The Stentorian Newspaper

Tag: community

  • Student Researchers Recall Highlights and Memories from SRIP 2024

    Student Researchers Recall Highlights and Memories from SRIP 2024

    From left to right: RBio students Rishi Saroya ’25, Yvonne Shih ’25, Saachi Arun ’25, Ava Cummings ’25, and Anneliese Heyder ’25. Anneliese Heyder

    By Anneliese Heyder, Stentorian Editor-in-Chief

    For the Research in Science (“RSci”) students, the last day of the Summer Research and Innovation Program (SRIP) has arrived. Students can be seen hanging up their lab coats, cleaning their goggles, and wiping down their workspaces where they’ve spent most of their days. Lab notebooks are out, students hunched over them while furiously scribbling final comments, details, and any data they’ve managed to collect in the last few hours before they head home. 

    For students in the Mentorship program, the last day isn’t for two more weeks. 

    SRIP, NCSSM’s flagship 3-5 week program provides students with one essential component to their research: time. During this period, students are allowed the time–from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day–to dive into their projects. 

    Once that clock hits 5 o’clock though, students are allowed to spend their free time however they wish: maybe walking down Ninth St. for dinner, going to the movie theatre at The Streets at Southpoint, or playing a game of badminton in the ETC courtyard. On the weekends, students can sign up for numerous events: a trip to Falls Lake, Target, or take the bus to the farmer’s markets in downtown Durham. 

    SRIP is comprised of multiple research groups and opportunities. You have the RScis (RBio, RPhys, and RChem) and RHum, RCompSci, REXCompSci, and Entreprenuership, which all occur here on the Durham campus. Mentorship, on the other hand, requires traveling to other colleges or universities and doing research in their labs. Both options have unique opportunities and experiences, allowing you to explore your curiosity and strengthen your research skills. 

    Erin Bienstock ‘25, recounts her daily SRIP routine at the Durham campus.“Students would leave school at 8 [a.m.] and since my mentor is at [North Carolina State University], I would get to the lab a little before 9 a.m.” Bienstock said.  “My schedule was different every day but I spent a lot of time making new fabric designs in [Computer-aided design (CAD), 3D-printing the designs, and testing them in the wet lab. I also researched companies to get quotes for new products we could experiment with.” She would finish her work by 4 p.m. and return to school by 5 p.m.

    RSci days were similar: they were long days in the lab, with students bustling around as they focused on their goals for the day. 

    Jonathan Charleston ‘25 recalls the busy days in the lab during RBio, including “morning sessions,” which involved a group discussion of goals for the day and “Starting out we had our morning sessions which involved getting started for the day, any protocols we need to look over. Then we had our after-lunch sessions, where we did the bulk of our work.” he said, adding that each day was “about 8 hours.”

    Each research project is different; each student has their own goals, deadlines, and struggles. Bienstock’s research is funded by NASA; she explains how she’s formed great connections with other students in the lab. Charleston is focusing onmaking prostate cancer testing more accurate and accessible by using a paper-based assay. These two projects are vastly different, but they allow both students to satiate their curiosity and develop their skills. 

    While everyone is working independently, SRIP allows the bonds between students to grow and evolve. Old friendships are strengthened and new ones are born. SRIP offers a collaborative environment, where students and mentors can offer their insight, opinions, and help to each other to see everyone succeed. 

    Bienstock reiterates this by adding, “This has made it easier for me to speak up and contribute my own ideas to the project.”

    When I asked her about advice for juniors applying to the program she said, “I would tell anyone applying to Mentorship to read research on the subject you think you want to find a mentor in. This will give you a good idea of what your experience might look like and you can write your essays about the papers that really inspired you.”

    “I loved how personalized [research] is.” Charleston said. “My project is very personal to me, and being able to tailor it to exactly what I want to do is probably my favorite part.”

  • Do young people still care about local politics?

    Do young people still care about local politics?

    By Teresa Fang / April 8, 2024
    On October 30, the Chapel Hill Youth Council hosted a forum for the mayoral and town council candidates for the then-upcoming municipal elections. (Teresa Fang/Stentorian)

    Many young people lament the polarized national politics we are set to inherit. But are we worthy of lamenting when we don’t even care about local politics first?

    I am a product of what I know as journalism and Chapel Hill civics. I worry less about the health of US democracy than I do about the deteriorating health of interest in it. Too many times have I heard a fellow high schooler voice their opinion about a recent national policy, but when confronted, they stare and cite a TikTok influencer or a popular podcaster. This response is exaggeratedly worse for local politics; local political apathy tears young people from reality and sets a precedent for misinformation.

    I single out social media as one of the largest facilitators of political apathy. A survey from Gallup reports that over half of US teens (ages 13-19) spend a minimum of four hours on social media every day. That’s four hours of being exposed to conformity influences, from beauty standards to cancel culture to the polarization of national politics. With social media becoming ever increasingly accessible, anyone can exercise their laws of free speech on social media while the consequences of spreading baseless claims become nigh invisible. 

    Anyone can complain about an issue, but can just anyone change anything about said issue? People may be knowledgeable on national politics, but if a citizen has concerns about a bus route or stormwater runoff, their representative in Congress can’t help them. But their local town council member can. If a student notices a decrease in the quality of their education at a public school, that’s just an observation supporting the recent national trend. If that student notices a difference in education at their school relative to other schools in the district, then that’s a different story. 

    Local politics impacts day-to-day lives. If young people can change our nation’s future, why don’t we try paying closer attention to our town first?

