Each speaker, no matter their station in life, expertise on a subject, or native faculties, encounters as limiting obstacles a host of contingencies — an inattentive or disinterested audience, disfluency or an otherwise lacking delivery, monotony, and failures in memory, among others. While it remains true that each of these…

And Moses spake before the LORD, saying, Behold, the children of Israel have not hearkened unto me; how then shall Pharaoh hear me, who am of uncircumcised lips? — Exodus 6:12 (KJV) It was Roland Barthes that, in 1971, put forward his ideas on the fallibility of speech in his…

Introduction When I was a sophomore at Penn State University in 2020, I knew 3 things: I wanted to pursue an internship. I wanted the internship to be in the field of consulting I wanted my consulting experience to be with an MBB firm A General Overview of Some MBB Summer Programs Broadly speaking, underclassmen internships and special programs…

The cliché, or platitude, is an utterance that attracts to itself the most intense opposition. Its antecedent is normally a regretful acknowledgement — “I know this sounds trite, but…” — and what follows from the listening audience ranges from a quiet eye roll to an incredulous guffaw. …

The demeanor of the deep thinker is unmistakable — from the way they furrow their brow in deep rumination to how they express their mind’s inner contents through speech. It is important, at least in principle, to distinguish the one who is deep from the one who is merely intellectual…

The Capacity to Think If the scores of psychoanalytic literature that exist heretofore agree on anything, it is that the mind is ceaselessly active. This reality is plain to us, and we could even venture so far as to say that the mind is active independent of our own volition. We know this when…

During November, my family and I wended our way to Atlanta, Georgia for the Thanksgiving holiday. As the glistening glass buildings transformed from black specks against the blue sky into looming towers all around us, I could not have anticipated the sights that would find me: the lucid murals of…

Introduction For many years, I was quite blasé towards the idea of having a distinct hairstyle. Hair, in my view, simply needed to not look bad. I got along fine with my monthly haircut: a low buzz cut with an “edge up” near my temples. It was not until my sophomore…

One of the areas I am seeking to challenge myself in during my summer internship is my ability to remember the names of people I encounter during the day. I normally do well with names, but it takes a few attempts for them to stick. …