Earlier this year Campus Life launched a review of our residential program houses, a process each academic unit experiences every seven years or so and one that Student and Academic Services has adapted for our many units. Just this year, University Health Services and Intercollegiate Athletics completed their accreditation / certification reviews by national organizations. Recently, the Hunter R. Rawlings III Presidential Research Scholar Program, the Prefreshman Summer Program and the Dean of Students Office, to name but a few, went through formal program reviews. Regular reviews are necessary to ensure the quality of the programs and services we offer our students.

As summer fast approaches, students’ thoughts turn from prelims and papers to the three months of freedom ahead. For some, these months will be filled with more hard work — pre-professional internships, grueling summer courses, long hours at a job — while for others they represent an oasis of laziness and tranquility.

To the Editor:

Re: “WARNING: This Column Is Not Kosher for Passover,” Opinion, April 15.

Like the author of this column, I faced the challenge of explaining Passover to my friends. It is incredibly difficult to explain to someone in five minutes why I cannot eat bread, rice, pasta, peanut butter, corn syrup, etc. on Passover.

However, I find that Cornell Dining has made it easy for me to keep fully kosher for Passover. The Kosher Dining Hall, 104 West, offers great food options for Passover. Not only do they serve the traditional matzoh and gefilte fish, but also interesting items, such as kosher for Passover pasta and rolls. As a vegetarian, I have never had trouble finding something I can eat.

Not too far from the Hogwarts-style dining hall, a different kind of magic was stirring in the halls of Risley. This past weekend, the Risley Theater hosted three performances of “An Evening of Wonder,” a mind reading and magic show presented by Risley’s own stage wizard and psychological illusionist extraordinaire, Jon Tai ’11. And as its name suggests, the show was nothing short of wonderful.

Buying textbooks at the start of every semester has become significantly cheaper for the hundreds of students across the country who have taken advantage of Skoobit.com.

Skoobit is an online textbook rental company that enables students to potentially save money by renting, as opposed to buying, their textbooks. Textbooks can represent a large chunk of the cost of higher education and it can be exasperating for students to spend hundreds of dollars per book, only to turn around and sell it at the end of the semester for only a fraction of the purchase price.

Today is a day for new beginnings. As the Cornell community comes back to life with the start of spring semester, an estimated 2 million people from all around the country and the world descend on our nation’s capital to celebrate another beginning — the inauguration of the 44th president, Barack Obama. Over 100 of this throng will be Cornellians, looking to take part in the making of lifetime memories and of history.

What follows is in reply to “The Doggy-Style Lover,” a controversial and thought provoking piece which raised the issue of alcoholism and gender equality at Cornell.

Welcome to The For Real Cornell Diaries, where I print the totally accurate, recorded lives of Cornell students. This week only, a new made up diary will be printed. While I maintain nothing about anything, all facts have been verified and all diaries record the true, unedited lives of different Cornell students living in The Real 14853.

9:30 AM: Still sleeping. Gonna check back on myself later.

On Nov. 4, Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States. A key contingent of Obama’s support base was the nation’s youth — most recently termed Generation O — who campaigned across the country for “The Change We Need.” Now that the American citizenry has voted in favor of Obama, the question remains as to what will happen to the student activism.

While Prof. Theodore Lowi, government, called the increase of student activism “impressive,” he sees it as a unique phenomenon.

Approximately 200 students danced the night away on Saturday in the Straight Memorial Room. The evening, which lasted from 8 p.m. until 2 a.m., marked the first-ever dance marathon hosted by the Order of Omega and the Student Union Board to benefit the Golisano Children’s Hospital in Syracuse.

Erica Shreck, vice president of the Order of Omega at Cornell, stated in an e-mail, “We are so excited to have been able to bring the Greek and entire Cornell community together to support such an amazing cause that positively impacts the greater upstate New York region.”

Outsourcing is abuzz and computer science enrollment has dropped, but in Cornell’s world-renowned computer science department, students and professors alike are confident that this outsourcing trend will not impact their futures.

When asked if outsourcing is a concern that comes up among friends, Noah Santorello ’09, president of the Association of Computer Science Undergraduates, said, “Never. Computer science is not like finance where everyone’s concerned about getting a job when the economy gets bad.”