A part of my life is soon com­ing to an end.

It is spring 2013 and time to say good­bye after 19 years of school. That is almost two decades, and 82.6 per­cent of my life that has been spent in school, which is just crazy. What is my next step? Well, hope­fully a job, but as of today, I do not know my future. I do not have a plan.

Come May 11 when I walk the stage in Wink Arena, I will be leav­ing Ferris; leav­ing friends; leav­ing fam­ily; leav­ing my job; leav­ing my home of five years. It seems I will be leav­ing a lot behind but tak­ing a lot more with me. (more…)

Are we liv­ing above our needs?

I know I could eas­ily live with­out a tele­vi­sion or my iPhone. Have I cho­sen to live with­out it? No.

So this col­umn is not about lec­tur­ing any­one, but to encour­age you to hon­estly think about what you truly need for hap­pi­ness. (more…)

Social media is a large part of our world today. As pop­u­lar as it may be, there are sev­eral drawbacks.

A lot of social net­work sites are over­rated. While I am on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, I do not use them on a reg­u­lar basis. I just never got too involved with updat­ing the world on when I sneeze or go to work­out or where I am at every moment of the day.

I want pri­vacy in my life. While I am a very social per­son and love engag­ing in con­ver­sa­tion, I need time away from the world. I need to be signed off and indulge in a good book or work­out with­out every­one else know­ing. It is not healthy to be con­sumed or obsessed with these net­works. (more…)

Customer ser­vice.

My first job was in cus­tomer ser­vice at a local fast food restau­rant. This was not only a great place to start gain­ing work expe­ri­ence, but also teach me life lessons.

I was able to be on the other side of the counter serv­ing cus­tomers as they came and went. As many of you have prob­a­bly expe­ri­enced, cus­tomer atti­tudes vary from friendly to down right rude. Dealing with those upset or mean cus­tomers was always a chal­lenge I had to over­come. My motto was the cus­tomer is always right, and I should make the expe­ri­ence worth­while. I was rep­re­sent­ing the fast food chain. The last thing I wanted to do was make the cus­tomer unhappy and regret com­ing. (more…)

It may be from edu­ca­tion or just a pas­sion I have to be sus­tain­able, but I am wor­ried about where our nation is head­ing in regards to energy.

Over break I trav­eled to Tennessee and along the way, I saw the roller coaster of gas prices. The prices did not deter peo­ple from trav­el­ing though. This is an energy source most of us use on a daily basis, and it is pol­lut­ing our air. Technology is improv­ing and more vehi­cles are going elec­tric or improv­ing their miles per gallon.

During my trav­els I also saw fields upon fields filled with wind tur­bines. I was so excited to see that more and more wind tur­bines are being installed. I know some think these are more of a neg­a­tive impact than pos­i­tive, but why not use the wind? Wind is free, after all, and will always be here. (more…)

I could not imag­ine what life would be like with­out the edu­ca­tors I’ve had in my life. Most of these peo­ple were my teach­ers in school.
 
One par­tic­u­lar teacher who stands out was my music teacher, who always believed in me.
 
I was in the fifth grade and tried out for a solo for our spring per­for­mance. Now, let’s set some­thing straight. I love to sing, but I do not sing the best. I do not con­sider myself a singer; I am the one who thinks I sound good singing in the shower and alone in my car, but that is it. (more…)

Don’t be deceived by a name or a size. No mat­ter the size, any­one or any­thing can have big potential.

This goes for the Mini Countryman that suc­cess­fully landed a back­flip. Now, it may have been a smaller engine and very lit­tle clear­ance in the orig­i­nal, stock model. But like most things, it takes time and a mon­e­tary invest­ment to make changes to a vehi­cle that will increase the performance.

The Countryman took some work to soup up the engine, lift the car and add some good sus­pen­sion. I under­stand not any­one can just attempt to make changes to cars. You have to have expe­ri­ence in order to cor­rectly alter a vehi­cle. (more…)

Gossip engulfs our lives, whether it is from our friends or on the front page of the tabloid mag­a­zines in line at the gro­cery store.

We have all heard gos­sip. We have all told gos­sip. We have all been a part of gos­sip, whether we want to be or not.

The prob­lem with gos­sip is the accu­racy. How do you know what your friend told you is really true? What is the source of the infor­ma­tion? (more…)

Crazy. That is what the weather has been lately.

It seems like every time I blink Mother Nature is strik­ing again. Each time it seems to be worse.

We can all remem­ber Hurricane Katrina leav­ing behind a mess in her destruc­tive path. And this past fall, Hurricane Sandy swept the East Coast. After almost eight years, New Orleans is still strug­gling and only a few months later the East Coast cities are still try­ing to get back on their feet. (more…)

An opin­ions col­umn was pub­lished in the Jan. 30 edi­tion of The Ferris State Torch about pro-life speaker Rebecca Kiessling, head­lined “Shaming the Survivors.” The arti­cle accused Ms. Kiessling of say­ing that rapists do not deserve to be pun­ished. This is false; she does not believe this and never said it. Instead Ms. Kiessling said that the chil­dren con­ceived in rape do not deserve to be punished.

On behalf of The Torch, we would like to apol­o­gize to Ms. Kiessling and the Ferris State com­mu­nity. Publishing false state­ments is uneth­i­cal and is not up to the stan­dard of The Ferris State Torch.

There was clearly a break­down in our edit­ing sys­tem prior to pub­lish­ing the col­umn in the Opinions sec­tion. Our val­ues of truth and fair­ness were not upheld with this col­umn being pub­lished with false state­ments. The col­umn has been removed per­ma­nently online. (more…)