Breakdown and Start-up
Just over two years ago, I was driving home fairly late one night on a quiet, remote road when another car suddenly moved towards me with great 1. I had to make a sudden and quick sideways movement to 2 hitting it and I almost hit a tree. Luckily I wasn't hurt, but I couldn't get my car to start. It had broken down. I felt quite 3 as it was late and there were hardly any other cars around. I 4 my roadside assistance company for help and they told me someone would be there in around one and half an hour. After about fifteen minutes, a passing car 5 and a strong man with a serious face stepped out of the car. He asked if I needed 6 and I told him what had happened. He 7 offered to stay with me until roadside assistance arrived. I was uncertain about what to do because I was nervous and uneasy. There was something very calm and comfortable in his voice, so I took him up on his offer. While waiting, we started talking and really 8 it off. By the time the roadside assistance man turned up, we'd arranged to 9 again. Two years on, we have shared the joys and sorrows of life together. I wish I could thank the careless driver who forced me off the road. If he was a better driver, I'd never have met a lifelong 10.
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If you would like to share your knowledge about life at Monash and make a positive impact on others, becoming an education peer mentor (导师) is the perfect choice for you.
What are the benefits of Education Peer Mentoring?
Receive priority access to professional development opportunities.
Join our community of high-achieving Monash students.
Develop your leadership, communication and teamwork skills.
Meet and network with senior Monash staff and like-minded student leaders.
Record this experience on your Australian Higher Education Graduate Statement.
Gain rich experience for your resume (简历).
Who can apply?
You have a desire to help new students get started and succeed at Monash.
You are willing to talk about your own university experience.
You should have strong interpersonal and communication skills.
You have the ability to work with a variety of people from different backgrounds,
What are the requirements?
You must be a student at an Australian campus for part-time or full-time learning.
You must be at least in your second year of study or above.
You should be able to commit to supporting up to 20 fresh students through personal interactions.
You should be able to commit at least 20 hours volunteering throughout the program in one semester.
How to apply?
As a new peer mentor, send a written application through the new mentor application button.
As a current peer mentor applying for this position again, send a written application through the returning mentor application button.
Once you've applied, we'll be in touch to let you know the outcome of your application.
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Important Dates |
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Mentor applications open |
9 January 2023 |
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Mentor applications close |
10 February 2023 |
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Program starts |
April 2023 |
The shift from adolescence (青春期) to adulthood can be hard and often filled with hardship and lessons learned, especially for young people experiencing homelessness.
Frankie, a young woman who feels lucky to have had the caring support from her dad Frankie's dad raised her, and they were very close. When he suddenly passed away two years ago, Frankie didn't know how she would survive. With no family or relatives to take her in, she fell into a depression. She bounced from home to home, losing trust she'd ever gain stability.
One Friday afternoon, Frankie sat at a park bench outside of school. As she was worrying about where she was going to live, she suddenly remembered something her dad would tell her when she was little.
"Don't ever give up," said Frankie. "If dad were here, he would tell me that."
Those words encouraged her to seek help from Noel, a YouthCare case manager, who helped her find accommodation at Catalyst, one of YouthCare's community living programs, YouthCare provided a path back to stability. Frankie was thankful to have a routine: dish washings after dinner, weekly game nights, and check-ins with a mental health doctor every Thursday. At Catalyst, Frankie received consistent support and found additional resources for her mental health care. Outside of her Thursday appointments, she participated in weekly homework assignments focused on well-being and goal-setting for the future.
Noel showed great surprise at Frankie's positive changes with each passing day. She earned her GED, and it wasn't long before she began searching for her first job. With the help of Noel, Frankie applied for a handful of positions in health or fitness. Frankie jumped with excitement when she received an interview call for a front desk position at a local gym!
Dressed in green, her dad's favorite color, Frankie entered her interview with confidence. Noel smiled very happily when Frankie received a second call later that day with news that she got the job.
Too many young people come to YouthCare with their own story. Each of them deserves a path back to stability a stable home, consistent support, and access to treatment services necessary to become well. Like Frankie, they can imagine new possibilities and change the course of their own story through encouragement and treatment.
