I chose to write about stress, because let’s face it, stress is a part of our everyday lives, no matter how much you want to get away from it, it always is in the back of your mind, lurking, waiting to strike at the most opportune moment when you are most lax. This topic fits well within the walls of Baruch due to the fact that most of the student population is stressed on a daily basis; impending due dates, overloads of work, taxing hours, the list goes on and on for what a college student has to deal with. Not enough people understand how to deal with it and manage it to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Starbucks is a place that’s known for their delicious coffee.  This hold especially true in Baruch, and that’s why we thought of doing our project on this.  The person in my group that came up with this idea was Katerina.  The topic of Starbucks gave the members a lot to write about.  It wasn’t boring to research and was a joy to learn more about this company.  This topic reflects my first year at Baruch because I’ve spent a ton of money on Starbucks coffee this semester alone.  There are Starbucks coffee available everywhere and because of this, Starbucks was the perfect topic for our project.

We decided on culture because it is such a dominate feature in all of our lives. We all came from different ones representing the diversity in all of Baruch. This cultural diversity is very important to the Baruch environment and student society. It exposes us to cultural from all over the world and aids in cultural unity. We all accept the different cultures and intertwine together. This is something that everyone, not just Baruch students, should practice. When we graduate and become business leaders we can take this acceptance with us and make America, maybe even the world, a more culturally diverse and accepting place.

For our New York Times project, we chose to focus on various types of cultures. Everyone in our group is from a different cultural background, so choosing who wrote about what culture was very easy to do. I’ve noticed since coming to the city that Italian culture is extremely common everywhere you go. Being half Italian and half Irish, I thought speaking about Irish culture would be more interesting for everyone else and for myself because it isn’t commonly spoken about. I found an article speaking about an Irish culture museum, so I thought that would be perfect for this topic. The purpose of the museum opening was to bring light to Irish culture which sometimes seems to be forgotten, which is exactly what my goal was in discussing Irish culture.

Our group chose the topic of culture because upon our initial experiences at Baruch, we found that there were an abundance of people who were from various countries and places in the world. This makes for a greater community filled with various cultures and experiences that allow for an expansion of learning amongst each other. Given the fact that we valued culture so much, we felt it would only be right to shed light on the five different cultures that we represented in our group. That is why we chose to find the different New York Times articles that talked about Jamaican, Moroccan, Colombian, Italian, and Irish cultures. Culture was less of a concern to us as it was a great characteristic of the school and because of that, we decided to focus on it not only on the macro level of the school, but also the micro level amongst our own group.

New York City is full people, and people have places they need to go. What better way to get around than the subway? It’s cheap, fast, and trains come every few minutes. Obviously the subway system is an important part  of many citizens’ daily schedules. For Baruch students living at 1760, the 6 train downtown is the ideal method of getting to school. Well for me at least. Riding the subway so often without any better alternatives made me choose this topic to learn about the system I rely on.

I am a New Yorker.  I am an American, a Long Islander, a High School Graduate. But above all that, I am a New Yorker. New York is never dull and is always moving at light speed. Few things ever stay the same in New York. But some things are ingrained into the very fabric that makes up New York. Some things are a part of New York’s past, it’s future, and it’s present. It is part of the very blood that flows through the city veins, it is one of the many things that define New York City.

The bagel is the core of New York.

The history of the bagel is so intertwined with the history of New York that you can not tell the story of one without the other. New York is the key ingredient in Bagels. It is a well known fact that the farther you travel outside of the 5 Boroughs (And Long Island, Long Island takes pride in it’s bagels) the less likely you are to find a good bagel. If you can even find a bagel at all!

As a New Yorker it is my duty to understand the complex and varied history of the bagel. From it’s humble beginnings at the Sabbath table in Krakow, Poland, to it’s fame and glory when an astronaut brought a dozen bagels into space. A bagel is more then a mere morsel of food, it is more then yeast,honey and malt, it is a right of passage for every New Yorker. The bagel unites the melting pot of New York. Greeks, Spanish,Jews, Muslims etc, can all agree on the beauty of a good bagel! The bagel in it’s doughy glory is the glue of New York, it is the symbol of peace. Without bagels the entire city as we know it would cease to exist. It is the foundation of society, it is the matriarch of democracy, it is the very heart,soul, sweat and tears that defines our nation!

Pretty much I wanted to do this topic because I really like bagels.

For our New York Times Project, our group decided on the topic of bagels. Although this theme may seem strange and unrelated to life at Baruch, bagels actually play a big role. We all agreed that food plays a large role in who we are and how we bond with new people; the discussion of food is one of the reasons of how we all became friends in fact. We felt that bagels, and food in general, bring a sense of comfort and home which are both relieving emotions when entering a college or university as a freshman. Not only are bagels a delicious food commodity, they are also great to read and write about. When searching in the New York Times, there were surprisingly more articles than we had imagined; articles regarding price, anatomy, bagel vs. donut and soon on. Bagels proved to provide friendship, happiness and a cheap cost which are ideal qualities for college students.

I don’t think you’ll ever come across someone who has tried a coffee at Starbucks and say they didn’t love it. How did this idea formulate you may ask? Midway through daydreaming in FRO, the thought of Starbucks dawned upon me. I figured it was a perfect topic due to the fact that it’s so simple and obvious, people wouldn’t choose to write about it. This assignment dictated us to choose a topic and demonstrate it as if it was the front page of the New York Times. I knew picking the topic of Starbucks would be interesting to research and give us a lot to write about. My group-mates and I found it interesting to learn about the origins, coffee beans, and great expansion of Starbucks overseas. Since we all spend a portion of our day at this beloved coffee joint, it was in our best interests to explore its rich history and share it with the class. There is no doubt that whomever you speak to that attends Baruch can assure you that they never run out of coffee. With the convenience of four nearby Starbucks, both in the school and across the street, all students and faculty of Baruch are always well- caffeinated.. so there’s no excuse to be falling asleep in class :p