Essays

Editor’s Perspective: Ode to Joy

What I didn’t know about Beethoven as a child was that I’d grow to be an inch shorter and orders of magnitude tidier than he reportedly was. Learning to play the violin was all “perfect practice makes perfect” and had little to do with studying the life of the revolutionary composer. What I also didn’t know was that he claimed his role as an artist. Or that, despite failing health and being deaf, he composed what many consider the greatest piece of music of all time.

Features

Girls Can’t Be Engineers

Six-year-old Huy Tran dangled from a mango tree branch, spying through a hole in a hut’s palm roof. Below, the muted glow of a nine-inch black and white television flickered in the crowded room. Everyone had gathered to watch the Americans land on the moon. Peering through the part in the roof, Huy Tran witnessed Neil Armstrong bounce along the moon’s surface in his space suit. That day in July 1969, she began to dream. One moment. That’s all it takes for a spark to ignite.

Soldiering Up

“Is it real?” a student asks, pointing to Marlon Scott’s desert camouflage backpack. “Do you mean the material? Of course, it’s real,” says Scott, a San José State political science major and former Marine Corps corporal. He knows what the student is actually asking. One of the many questions he frequently evades: Were you over there? What did you see? Are you crazy? After two deployments to Iraq with his infantry unit, Scott decided to get out of the military and go to school.

Profiles