In the age of COVID-19, no one is a stranger to Zoom calls. However, for a group of educators led by Dr. Bradley Carpenter — an associate professor of educational leadership — a click of the “join meeting” button is followed not by a lecture or a conference, but by meditation and discussion on self-care.
Author: Jenna Fitzgerald
Jenna Fitzgerald
Jenna Fitzgerald is a senior University Scholar from Dallas, with a secondary major in news-editorial and minors in political science and Spanish. In her third year at the Lariat, she is excited to learn from her staff and walk with them through the daily joys and challenges of publication. After graduation, she plans to attend grad school and hopefully teach at the college level.
What distinguishes this path from today’s misguided ones is that it presents modesty as an opportunity to honor and cherish ourselves, not as a chore that must be done to prevent others from looking at us in an impure way, but above all, modesty is about empowerment and self-worth.
After establishing the Zavala Program for Constitutional Studies in the fall 2021 semester, Baylor’s Department of Political Science is preparing to kick off a series of lectures and reading groups in February while welcoming its inaugural class of Zavala Fellows.
Studies show between 22% and 30% of college students are at any given time in their first year of grieving the death of a family member or friend. At Baylor, with an undergraduate population of 15,191 students, that means between 3,342 and 4,557 undergraduates are currently in their initial stage of bereavement. With such a significant portion of college students wading through the trenches of grief, it is difficult to fathom how there could be such a profound lack of resources for them.
Yes, I am a part of that unlucky batch of about 13 million people in the United States who are afflicted by chronic migraine — a club that I wholeheartedly wish I was excluded from. Three neurologists, one MRI and a lot of blood work later and I have essentially no answers. All of my tests have come back normal, and I have been left with the extremely unsatisfying answer that some people “just have chronic migraine” — no cause, no cure.
I’ll be the first to say that perfectionism makes no legitimate sense. It’s unnecessary and — in a lot of cases — unattainable. For some reason, though, it’s impossible for me to move my goal post closer to reality. That’s the problem with perfectionism: you can’t just “turn it off.” It lives with you. It affects every task that’s set before you, whether that task is big or small. It drains you in more ways than one.
On Aug. 13, Baylor announced new protocols for COVID-19, which require masks in classrooms and labs and implemented twice weekly testing for those without an exemption. Its precautions, while certainly better than nothing, are a stark departure from the caution of last year’s response and can be characterized only as a weak and irresponsible attempt to curb the greatest public health crisis of our time.