Heading to China

You’ve heard of the Rhodes and the Marshall. Now there is the Schwartzman, and Wellesley has one of the inaugural fellows, Savitri Restrepo Alvarez ’16 (center, above). Stephen Schwarzman, chairman and co-founder of the Blackstone Group, recently established the fellowship with an eye toward the importance of China in addressing global challenges in the 21st century. One hundred eleven scholars will study and live at the newly constructed Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University in Beijing, all expenses paid. Restrepo Alvarez, who is majoring in international relations and minoring in Chinese language and literature, will pursue a master’s degree in global affairs at Tsinghua. One of the most selective fellowships in the world in its inaugural year, the Schwarzman is modeled after the Rhodes.

Shake It Up

Fourteen thousand lines, from 154 sonnets and 39 plays. In early March, the Shakespeare Society once again tackled reading the complete oeuvre of the Bard aloud in 24 hours, and succeeded in beating the clock. Shakes VP Cordelia Zhong ’17 says as many as 35 people were reading plays simultaneously in the middle of the night in Shakespeare House. “Most of the time, each play is read by several people,” she says. “However, by the time it gets to be around 5 a.m., our deadline begins to put more pressure on us, and people begin reading plays on their own, just muttering lines to themselves as they sit with their cups of coffee or tea.”

Those LOL Moments

It all started last winter when Hannah Wei ’18 wiped out on an icy campus walkway, and Olivia Joslin ’18 tried to capture the moment for posterity on Snapchat. Then Snapchat wiped out, too, and the laughter was lost. In response, the two developed and launched an app called CliqueBit to celebrate life’s sillier moments. Users can create posts that are less permanent than Facebook and Instagram, but more long-lived than Snapchat. The app also helps users create memes and stop-motion videos. It has been featured in USA Today, and the innovation news website BostonInno called CliqueBit one of five “Boston Mobile Startups to Watch.”