  • Knife Violence: A Prominent Issue in the United Kingdom

    Knife Violence: A Prominent Issue in the United Kingdom

    By Om Nair / May 24, 2024

    A protest against gun and knife crime in Brixton, London, in May 2024. (Peter Marshall/Alamy)

    In 2023, on a Sunday night in the midsts of North London, a gang of thugs burst into a rural chicken shop and slashed a young man with their machetes as customers (and other employees working behind the counter) fled during the attack. The young man desperately crawled under the counter, hoping to hide from the lively mob. Sadly, it was no use. The group of thugs climbed over the top and, according to an article published by The Sun, “continued their attack on him” (Duffy). After the ordeal had ended, the young man was reported staggering away, with one of his pant legs appearing to have been viciously ripped from a machete blow. When police arrived at the scene (around 9:15 PM), two men – aged 20 and 17 – were taken to the hospital to treat their stab wounds. Fortunately, neither of their injuries were life-threatening. 

    Knife violence incidents are extremely prominent in the United Kingdom, with Home Office data, in March of 2022, showing that there were “261 homicides (currently recorded) using a sharp instrument, including knives and broken bottles. This meant sharp instruments were used in 405 of the 594 homicides that occurred in 2021-22” (UK Parliament). In 2023, in the city of London alone, 21 teenagers were killed – with 18 of them passing away from brutal stabbings.

    Famous English actor and rapper Idris Elba joined protestors from the “Don’t Stop Your Future” campaign outside Parliament, dressed in clothes in shoes that are characteristic of those who have been murdered by knives. “I can’t stay silent as more young lives are lost to these brutal and heartless crimes,” Elba said. “As school returns, too many young people will not be joining their classmates and too many grieving families have lost a young person they love in recent years” (AP News).

    The term “knife crime” has started to become a common phrase used in the media, yet the very definition of this phrase has become ambiguous. Knife crime can refer to a variety of circumstances, ultimately making it difficult to define and even comprehend its popularity in our society. To put it simply, knife crime refers to any illegal act that involves the appearance of a knife. This means that scenarios ranging from sexual assault and robberies can be deemed as a “knife crime.” 

    Recently, the media (news portals, media influencers, politicians, and more) have claimed that crimes involving the use of a knife are an “epidemic” and are detrimentally influencing the younger generation. A research report posted on the National Library of Medicine’s website titled “Exploring UK Knife crime and its associated factors: A content analysis of online newspapers” provided statistics that support this notion by mentioning the emergence of stabbing instances in the United Kingdom and other neighboring countries, “Knife crime offenses in England and Wales have increased by 80% in the last five years, reaching levels not seen since 1946. Offenses involving knives or sharp instruments rose by six percent from 47,388 to 50,019 in England and Wales before the first Covid-19 lockdown was imposed… Most of the victims and the perpetrators of these crimes were Black and Asian, especially young people aged to 10 to 25” (Vinnakota, Rahman, Sathian, etc. al.). 

    Quoted from a report written by Joshua Askew and Sudesh Baniya, ‘violence is like a virus.’ As cases of knife violence continue to surge in England’s society, the sense of fear that is associated with these stabbings will become contagious. That fear is often accompanied by a strong urge for security. Pointed out by Patrick Green, Chief Executive Officer of the Ben Kinsella Trust (an anti-knife crime charity), ‘The vast majority of young people don’t carry knives. They know it is wrong. But there are some who we as a society have failed to keep safe and help make better decisions. Social exclusion, poverty, deprivation, inequality, racism – a whole number of factors make people vulnerable to being drawn into crime and, ultimately, violence. Once it becomes established, it grows quickly.” 

    But, the United Kingdom isn’t the only country that is facing these colossally high knife crime rates. In fact, knife violence is also a prodigious problem in the United States. While the majority of the homicides committed in our nation are done so with the use of a firearm, recent federal research studies have displayed that knives are the second most used weapon of choice in murder cases. 

    So, while the UK government has been heavily criticized for their inability to maintain their high knife-crime rates in their streets, it is worth mentioning that knife violence is not just a local issue on the streets of London or Manchester, but rather a global complication concerning several countries and their citizens. A write-up created by Robert Kaiser named “The Global Rise of Knife Crime” jumped into this idea by providing statistics pertaining to certain countries that have shockingly high knife crime instances, “Let me highlight just a few headlines and dates of some rather horrendous violent incidents involving edged weapons from around the world, helping us to understand that it is a global issue, not limited to a certain belief, language, culture or country… Germany: Newspapers reported about a serious increase in knife crime, telling us that ‘…more than 1,600 knife-related crimes were reported in Germany during just the first five months of 2017, an average of 300 each month, or 10 each day.’ On the 20th of July this year (2018), at least 14 people have reportedly been wounded, two of them seriously, in a knife attack on a bus in Lubeck, Germany… Israel: Only a few days ago, on the 14 November 2018, a terrorist wounded seven police officers in a stabbing attack in Jerusalem… Australia: On November 9th, 2018, a man set a car on fire and stabbed three people in Melbourne, one fatally. He died in hospital after being shot by police.”

    Knife violence is a problem that is rarely mentioned or thought about when talking about global issues. Understanding the prominence of knife crimes, not just in the United Kingdom but throughout the world as a whole, can help several communities pay more attention to the gruesome (and frequent) consequences of knife violence.

    So, the next time that you find yourself participating in a discussion regarding difficult situations happening across the world, consider shedding light on knife violence and educating your peers on this topic. By talking about knife violence (and other sensitive subjects), we can help administer change by cultivating more attention around this problem.

    Citations:

    1).https://www.euronews.com/2023/04/20/violence-is-like-a-virus-why-are-so-many-british-kids-stabbing-each-other

    2). https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-weapon-used/

    3). https://www.gafirm.com/legal-blog/commonly-used-weapons-for-homicides/

    4). https://www.ppss-group.com/blog/the-global-rise-of-knife-crime-why/