Well, I graduated from my dream school Sunday. For the first time, school is not the center of my life. I have been in the education system for 17 out of my 22 years. Get me started, and I will spout off every reason I truly believe education is the future of our country.
My 3-year-old nephew will attend pre-school this fall. He would have you believe he earned that cap though!
Ask me if I’m happy it’s behind me and I will tell you: my future is undecided and wide open and it’s wonderful.
I-81 construction
Years before President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System spread across American cities and eventually through Syracuse, the city’s 15th Ward was a vibrant, diverse community. Within it were high- and low-income residents, white and black neighbors and the city’s first black dentist.
But in the 1950s and ’60s, the largely African-American community was razed to make way for an elevated interstate highway that would displace nearly 1,300 residents to the South Side. Whites took to the suburbs, leaving abandoned buildings in their wake.
“No one asked the community what it wanted when I-81 was built 50 years ago,” said James D’Agostino, director of the Syracuse Metropolitan Transportation Council, the organization responsible for Onondaga County’s transportation planning.
Walking underneath the I-81 viaduct
Today, portions of Interstate-81, the expressway that cuts through Syracuse, are nearing the end of their lifespan. The visibly decaying viaduct, the 1.4-mile elevated strip, prompted the transportation council and the New York State Department of Transportation to launch The I-81 Challenge, a public outreach campaign to address the future of I-81 in the next decade.
Images via The I-81 Challenge blog.
Photos by Andrew Renneisen (via The Daily Orange)
Part 3 of 3: Every year, the Syracuse community gathers in the Carrier Dome to celebrate cancer survivors, honor loved ones lost to the disease and fight back to end cancer. Part Three of this series acknowledges those who fight for the cure.
The abnormal cells grow uncontrollably. They first arrive innocently enough, manifesting themselves as an unusual lump barely worth mentioning. Or a cough that lasts a little too long. Or a bruise that, for some reason, just hasn’t gone away.
The cells spread, invading other parts of the body, destroying tissues in their way. They might travel through a lymph or hide in a white blood cell. Eventually, they announce themselves by ravaging the body they’ve invaded. Too often, they end a life.
Not everyone is willing to sit back and watch.
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Part 2 of 3: Every year, the Syracuse community gathers in the Carrier Dome to celebrate cancer survivors, honor loved ones lost to the disease and fight back to end cancer. Part Two of this series explores the ways in which SU honors, mourns and remembers the fallen.
Typically, one mourns alone. Behind closed doors and under covers, you can hide the raw grief that demands release. The tears that escape honor your grandmother, your great aunt, your father, your loveable Rottweiler, your best friend.
One night of the year in the Carrier Dome, members of the Syracuse community grieve together. They openly share their vulnerability in a ceremony of remembrance for their lost loved ones. No closed doors or covers are needed.
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Photo courtesy of Haley Buchan
Part 1 of 3: Every year, the Syracuse community gathers in the Carrier Dome to celebrate cancer survivors, honor loved ones lost to the disease and fight to end cancer. Part One of this series serves to celebrate one of SU’s own survivors.
There’s a feeling that grows as you near the light at the end of the tunnel. The sigh of relief you know will escape your overwhelmed body when you reach your journey’s promising end. “Everything’s going to be OK,” it whispers.
Heather Buchan saw the light in December. And by the end of the month, the Syracuse University freshman would see it disappear the moment her doctor delivered the news: Her cancer had returned.
Nothing could prepare anyone for that. But Buchan learned the day she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at 16 that there was never any certainty to living with cancer, and there was no certainty to living without it.
I arrived in Syracuse yesterday for my final semester of college. I don’t feel any nostalgia (quite yet), but more a surge of energy to tackle my last bout of academia (at least until grad school at some undetermined point in the future). I graduate in May. From there I will be a full-fledged member of the working class, with bills to pay, responsibilities still unforeseen, and challenges I welcome.
The view from my building:
