Worcester is famous for the snow dumps it receives in the winter. It has something to do with where the city is in relation to the Appalachian Mountains. The clouds bear down when the temperature drops, and then the snow is relentless and the weather is brutal. All winter, it’s brutal, brutal, brutal, and then somehow, slowly, it’s not anymore. That’s kind of how the end of W.P.I.’s crisis arrived.
~ Jordan Kisner via The New York Times Magazine
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Worcester Polytechnic is a STEM-focused research university, and its curriculum emphasizes project-based learning: Students train toward junior- and senior-year projects that involve real-life impact, like developing a low-cost device to feed premature infants; or running analyses of the distribution system for Panama’s national water authority to identify opportunities to minimize shortages. Robots the size of small coolers on wheels scuttle around the quads delivering food to students in their dorms or labs.
~ Jordan Kisner via The New York Times Magazine
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Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts is a tidy New England college campus with the high-saturation landscaping typical of well-funded institutions. The hedges are beautifully trimmed, the pathways are swept clean. Red-brick buildings from the 19th century fraternize with high glass facades and renovated interiors.
~ Jordan Kisner via The New York Times Magazine
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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity.
~ Rollo May
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Freud describes the neurotic personality of the late nineteenth century as one suffering from fragmentation – that is, from repression of instinctual drives, blocking off of awareness, loss of autonomy, weakness and passivity of the ego, together with the various neurotic symptoms which result from this fragmentation.
~ Rollo May
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Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society.
~ Rollo May
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Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world.
~ Rollo May
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Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the “divine madness” to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks.
~ Rollo May
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