Drama Board's Spring 2008 One Act Play Festival featured three short pieces and took place in the Dean Bond Rose Garden. Excerpts from the first, Overtones by Alice Gerstenberg, showcased Katherine Walton '11 as Harriet, Miriam Rich '11 as Hetty, Katherine Bates '08 as Margaret, and Kim Cramer '10 as Maggie. The scene was directed by James Robinson '10.
Members of Rhythm n Motion dance company describe it as a community of passionate dancers whose souls are in tune with the rhythms of the African Diaspora. Their high-energy performances always enjoy wide community support and this spring's dance concert - featuring 15 members of the Class of 2008 - was no exception.
The 2008 presidential campaign brought Chelsea Clinton to campus a few days before the Pennsylvania primary. She was greeted and escorted across campus by the Swarthmore Phoenix before being welcomed by Student Council President Peter Gardner '08 and introduced by Michael May '11.
At the Phoenix Mascot Tryouts, Swarthmore's oldest a cappella group Sixteen Feet performed one of the school's early 20th-century fight songs in honor of the event. Their rendition of "Hip, Hip, Hip for Old Swarthmore," complete with a reference to athletic rival Haverford College, proved a real crowd pleaser.
Mascot tryout hosts Claire Melin '08 and Kyle White '08 put the seven candidates through a three-step audition process: talent, athletic, and pep. At the event's conclusion, the judges chose the finalists to form the College's first-ever mascot team.
Nobel Laureate John Mather '68 tells the story of how the universe began with a Big Bang, how it could have produced an earth where sentient beings can live, and how those beings are discovering their history. Mather, co-recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for providing increased support for the Big Bang theory of the universe, is a senior astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He includes in his talk, the 2007 McCabe Lecture, Einstein's biggest mistake, how Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe, and NASA's plans for the next great telescope in space, the James Webb Space Telescope.
Sociologist and Associate Provost Sarah Willie responds to a recent poll questioning the relevance and significance of Black History Month. "When I say I'm a critic, I just mean that I want Black History Month to go further," says Willie, whose research interests include social inequality, higher education, and African American culture. "It's very relevant and I'm looking forward to black history, black sociology, black psychology, and black literature and the arts studied all year long."
Fans turned out in full force to support the men's and women's basketball teams in two overtime games against longtime rival Haverford College. The women won their match-up in a back and forth game that saw six ties, while the men gave a strong effort in an ultimately close battle.
For their final projects, students in Professor of Engineering Carr Everbach's methodology class invented percussion instruments that could all be played from the same MIDI piano, or from MIDI files that could be sent to the piano. Instruments included water chimes, hanging bells, a steel pan drum, a toilet plunger organ, and a glockenspiel."The goal was a robotic percussion orchestra that would possibly be useful in a musical or dance performance," says Everbach, whose main areas of interest include acoustics and environmental engineering. "Each group brainstormed ideas, learned how to use the machine shop, investigated electronics, solenoids (coils driving a magnet through induction), and servo motors, and did Matlab programming."
