The Carletonian

Sunday, May 18, the Carleton Christian Community opened up their prayer tent outside of the chapel to commence a week “of uniting the body of Christ at Carleton, in Northfield, and beyond, in and through prayer,” according to their schedule. The prayer tent is this year’s celebration of Unity Week, which the Carleton Christian Community organizes annually to celebrate unity between different Christian denominations. In the past, however, Unity Week has usually been a smaller event and involved more interaction between Carleton and the community of Northfield. This year’s event is decidedly larger.

Last Friday, May 16, saw a piece of Carleton history being made when Campus Activities sponsored the school’s first student spelling bee. The bee began in the Chapel at 7 p.m. with twenty-nine contestants. Two and a half hours later, the field had been narrowed from the originally twenty-nine to three tenacious freshmen: Garrett Miller, Molly Nichols, and John Cossette.

Sean Sweetnam ‘08, a physics major, has been awarded the Fulbright Scholarship and will travel to Switzerland, where he will attend Neuchatel University and conduct research on solar cells.
Sweetnam gives many reasons for his decision to accept the Fulbright. “The Fulbright is a great opportunity to continue studying physics. I’m planning on working with solar cells, and I’m hoping to do some traveling, too.”

On Saturday, May 17, Carleton hosted the annual Area 10 Special Olympics track and field tournament, the qualifying event for the statewide State Games to be held in June. Adults and children with intellectual and physical disabilities from nine Special Olympics delegations in southeastern Minnesota came together for the all-day event.

Carleton held its annual Spring Concert last Saturday. Despite the rain, students came out en masse. They danced to the tunes of student bands Duck Bus and Sorpresa. Caroline Smith, Kinetix, and the Cool Kids also took to the stage. Headliner Dr. Dog closed the concert.

The fourth and final anticipated candidate visited campus this Wednesday and Thursday in the job search for the new Director of Campus Activities. The new candidate is, according to student workers at Campus Activities, already the favored pick by the administrators who will choose the new Director.

Carleton’s Student Association (CSA) passed the Spring Allocations, Monday, May 12th, with proposals to take steps toward evaluating and making changes toward the Love Bus Program and the College Readership Program.

Spring Allocations opens CSA to discussion about the amount of money given to each student organization, contract, and line item expenditure.

This year’s CSA budget breakdown allocates 82,212 dollars for Operating Funds; 175,302 dollars for Large Organizations; 17,778 dollars for Small Organizations; and 138,000 dollars for Line Item Expenses.

This spring, senators proposed ways to make the College Readership Program more environmentally friendly and efficient. Among the approaches referred to multiple times during the debate were: installing reusable bins, advertising that CSA does not get charged for newspapers not taken, and putting some newspapers on bars like they do at Blue Mondays.

To receive credit from non-Carleton programs, applicants must submit a variety of petitions to the Carleton Off-Campus Studies (OCS) office for the office to determine if the program will be a good fit for the student, in addition to submitting the applications for the program itself.

Senior Miranda Fix, Mathematics major and French and Francophone Studies concentrator, was awarded the English Teaching Assistantship (ETA) Fulbright and will spend 10 months, starting this fall, in Yilan, Taiwan.

For the school’s admissions department, April and May represent a conclusion to all of their efforts from throughout the year. After sifting through thousands of applications from November to March, the admissions office now reaps the fruit of their labors as accepted students have responded to the school for the class of 2012.

And it’s been good news for the school. With one of the biggest high school graduating classes in history, there was a 2% increase in the number of applicants as the pool rose to 4950 applicants. Accepted students are coming from 40 states and 16 foreign countries. As of now, excluding students yet to be accepted from the waitlist, there will be 496 students, 250 men and 246 women,with 21% of those students coming from multicultural background and 7% of new students coming from foreign countries.

It's another big year for Carleton science departments. Sophomores have chosen majors, and the results are in. With a total of 62 sophomores declaring, Biology tops the charts for the most majors this year.

Coming in second, Political Science boasts 50 new majors with 17 in the traditional Poli-Sci field and 33 specializing in International Relations. Social Science stronghold Psychology came in third, with 46 declared majors.

The anonymous graffiti artist responsible for the A-shaped, monster and alien figures around campus was caught by campus security on May 2. John Mawhorter ’10, a Cinema and Media Studies major from Claremont, CA, was spotted graffiting on at in front of the LDC by a campus security officer at 3:00 am.