Ratna writes

This school year was a toughie! At times it felt like one big "sophomore slump," between hard classes and cold weather and dreary moments. But now that I've vanquished (okay, completed) my last exam of the semester, I wanted to take a second to look back on some of the silver linings of this sophomore year. Here are some of the things I'm proudest of from 2013-2014: 6. I took a philosophy class. Who would have thought I would take philosophy in college before ever taking a college English class? I knew as soon as I shopped Professor Sean Kelly's Existentialism class this spring and added it to my schedule in place of the Shakespeare course I'd been planning on. It was most refreshing to be taught "heavy" stuff by a professor who was at once so brilliant and so down-to-earth, a trait it's been hard at times to find here. To have a class full of engaging "aha!" moments and many a lecture that eventually proved something simple like ...

As many of you know, I've been lucky enough these past two years to get to know the family of one of my role models, Marina Keegan, and have been working with them on a literary tour for her first book, which was just released this April. Marina is an incredible poet, playwright, author, activist, and human who was killed in a car crash four days after graduating from Yale in 2012. Hundreds of people have flocked to book readings of The Opposite of Loneliness  along the East Coast to get, just for a moment, a glimpse of what hearing Marina's words read aloud can be like. I was honored last Friday to be invited to be a reader at one of these events, and to read Keegan's essay  The Opposite of Loneliness , which she originally composed as a commencement speech, and after which her book is named. I was thankful to have a number of friends attend the event, and each and every one was struck by the power and pertinence of Marina's expression, which can be described by no ...