Dogs greet other dogs' noses first, sniffing(嗅) each other from head to tail. People are not so open about the process of sniffing, but smell is important in human relations, too. There is also evidence that humans can infer relationship and emotional states and even discover disease through smell.
Now, Inbal Ravreby, Kobi Snitz and Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science have gone a step further. As they report in Science Advances, the three researchers started their first experiment by testing the smells of 20 pairs of familiar and same-sex friends. They employed an electronic nose (e-nose) and two groups of human "smellers".
The e-nose used a set of gas sensors to assess T-shirts worn by participants. One group of human smellers were given pairs of these shirts and asked to rate how similar they smelt. Those in the other group were asked to rate the smells of individual T-shirts on five dimensions (维度): pleasantness, intensity, attractiveness, competence and warmth. Both approaches produced the same result. The T-shirts of friends smelt more similar to each other than did the T-shirts of strangers.
Does friendship cause similarity of smell, or does similarity of smell cause friendship? The three researchers investigated whether there were positive interactions between strangers by using the e-nose measurement. They collected the smells of another 17 volunteers with e-nose, and then asked the participants to play a mirroring game.
That game involved silently mirroring another individual's hand movements, Participants were paired up by chance and their reactions were recorded. After each interaction, they demonstrated how close they felt to their fellow gamer by overlapping two circles (one representing themselves, the other their partner). The more similar the two electronic smell signatures were, the greater the overlap. Participants also rated the quality of their interaction in the game along 12 dimensions of feelings that define friendship, Similar smells were consistent with positive ratings for nine of these dimensions. However, two participants smelling alike did not mean they were any more accurate at the mirroring game than others.
Why smell might play a role in forming friendships remains obscure. Other qualities related to being friends, including age, appearance, and education, are either immediately obvious or rapidly become so. But while some individuals have strong body smell, many do not. It is present. But it is subliminal(潜意识的). Dr Ravreby guesses that there may be "an evolutionary advantage in having friends that are genetically similar to us". Body smell is known to be linked with genetic make-up. Smelling similar to others may thus allow subliminal inferences about genetic similarity to be drawn.
I have a friend who bird watches. She feels comfortable whenever she's doing it. If you ask her why she likes it, she will say things like "Well, birds are the world's most magical creatures." I have another friend who knits. She likes it because it's satisfying, and has an astonishingly impressive impact on people for whom being able to knit gloves is out of reach.
As a term, "hobby" has always been of arguable meaning. Ask someone what they think a hobby is, and you'll get a dictionary definition that they will have just looked up on their phones and, then, a passionate speech on all of the activities that can under no circumstances be put into groups as hobbies by their own highly unique and inflexible standards. Being online is not a hobby, apparently, nor is listening to music.
Hardly anyone knows what a hobby is, and this is particularly the case now that so many of us are spending our leisure time online arguing about these sorts of basic definitions with people, as the writer Max Read put it in an essay, "to whom the world has been created again every morning, for whom every settled argument of modernity must be rewritten, but this time with their engagement."
Even taking these difficulties into account, however, it seems obvious that birdwatching and knitting are classic hobbies. They are enjoyable, involve practice and reward effort, and they are given immediate access to a group with the same interests. They are the sorts of hobbies advice columnists (专栏作家) have in mind when people write in about their imbalanced lives. It's interesting, then, that not one of my two clearly hobby-having friends would admit to the practice.
They worried that their hobbies, which give them pleasure and keep them far from their computers, made them seem like they had too much leisure time and too Lew inner resources that would enable them to naturally avoid boredom. They are fully paid-up members of society, with busy lives, fulfilling interpersonal relationships and, again, hobbies that make them happy. It's just that hobbies have an undeservedly bad reputation, one made worse by the Internet, like everything else.
The birdwatcher said the problem with having a hobby was that it made people seem like they were contributing and learning nothing. The knitter said that she personally connected hobbies with having no friends and no idea of what normal people do to have fun, Actually, they do not want to be seen as mad people who intentionally get away from the correct course.
