Boo to the University of California, San Diego, admissions-letter snafu. More than 46,000 applicants received a letter from UCSD on Monday welcoming them to the 2009-10 school year. Sadly for 28,000 of them, the letter was actually sent out mistakenly to the entire freshman applicant pool, not just the ones who were actually admitted. While we’re (fortunately) past our days of waiting for acceptance letters for undergraduate education, we can all understand just how completely awful this must have been for the student applicants who actually got rejected. Even though it was certainly not meant as a joke by the university, this probably has to go down in history as one of the sickest April Fools’ Day pranks of all time. This “boo” deserves to be more than “booed” — we give it an “epic fail.”
Bravo to free self-defense classes. Tempe’s Chinese Shaolin Center is offering the free classes to women who not only want to learn the fine craft of martial arts and boost their physical fitness, but increase safety awareness and personal security. We know there are some creepers out there in Tempe, and even though ASU is generally a safe campus, it’s always better to be safe than sorry. Besides, it’s reassuring to know you could take down someone who is trying to hurt you by using skills you were smart enough to have previously learned at a free class. You know, in case you forgot that can of pepper spray or your Tazer at home.
Boo to the end-of-the-semester workload. Now, we understand that we aren’t paying tuition just to get a free pass to graduation — wait a minute, do we? But seriously, this “slap-the-students-with-as-much-s***-as-possible” April/May mentality just isn’t working for us. What’s wrong with spacing this stuff out? It’s a long semester, and at this point each year we find ourselves asking, “What the heck have we been doing with our time?” For some reason, those clear and concise syllabi always look so doable in January. But in the midst of graduation plans, senior theses and next year’s State Press applications (get yours in!), the fact that some classes still have something like 90 percent of the possible points still to be earned is too much for any one student to handle.
Bravo to the upcoming arrival of one of the most glorious days of the year, Major League Baseball’s Opening Day. Granted, it is rather hard to get over the fact that the league has ruined the fanfare of the day by adding a preceding Sunday night national-TV game to the schedule. However, it is something we’re willing to overlook because of the joy of a day full of baseball on Monday. Also, because it gives us back the ability to watch “SportsCenter” — now LeBron James-related news will only take up 20 hours of ESPN programming rather than all 24. Thank goodness for baseball season.
Boo to April Fools’ Day, for it showed us just how foolish we truly are. Mark Twain once said, “The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.” Well, that could not have been further from the truth in our office. Unnamed members of our staff, past and present, pulled various stunts from faking a birthday and reeling in courteous “happy birthday” greetings by the dozens to calling in a fire near a spot on campus called “Hayden Yard.” However, to us, the most disappointing part of the day wasn’t feeling like gullible dopes; instead, it was the heartbreak when we found out Google’s Autopilot e-mailing technology was not, in fact, available.
Bravo to the ASU women’s basketball team. The Sun Devils, led by six seniors, made a thrilling run to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament, eventually falling to the one of the best teams in women’s college basketball history, undefeated UConn. Now, the program has fallen only one game short of the Final Four two out of the last three years — quite the impressive feat. Though the ladies’ season ended sooner than we would have hoped, ASU should have nothing but pride in its women’s basketball team.
