Eating good food on a daily basis can be important for staying sane and feeling healthy in college, especially when you’re leaving home for the first time. While the buffet-style meals and unlimited desserts of the dining halls may seem like luxury on your first week, by the start of classes you’ll probably be craving something that reminds you of home.
Once you try most of the restaurants on St. Paul Street (which, unfortunately, doesn’t take too long), you might want to explore places outside Charles Village. If you find it difficult to choose where to visit first, don’t worry! Here are some recommendations for good food in Baltimore.
Once you join the Hopkins community, you will soon learn to speak the Blue Jay language. Below is a list of words whose meanings are unique at Hopkins and whose presence are woven into Hopkins students’ daily life.
All incoming freshmen and sophomores at Hopkins are required to live on campus with their peers. This can be one of the biggest, but often overlooked, adjustments for most students coming out of high school. I know it was for me, so I’d like to offer some insight into my experience with my roommate and suitemates in my freshman year.
Welcome to Charm City! As your Leisure Editor, I see it as my obligation to introduce you to my favorite spots around Baltimore. Of course, I can’t possibly cover all the eateries, museums and wonderful neighborhoods in just 800 words, so I am choosing a few that students frequent the most: Hampden, Mount Vernon, Inner Harbor, Federal Hill, Fells Point and Towson.
After a summer of anticipation, attending every New Student Zoom available and obsessively soaking up every bit of information about Hopkins, my freshman year arrived. I imagined myself being very social, going out on weekends with friends and quickly forming deep friendships.
Yana I’m not going to lie and say I’ve always wanted to be a journalist because that simply isn’t true. I have always been interested in writing though, and it is this interest that brought me to The News-Letter.
I wish I was cynical about goodbyes. No matter how many times I’ve had to close a chapter and let go, nostalgia and sentimentality always get the best of me. As I lament the end of not just my Hopkins career but the time spent with my friends, I’ve always envied those who are able to rationalize goodbyes and move on, though I know this graduation is going to hit differently for all of us.
It’s hard to believe I’m currently writing my last article for The News-Letter ever. Though I have yet to walk across the stage at Commencement, this feels more like my true Hopkins finale. Yet this closing act of my studenthood hardly feels bittersweet. I can’t keep the corners of my mouth from turning up with gratitude while my fingers tap out reflections on the keyboard.
Dear freshman Leela, Four years ago, there was so much unknown. When I think of you (us?) standing on the stoop in Brooklyn, surrounded by all your earthly possessions, waiting for Dad to pull the car around to drive to Baltimore for orientation, I wish I could give you a hug.
“You are like a ball of constant stress.” I remember this line spoken to me during the beginning of my freshman year. At the time, I was still a Peabody Institute voice student, and I was in one of my earliest studio lessons. While nervously singing an art song learned hastily the night before, my legs kept shaking and my head could not keep still.
At this point, it’s not really a secret anymore, but, for those who don’t know, my name is Isabel, and I started @jhufreestuff on Instagram. To be honest, part of the reason I wanted to write this article was because of the theatrics (not surprising if you follow the account). The other reason was that I wanted a chance to reflect on what it’s been like to run this account for almost four years, which I can’t really do in one “face reveal” post on my Instagram story.
Content warning: The following article includes topics some readers may find triggering, including sexual assault. Back home in Taiwan, my family likes to joke that I am an ai ku gui: a crying ghost.
As someone who started at Hopkins in the fall of 2020, many of my “college firsts” were virtual. It’s hard to define when exactly my college experience became “normal.” It could have been in my first in-person class sophomore year or the first show I was able to perform without wearing a mask.
I made my last batch of brownies today. Not my last batch ever, of course, but my last batch for a few, specific, important people.
Believe it or not, one of the hardest goodbyes I’ve had to make at Hopkins was to a building — the Gatehouse to be exact. The grayish-green building, worn down yet exquisite in its architecture, that remains unknown to most of Hopkins represents much more than a corner of campus: it houses the institution of The News-Letter, an organization that I have dedicated my entire Hopkins career to.
Speak Out Now is a socialist group that advocates for active participation in ending capitalism through revolution. According to their website, a socialist system means the “common ownership and sharing of the world’s resources and productive capacity under the democratic control of the world’s peoples,” rather than the exploitation of labor and the ownership of profit by a small number of capitalists.
People notice the flashy moments of activism the most: the massive protests, the inspiring speeches and the ratified legislation. Activism is much more than that. Sometimes activism grows through spontaneous spurts of growth, and other times, its roots take time to spread. It's kept alive through the cultivation of continuity through tough moments of growth and active moments of flourishing.
In June 1976, roughly 10,000 students in Soweto, South Africa organized a peaceful protest against new legislation decreeing that Afrikaans, alongside English, be used in Soweto high schools. Afrikaans was known as the “language of the oppressor” in apartheid South Africa. Upon their peaceful march toward Orlando Stadium, the protesters were met with heavily armed police.
“When we first came here, many of us found that we were not entirely welcome. A great number of men came to Johns Hopkins not wholly receptive to the addition of undergraduate women. There were those who resented the intrusion of women into their male sanctuary; there were those who considered women incapable of surviving academic pressures; and there were those who feared women would be equal competitors. In many instances we felt unusually isolated from the rest of the community.”
