It is the end of my freshman year and I’m still receiving the same question. One that probably won’t go away for a long time. It comes from family, friends, even acquaintances, and often sounds something like “so, why on Earth did you choose Minerva?”

To be fair, it is a good question. Why did I decide to go to an Edtech startup university with minimal credibility over the Ivy League and its counterparts?

Have you ever asked a silly question?

I have. Peet’s Coffee. 4:45 pm.

“Uh, hi. What is the iced latte like?”

“Well, it’s a latte and it’s iced.”

The lady behind the counter answered. Suddenly, a smile produced whitened teeth and she burst out laughing. I honestly didn’t find it funny - but she really did. I couldn’t even order for another minute because she was giggling her brains out across the counter.

“I’ll take it.”

I eventually responded, knowing her day had just been made.

Coffee in hand, I sat down at a long, wooden coffee table. Across from…

The importance and intuitive appeal of culture became apparent to me through my work as Chief Graphic Designer of my high school’s languages magazine. I quickly realised that although the articles my classmates write are interesting, few would read the magazine if it wasn’t aesthetically appealing. It was my job to enhance this magazine visually — to design the magazine such that it both reflects the content inside and captures the attention of the high school community. Adobe InDesign gave me the power to do this.

Each edition brought a unique set of articles and design challenges, but culture became…

The movement of tectonic plates, the Tertiary period of warm and wet climate (65–2.6 Myr ago) and the Quaternary period (2.6 Myr to present) of periglacial and interglacial climates is what has brought Dartmoor to the landscape it is today. Many geomorphological textbooks present the Dartmoor landscape as “the product of deep granite weathering and subsequent periglacial slope processes and tor development, a two-stage evolution model made popular by David Linton (1955).”[1] This gives us great insight into just how crucial the granite was in creating the current Dartmoor Landscape. Granite is an igneous rock that is predominantly found at…