When it comes to whether or not one should get a vaccination, it's important to have all the facts.

When studying the debate over the minimum wage, I began to consider the effects of campus wages at Boston College. Year after year, on-campus prices increase. Football games, theater productions, and charity events are additional costs that are not factored into a semester's tuition. These costs can be quite a heavy burden. As our nation looks to increase the minimum wage, student employees should join the movement to increase their on-campus wages.

Three young men sit in the stands watching a hockey game. For the two seniors, it's their final game at Conte-the last of many. Their conversation is resigned and detached-Boston College goes on to lose this game and faint worry is only just starting to set in. Mostly, the three young men make big pronouncements, each pronouncement anchored in the 20/20 hindsight of old age. They're seated pretty high up.

If you've ever seen Mario Savio's 1964 "put your bodies upon the gears" speech-a part of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at UC Berkeley in which he fearlessly urged his fellow students to take on a university that he saw as oppressive, tyrannical, and corrupt-then you know that you've probably never seen a display of conviction as passionate and as brazen as his at Boston College.

Sometimes it's educational to spend some time looking at your fellow library-goers instead of at your books.

As an education dork fascinated by policy issues, I recently spent a lot of time reading about the Common Core. For those of you who haven't heard of it, the Common Core is a set of academic standards and learning goals that outline what a student should know and be able to do at the end of each grade. What motivated me to write this column was my shock at turning on my computer the morning Indiana dropped out and realizing "Common Core" was trending on Facebook.

The term "lost" tends to connote chaos and confusion. Lost is the exact opposite of having and abiding by a plan or carefully reviewed map. As my professor stated, perhaps getting lost can actually reveal to us places, people, and experiences that we never would have even fathomed had we stuck to our personal maps and plans.

Although the world of higher education poses academic challenges that develop one's critical thinking, a more significant challenge students confront is one that tests their grasp on the environment from which they come.

A quick Google search for the phrase "spiritual but not religious" yields a list of varied results-everything from webpages espousing spiritual aid, to humanist chaplains writing on how to be good without God, to religious advocates warning against the dichotomy of spirituality and religion, to a host of popular media sites, each with its respective columnists and pundits popping opinions left and right.