In college, breaks are something to be cherished – however, just like napping, or preparing fine cuisine within the DH, you need some experience and some practice to really become a master. So, to help guide you on your path to transcendence at Furman, here are a few key tips. -Only a fool does laundry…
Category: Ben Gamble
The Ultimate First Tour Questions
Unbeknownst to most of my tours, or even to my colleagues, I use a highly sophisticated system of questions to determine exactly what kind of people are on my tours. It’s like Enneagram meets astrology meets Hannibal Lecter. But, like, a family-friendly, Furman Advantage Hannibal. This system mostly boils down to a single icebreaker question…
Graduation is Coming
After however many months of slipping Game of Thrones GIFs into these posts, I’m finally going to get a few new ones tonight. Our apartment is like the Apollo 13 mission control room right about now. In a lot of ways, graduation feels like the end of a TV series. You know you’re going to…
Informal Formals
In some ways, a lot of college is full of paradoxes. You are perpetually broke, but also throw around money on Venmo like you’re Liechtenstein at the UN. There are other ways, too. Everyone is failing everything, yet mysteriously everyone shows up the next semester after always getting “destroyed by finals”. There’s more subtle ways…
Seven Year Crossroads
Consider the following images carefully. I’m not the sort of person who frequently takes pictures, which truthfully should’ve been the sort of thing that got me filtered out of the internship hiring process. However, we find ourselves here, as we often do. The first picture is from my freshman year, when my hair was long…
Wax On, Wax Off
I think most people come to college expecting a wildly different experience than what they really get. It’s the sort of thing that’s hard to quantify or really even express – our ideas of college are shaped so profoundly by movies, older siblings, and the carefully curated stories told by our parents. I think there’s…
The Noble Duck, and Sunrises, and Spring Break.
Observe the majestic Furman waterfowl. He is stoic. Even though rain and fountain water alike fall upon his developed plumage, he nevertheless readies himself to swim. Perhaps, the dreamers say, he even readies himself to fly. In a lot of ways this is a metaphor for coming back to school after spring break, but for…
Snapes
Professors are some of my favorite people at Furman, aside from when they give me the grade I probably deserve. Everyone will wind up gravitating to a different kind of professor. It wouldn’t be true for me to say I absolutely loved all of my professors, but you won’t get that anywhere. Some teaching styles…
One Last Time
Hamilton references in the title are what the kids are into now, right? Freshmen attempting to answer questions in classes. I’m certainly glad to be back at Furman, and hoping to make the most of my last semester. Given the current wind chill outside, however, making the most of my last semester involves a lot…
The Finish Line
In my philosophy class this semester, my professor ruminated on how, ultimately, trying to live a good life is sort of a futile effort, given that we cannot possibly, 100% certainly for-sure know what good is. Someone asked what even was the point of trying, which he responded to with an anecdote. entirely unrelated. Imagine you’re told…