College isn’t easy. Coursework piles up, you fall behind, and it feels like a hopeless situation, even if it isn’t. 

However, it’s the pressure you put on yourself that can really kill your momentum. Even if it doesn’t feel like it at the moment, sometimes all you really need to get back on track is a few words of encouragement.

College isn’t easy. Coursework piles up, you fall behind, and it feels like a hopeless situation, even if it isn’t. 

However, it’s the pressure you put on yourself that can really kill your momentum. Even if it doesn’t feel like it at the moment, sometimes all you really need to get back on track is a few words of encouragement.

On Jan. 19, the Old Town Playhouse and the Minervini Group opened the Northern Michigan Asylum Playwriting Contest, inviting playwrights to submit plays relating to the Traverse City State Hospital until the deadline on Dec. 31. The winner of the contest will see their play workshopped and then produced in 2027 or 2028, according to the contest’s submission guidelines.

On Feb. 27, Campus Life will host a volleyball tournament at 6 pm in the Rajkovich Physical Education Center. It is open to all employees and current students. You must sign up your team by 5 pm on the day of the tournament.

On Feb. 27 at 6:30 pm, NMC will hold an Alumni Trivia Night at Right Brain Brewery in honor of NMC’s 75th anniversary.

When Dr. Kori Schake talks about American power, she doesn’t start with tanks or treaties.

She starts with restraint. 

“We would have a very different civil-military relationship in the United States,” she told an audience at NMC on Feb. 19, “if it didn’t start with George Washington laying the foundation.”

A lot of people tell me they don’t like jazz. Whenever I ask why, they usually tell me the same thing: it’s too complicated. It’s just a bunch of self-obsessed musicians trying to cram as many notes into as little space as possible, flexing their musical skill and knowledge over the masses with high-handed ideas and insane execution.

Even if all these people are wrong, I can see where they’re coming from. The mistake they make is being exposed to the most complicated stuff first. It’s like learning to read; you wouldn’t give a first grader The Count of Monte Cristo and expect them to understand a single thing. You need a simpler access point to ease some people into jazz.

Last year, the organization Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) established more than 100 chapters in high schools and colleges across the country, following the reelection of President Donald Trump, and success of New York City’s Mayoral-elect Zohran Mamdani. 

This month a local chapter launched at Northwestern Michigan College. 

“Does artificial intelligence have a place in college writing curricula?”

That is the prompt I wrote Google Gemini, to which it responded, “In 2026, the question is no longer if AI has a place in writing curricula, but how it is being integrated.” 

“It is becoming a permanent fixture in the process of writing.”