Should fraternities and sororities be allowed on college campuses?

By Phillip (Age 14.5, Island School)

People join fraternities for various reasons: they want to feel involved, they think it's cool, they think it's an honor to be able to go up to a friend and boast the fact that they are part of the frat, etc. However, fraternities often cause a lot of problems, some of them major. 

When a freshman wants to join a fraternity or is asked to join a fraternity, they usually have to go through a process known as hazing. Hazing often involves very dangerous acts, and although some frats only require a brief albeit disgusting and unappealing process to get in - like licking someone's shoe - other frats ask for much more dangerous things. Some people have even been killed because of this process, like drug overdose or loss of judgment due to excessive consumption of alcohol. 

However, all these stories we hear are usually only of the minority. The majority of frats aren't very dangerous, and are in fact fun to be a part of. Feeling involved, in my opinion, is an important part of college life, because usually studying at that stage is very stressful, and going out once in awhile to meet up with a bunch of people and partying or pulling some pranks will relieve your stress.

Also, if you join a fraternity or sorority, once the dreaded hazing process is over and you're officially part of the group, things usually get much better. You make friends within the fraternity that you are part of, and after you graduate, the alumni will provide help and support when you need it. After all, most of them will be qualified college graduates and experts in different areas, and it's an easy way to make acquaintances. 

Instead of banning frats and sororities, a better solution would be to monitor the frats carefully, and have stricter regulations concerning the frats. Also, the hazing process should be strictly regulated, and have punishments for students who perform abusive acts on other students.

Banning frats and sororities still wouldn't stop secret societies and other kinds of groups from popping up, and in fact, might even encourage them to because the students might think it's cool do do something that you're not supposed to do. Also, they might find other meeting places that even further encourage them to break rules, like a disused part of the campus. 

It's good to be part of a group in college because later on in life, you'll eventually have to deal with different types of people, and being part of a frat will give you an early taste of what it would be like. Also, your affiliation with the people in the frat might even help you with problems on campus, from small things like homework to larger things like relationships with other students.

Banning frats and sororities wouldn't be the best solution because the students would find another way to do it anyway, and also, the bad things that happen in frats are usually the minority of cases. Frats encourage students to meet different people and learn how to deal with people, instead of being an anti-social saddo. 

Plagiarism

By Phillip (Age 14.5, Island School)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Many people plagiarize for various reasons, whether it's because they feel they don't have the ability to do something original, or simply because they're not bothered. It can range from very small things like copying a math problem off a friend, or to copying someone's business idea like Mark Zuckerberg, when he allegedly copied the initial idea of Facebook from ConnectU. However, in the end, Mark Zuckerberg was more successful, since he was better at executing the idea.

If I was at university and I came up with an idea for a brilliant Internet business and my friend copied my idea and started making a website, I think I'd ask him for credit since he stole the idea from me. However, I wouldn't be very mad because if you put it this way, everyone is plagiarizing. For instance, Steve Jobs mentored the founder of Google, a successful search engine business, and in the end, Google ended up copying Apple's iPhone business and launched the Android system. Although Steve Jobs expressed disappointment and stated, "We did not enter the search engine business, so why did Google enter the smartphone business?", in some ways, Apple gained a competitor. And since iPhones are usually a little ahead of the Androids, Apple made even more money by analyzing the Android's faults and making it even better.

Also, plagiarizing can only be restricted up to a certain extent, and sometimes you can't even tell if they plagiarized or not. If people did not plagiarize and always came up with original ideas, the world wouldn't be as developed as it is now because people always add onto ideas and make it better. If it was totally against the law to take someone's idea and use it, then everything would stay at the most primitive stage of its development and not be able to advance any further.

Maybe it could be that I can re-plagiarize the plagiarized idea and make it even better, and get another friend who is really good at computers to develop a website better than the one that the other friend made, and become a competitor. It might even be better because that means I'll be having two brains behind the operation instead of one, but in a subtler way, since the friend who copied my idea would only really have copied the basis of it. The friend would still have to think on his own in order to keep the business running.

And instead of only looking at the negative side, I might even be able to look at the positive side and become partners with my friend and work on it together. Since I had come up with the initial idea, it will likely be that I know more about the business idea than my friend does, so maybe I could come up with ideas and my friend can work on it. I might not have been able to execute the idea without a computer whiz in the first place, so it might have even been a good thing that my friend plagiarized, because he would have practically volunteered to work on my idea.

Plagiarism is generally viewed as a bad thing, but in some cases it might even be a good thing. You might even be able to work with the people who plagiarized your work, because each person has their strengths and weaknesses. And also, if people are only restricted to coming up with original ideas, then the world wouldn't develop, and instead people would have a hard time trying to think of ideas.

Is Privacy Overrated?

By Phillip (Age 14, Island School)

Everyone, at least at some point in their lives, has something that they want to keep private and to themselves. It can be something simple like a picture of you and your mom that all your friends will think is lame, or something big like your identity card number or passport number. We try to keep things private and in many cases, those efforts prove to be futile. Technology is evolving, and with it, so are the ways for people to invade our privacy.

Every teen has a Facebook account. Well, every teen that has a computer or has access to one. Facebook has become a big part of our daily lives, and we use it to exchange information like homework, or where we are going for the summer holidays. We also upload photos of ourselves and friends. Many of these photos are accessible even if you are not a friend of the uploader, through your friends. Or, maybe the uploader changed their privacy settings so that everyone can see the photos. But, do we want this to happen? Facebook friends are like a chain. We will have friends who have other friends who are not mutual, and those friends will have friends who are not mutual friends with our friend, and so on. So in the end, our privacy is not just limited to people we know. If you do not protect your information carefully, you can have a 56-year old pervert standing outside your window staring at you while you just sit on your sofa watching some movies, not suspecting anything.

But privacy might seem 'overrated.' Most of us believe that privacy must be protected at all costs, as it also involves our personal safety. But there is actually much more information than we think that we would be willing to share with others, like how many cousins you have, or how many siblings you have, how old your grandparents are.

Not conforming to what everyone else is doing will make us social outcasts, but we have to learn to balance it. Although privacy may be overrated, no one would be willing to share information with strangers, which happens almost every day in our society. Uploading pictures of yourself is fine, but things have a limit. Nowadays a lot of adults also use Facebook, and they could be teachers at your school. Many teens whine about teachers making an unfair decision and let it out by writing about ugly their teacher is on Facebook. But if that teen does not have the right privacy settings, his or her teacher won't be greeted with a hearty hello the next morning.

Protecting your privacy is important, but it is not good to think about protecting your privacy all the time. If you are too caught up with protecting your privacy that you forget about living your life and feel paranoid wherever you go, then that will make your life like a horror game: a horror game where you are being chased by an endless horde of zombies who, no matter how many you defeat, will keep coming at you. It is impossible to live in a society where everything is totally private, and where there aren't at least one or two strangers who know your name.

Many teenagers have parents who have Facebook, or have access to their Facebook accounts. Teenagers start to feel unsafe and feel that their parents have invaded their 'private bubble'. But, teens do not think about how a company might have their ID number or how some old guy in another country halfway around the world may have access to their pictures. It is important to know what the priorities are and set them accordingly.

The modern society is a place where no one can be 100% safe, and since the start of mankind, every community and society has been like that. Privacy is something that should definitely be protected, but only to some extent. If we get so paranoid about protecting our privacy that we block ourselves off from the outside world, what's there to protect your privacy from?