frontpage – Page 13 of 20

31Oct

By Hefina EverardNo Comments

Sports & Socs

It’s Time to Find Your ‘Thing’

The Freshers Festival blues have arrived (as well as the flu) and you’re setting your alarm for your 9am tomorrow morning. Doesn’t seem much fun, right? However, it would be better knowing that after your lecture, you have a Travel society social or a Lacrosse game. Becoming a member of a society or a sports team is one of THE best ways to make the most out of your journey here at Royal Holloway. Here’s why you should join a club or society: Happiness Levels: As much as university can be jam-packed with things to do, sometimes it is normal to feel lonely. Your mental health can be hugely impacted by this new wave of independence. Being part of a society or playing in a sports team is something that can contribute greatly to your happiness levels. By playing a sport or being in an environm...

Do you know the true origins of Halloween?

31Oct

By Michele TheilNo Comments

Features

Do you know the true origins of Halloween?

Halloween takes place on October 31st each year and is a time associated with trick-or-treating, ghosts, and scary costumes. This celebration has become a huge part of culture, but how many people know its true origins? The traditions we celebrate today have their roots in both Christian and Pagan festivals. Halloween rests on the eve of All Saints Day or All Hallows Day, a time many church practises used to celebrate the saints. The eve of this day became known as All Hallows Eve and which eventually merged to become Halloween. Traditionally, worshippers would go to church on All Hallows Eve to pray and fast before a day of feasting and celebration. All Souls Day, a day set on November 2nd to honour the dead, is also part of Christian tradition. The horror films, zombies, ghosts, ...

30Oct

By Amal AbdiNo Comments

Lifestyle

Your Guide to Barcelona

One of the things that really drew us to Barcelona when we spontaneously decided to book a summer break was that it really does have a bit of everything. From the sunnier climate and the beaches to the rich history and culture, the city will certainly spoil you for choice when you’re trying to plan your trip. 3 Top Tips – Wear comfortable shoes – Take your student card everywhere – Be vigilant – Barcelona has an extremely high rate of street theft. Where to Stay: As I visited with three of my best friends, we all really wanted to relax after the blood, sweat and tears of second year – literally. So we decided to stay in a small, beachy resort called Santa Susanna, which is located towards the north end of the city’s coast. We stayed in a cute apartment in Odissea Park Aparthotel, whi...

30Oct

By Emily BradburyNo Comments

Features

Meet Emily: Photography Editor

"Where are you from?” – I have been asked this question many, many times throughout my life. Every new school, new city, new country, everyone always wanted to know where I was from. To many people, it’s as simple as placing a pin on the map, but for me this is something that was never straightforward. Moving from place to place from a young age gave me the opportunity to grow up in many different cultures and experience a variety of lifestyles. Like many people on their travels, I captured iPhone snapshot images to try to preserve the memory of that moment but to me this has never been enough. My love for photography started in high school when I went on a volunteer service trip to Peru. The raw nature of the rural landscape was something I had never previously experienced and I found my...

29Oct

By Michele TheilNo Comments

Features

Loneliness in Young People

Loneliness is something most people experience at least once during their lifetime. Whilst generally associated with older generations, it has come to light as an issue increasingly affecting young people. In April this year, the BBC published an article which suggested that loneliness is “more likely to affect young people” than those with greater life experience. The question that must be asked is this: why are young people suffering from loneliness? One contributing factor is the swift digitalisation of our modern world. The reliance most people, especially teenagers, place on technology is a major cause for concern. Frequent communication via Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram detaches young people from raw social experiences such as talking face-to-face. Whilst this issue is not exclu...

How to Find Love: The Love Island Method

29Oct

By Holly FeenyNo Comments

Lifestyle

How to Find Love: The Love Island Method

While I’m sure we all wish we could jet off to Majorca for 8 weeks, with a bunch of hot people and free food, the Love Island experience isn’t quite what most of us get when searching for romance. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t take some valuable lessons from the show and its lovely contestants in our own quests for love. Here’s how you can use the Love Island method to bag the guy/gal/person of your dreams. (Note: Author is not responsible for any negative consequences of this brilliant and completely serious advice.) Your Type on Paper: If you watched Series three of the show, then you remember that they said this literally every five minutes. It was annoying, but now we can take some constructive advice from it. Of course, it’s important that you feel a physical attraction to so...

Are clouds effected by the extra terrestrial?

29Oct

By Amal AbdiNo Comments

Science & Technology

Are clouds effected by the extra terrestrial?

Cosmic rays are charged particles that come from outer space and bombard the Earth’s atmosphere. These particles usually decay in the early stages of the Earth’s atmosphere, raining down a shower of product particles onto the Earth’s surface. If you have never heard about cosmic rays, this may seem very alarming. But the fact is that these particles have been showering over you for your entire life, and can cause little harm. However, a collaboration of scientists from across the globe have been wondering whether this continuous barrage of extra terrestrial particles has an effect on the Earth’s atmosphere, and more particularly its cloud formation. To investigate this question, the Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets (CLOUD) experiment, was formed. Since 1750 the Earth’s surface temperature...

28Oct

By Amal AbdiNo Comments

Opinion

Love Island and Racial Diversity

This year, Love Island saw its first black woman, Samira Mighty, entering the villa and the show failed her. From the moment Samira was not chosen by any of the Love Island men in the first episode, I knew that she would be facing this kind of rejection for the rest of the series. Throughout the show, she was either seen as a second choice by the men or served her role as an asexual agony aunt there to save the relationships of her white friends. Unfortunately, Samira’s experience on the show is simply representative of black women’s experience in the real world. Misogynoir is a portmanteau that combines ‘misogyny’ with the French word for black, ‘noir’. The term, coined by the black feminist Moya Bailey, is often overlooked by mainstream feminist discourse as it describes the racialise...

Life at Royal Holloway as a Commuter Student

28Oct

By Amal AbdiNo Comments

Lifestyle

Life at Royal Holloway as a Commuter Student

Student who commute to university from home are growing in number. But, their specific experiences are often ignored in the student narrative. It might be difficult to understand why people choose to commute but for me and many of my friends, growing up in London, the idea of moving out for a university was not even something to contemplate. Of course, commuting is far cheaper than living on campus, especially with the scrapping of the maintenance grant now becoming a loan. The reality is that many students from working-class backgrounds, simply cannot afford for many reasons to leave their family homes and be straddled with so much debt. There are also cultural reasons for commuting, as some children are expected to stay at home throughout university. I commuted to Royal Holloway from W...

27Oct

By Ian HayesNo Comments

Culture & Literature, Film & TV

Reality TV: A 21st Century Freak-Show

Writing this, I am sat in a dimly lit, overpriced coffee shop in the middle of nowhere. It is the morning after the seminal event of our times, the cultural zenith for all those who dare to be ‘edgy’, ‘hip’ and part of the ‘in’ crowd. This is of course the day after the Love Island final. Love Island is the most recent evolution of reality TV, in which first came Big Brother, some strange show in which an ever dwindling group of people (contestants are ‘evicted’ by the public each week) are forced to live with each other for the length of the series until there was 1 winner left standing. Big Brother takes its name from George Orwell’s 1984, in which ‘Big Brother’ is always watching. One of the issues I have with the name in particular is that it implies that we’re always watching, which ...