Veerle de Jong

The point is, our passions shouldn’t fall to the back burner simply because we feel pressured to focus on academics and careers.

Even if you don’t identify as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, reading queer literature is an important doorway — one that leads toward creating a more accepting world that celebrates attraction and love in all its beautiful forms.

We tend to focus so much on needing new experiences when we enter college — a new city to explore, a new home to decorate, finding new sights to see and checking off all the new foods and restaurants we absolutely need to try.

As an avid admirer of the botanical, I absolutely adore having a range of plants and flowers in my home. Not only do they freshen up and lighten our living spaces, but they also teach us a responsibility for our environment as we care for and nurture our plants.

To negate all the bad luck I feared was coming my way simply for having so many wonderful people in my life, I felt the need to be perfect at everything I did — to work myself in circles so that I would be deserving of them.

January 2022 me feels like she existed lightyears in the past, but that’s because my life is so different now then it was just a few months ago. Even though there’s so many events to process, while I reflect on everything I’ve experienced this year, there’s one moment in particular that stands out most.

Dead week is looming over our shoulders, so you all know what that means: how many different ways can we procrastinate studying for our finals? The answer is endless, because if college students are good at anything it’s putting off all their work until the very last minute.

Baking is the perfect excuse to take a much needed mental health break from all that studying and it helps us get into that wonderful holiday spirit! I don’t know about you all, but I’m an absolute sucker for ginger, cinnamon and anything else holiday spice – hence the following gingerbread cookie recipe.

There’s so much good and bad to unpack, but I won’t bore you with the particulars. Even though I felt like I was being thrown back and forth a lot, I managed to make it through all right – and I’ve learned some valuable lessons along the way.

Let’s be honest, finding the perfect gift for someone can be one of the most stressful and time-consuming tasks. You might spend days, maybe even weeks, searching for a gift that will hopefully make that special person grow the biggest smile in the world, only for them to be slightly excited or even disappointed when they receive it.