CSOM Dean Andy Boynton sent an e-mail to some 75 alumni at Bear Stearns, offering networking and career assistance from the Alumni Association and the Wall Street Council. Bioinformatics professor Gabor Marsh and his research team developed software that analyzes genomes faster and more accurately than any previously released product. James Niles-Joyal ’08 recited from memory the first 3,141 digits of pi at Harvard’s Pi Day (3/14, naturally) competition. It took him 50 minutes and 10 seconds. His closest competitor managed 461 numbers. The Carroll School’s Chief Executives’ Club of Boston continued its dominance of CEO-event rankings, finishing first domestically and second in the world behind the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Meanwhile, the University itself was ranked first in the state in a corporate reputation survey of 200 Massachusetts business executives. A zoning ordinance was enacted by Boston that makes it illegal for a landlord to rent a dwelling to more than four unrelated “undergraduate students.” Landlords are offering a lawsuit. Boston College is offering counsel to affected students. The University tested one of its new emergency notification procedures by sending a text message to some 14,000 personal cell phones that had been registered by students, faculty, and staff. A record 30,800 individuals applied for admission to the 2,270-member Class of 2012. The marching band made its first-ever appearance on ice at a men’s hockey game in January. No one fell. A student accidentally triggered a flood of tens of thousands of endlessly rebounding e-mails when she sent an electronic query (“Re: Housing near BC”) to 13 listservs. Five Facebook groups sprang up in the aftermath, including one plaintively called “Genevieve Ruined My Blackberry.” Also on the Facebook front, the accounting department used the social networking service to locate and importune graduates who did not respond to last year’s department survey of seniors. Said professor Billy Soo, “Hopefully people don’t start to block us out.” Katherine Adam ’07 and sociologist Charles Derber published The New Feminized Majority (Paradigm, 2008), which began life as a senior thesis for which Derber served as advisor. The Heights‘ April 1 issue revealed that the Newton Campus had seceded and penned its own fight song, “For Newton”; that disappointing student attendance at basketball games this year had resulted in plans to hold the 2009 season in the Hillside Café; and that Steve Montgomery, the University official who puts the kibosh on off-campus parties, had broken up a local family’s Passover Seder after peering through a window and seeing adults and children singing and drinking wine. The Newton native and heartthrob of The Office John Krasinski revealed to Parade magazine that he might have chosen to attend “awesome” Boston College “but did I really want to walk home every afternoon after class?” He attended Brown. Jennifer Castillo ’09, an international studies major and an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, was awarded the University’s Romero Scholarship for 2008–09. A man wearing a Boston College knit hat robbed a bank in Salem, New Hampshire. Psychologist Joseph Tecce, often called upon to analyze the comfort of political figures speaking under stressful circumstances, said of Roger Clemens’s performance before a Congressional panel looking into steroid use in baseball, “It’s an earmark of lying when people do not answer a question directly.” The Lynch School of Education received foundation grants totalling $9.2 million to expand its successful BostonConnects program from nine to 14 public elementary schools in Boston. Nearly 600 students spent spring break on service trips, and a Heights editorial seconded a UGBC proposal for an endowment that would fund the trips and bring an end to “begging” tables in the dining halls. A young man who won a poker championship for college students turned out not to be a BC student as he’d claimed, but a 2006 graduate. “This is a shock,” the tournament director told the Boston Globe. Undergraduate tuition for 2009 was set at $37,410, and the operating budget at $772 million. Speakers who drew SRO crowds of students included Jon Sobrino, SJ, a liberation theologian from El Salvador; the dismantler of South African apartheid F.W. de Klerk; Boston College philosopher Marina McCoy, who spoke on “Caring, Vulnerability, and Community” in the inaugural Fitzgibbons Lecture; a panel of faculty from BC and BU who spoke on “What we owe the Iraqis”; Kal Penn, of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle fame, stumping for Barack Obama; Chelsea stumping for her mom; and Charlie Wilson, a one-time wild-man Texas congressman who developed covert anti-Soviet operations in Afghanistan and was recently played by Tom Hanks in the film Charlie Wilson’s War. The Heights report included the observation that Mr. Wilson is, in fact, taller than Mr. Hanks.

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