.

Winter can be an unfortunate time in Southern California. It’s not because of the changes in the weather or the impending holiday season, but because of what this temperature drop does to the fashion sense of most SoCal natives.