All I’m asking is for a little less mellow, a little more angst. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without the community of people I’ve known and met through punk music, and I would be sad to see this corner of the world I’ve come to love so dearly miss out on that experience. Western Massachusetts, please: up the punk.

On Tuesday, Nov. 8 the Student Government Association’s Senate meeting convened at 7:30 p.m. in the Blanchard Great Room with Jodie Castanza, director of Residential Life, and Associate Director Melanie Lawson. The Residential Life staff intended to engage students in a discussion concerning policy and practices regarding student conduct regulation on campus, and the housing lottery.

The shuffling within the administration at Mount Holyoke continues this month, most recently in the Human Resources department. On April 29, Lauren Turner, director of Human Resources at Mount Holyoke, will be leaving her position to assume a similar role at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell as Associate Vice Chancellor of Human Resources and Equal Opportunity Outreach.

Many a senior thesis is generated from some spark of curiosity or inspiration that occurs during a Mount Holyoke student’s undergraduate experience. For Lauren Wooten-Smith ’11, the genesis for her multi-dimensional research can be traced all the way back to an experiment constructed for a high school science fair. Now, her years of research will be incorporated as part of a CBS feature documentary, to be aired in the coming months.

On March 11 at 2:46 pm, an earthquake registering at a staggering 9.0 on the Richter Scale struck just off of the eastern coast of the island of Honshu, Japan. The force of the quake also triggered a tsunami that hit the coastal cities of Honshu. Fukushima, one of the cities on the eastern coast of Honshu, is the site of a nuclear power plant, where engineers still struggle to contain radiation levels . At the time of the quake, three Mount Holyoke students were studying abroad for the year at the Associated Kyoto Program, which is a little over 450 miles from Fukushima, the site of what is currently the most severely damaged nuclear plant.

Washington, DC has been the recent seat of heated debate this legislative year with debts looming and budget battles raging, and at the spotlight in recent weeks has been put on federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Across the country, people responded loudly and in huge numbers with strong opinions on women’s rights to affordable reproductive health services. Soon, the conversation will be brought to Hampshire College campus, in a three-day conference titled “From Abortion Rights to Social Justice: Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom,” to be held April 8-10.

At four o’clock on Friday afternoon, I packed my car up with a week’s worth of dirty laundry and all the necessary materials for prepping for my midterms and headed west on 90, starting the long trek back to the small town I call home in Pennsylvania.

Action movie stars like Jackie Chan often inspire delusions of martial arts expertise in even the most timid of people. They take a few karate lessons. They learn how to impressively shout while punching, and they buy the cool white uniform that ends up collecting dust after they lose interest in counting in Chinese. At best, their self-defense repertoire will include enough skill to punch an assailant without breaking their thumbs.

With an overwhelming total of 906 pages, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is not a very well understood piece of legislation. To help debunk some of the document’s mysteries, Dr. John E. McDonough, former Senior Adviser on health care to late Mass. Senator Edward M. Kennedy and current director of the Center for Public Health Leadership at the Harvard School for Public Health, broke down the details of the bill’s ten sections in a lecture on Feb. 17 at Amherst College.

In the experimental and fun-loving spirit of J-Term, a group of Mount Holyoke students ventured into the wilderness of New Hampshire a few weeks ago to participate in a truly unique course on dog sledding and snowshoeing. More than just the techniques of these outdoor winter activities, the ten students who participated also learned basic winter camping survival skills. From Jan. 16 through 19, the College’s athletic Director Laurie Priest led ten students on a crash course in teamwork.