Well, I enjoy certain light operas. I play music for my own amusement. And yes, I am an ordinary student, and that is not a sign of madness.
In principle, it sounds simple: eat less and move more. Yet, despite all the calorie counting, dieting and exercising, worldwide obesity (肥胖) rates just keep speeding up. People in the US were heavier in 2021 than they were in 2020, placing many more people at risk from serious diseases.
So why hasn't this approach to weight control worked? One possibility is that we haven't tried hard enough. Or perhaps the problem is the focus on "calorie balance" itself. In a recent paper, my colleagues and I question the basic assumption of whether taking in more calories than you burn really is the chief cause of obesity. We argue that the evidence actually points the other way: we are driven to overeat because we are getting fatter.
As their growth rate speeds up, teenagers may eat hundreds of calories more each day than they used to. Does this "overeating" cause the rapid growth? Or does the rapid growth, which requires more calories to build new body tissues, make teenagers hungrier so they eat more? Clearly the latter, as adults won't grow taller, no matter how much they eat.
The key to how this works in obesity is hormones (激素), especially the fat-storage hormone. Processed, rapidly digestible high-carbon foods like potato chips and sugary drinks raise our hormone level too high. A few hours after eating a high-carbon meal, the number of calories in the bloodstream falls rapidly, so we get hungrier sooner after eating.
Therefore, in order to prevent and treat weight problems, the emphasis should be placed on what to eat instead of how much we eat Replacing processed high-carbon foods with high-fat foods-such as nuts-lowers the hormone obtainable for the rest of the body.
Although much more research will be needed to test this idea, it is time to question the basic assumptions about cause and effect, calories and weight gain that have dominated our thinking for decades.
A. Weight control becomes a battle between dieting and exercising.
B. This may seem incredible but consider the rapid growth of teenagers.
C. The dietary advice for dealing with obesity has been around for decades.
D. We have lacked willpower to maintain healthy dietary and exercise habits,
E. A low-calorie diet further restricts an already limited supply of energy to the body.
F. This causes our fat cells to store too many calories, leaving fewer for the rest of the body.
G. In fact, high-fat foods may help decrease body fat, a possibility supported by medical practices.
Sleep in Different Cultures
It is apparent that there are significant differences in sleep patterns in different parts of the world, and that sleep patterns have also changed over time. Traditions, cultural values, local conditions and environments all influence sleep patterns.
One major source of these differences is the widespread use of artificial(人造的) light, which has led to changes in the sleep patterns in the industrialized world. It is thought that today we sleep several hours less than before industrialization. Artificial light has encouraged people to go to bed later and to sleep the whole night through (Monophasic Sleep), rather than the more broken up and flexible sleep patterns (Biphasic Sleep), During the long nights of the winter months, our ancestors used to break sleep up into two or more parts, separated by an hour or two of quiet restfulness.
Even within the developed world, there are still significant differences in sleep patterns. A study carried out in ten countries in 2002 showed some of these regional variations. For instance, the results of sleeping time at night from individual countries varied from 6 hours 53 minutes in Japan to 8 hours 24 minutes in Portugal. Over 42% of Brazilians took regular afternoon naps (short sleeps), compared to only 12% of Japanese people.
A daytime nap is a common habit among adults in many countries. Spain, in particular, has raised the nap almost to the level of an art form. The experience of Japan is a clear example of the way a culture change can affect sleep patterns. In the 1950s, Japan was keen to rebuild. Japanese workers were encouraged to wake early and finish late as well. The work-place nap was encouraged as a way for a worker to increase productivity, even though in fact it probably degraded the quality of night-time sleep even more. Today, sleep is perhaps more undervalued in Japan than anywhere else.
It is clear, then, that there are cultural and historical differences in our sleep patterns. Yet the one thing that stays the same across all cultures is the one truth about sleeping: We all do it!
Ø The work-place nap was encouraged and in fact it probably increases the quality of night-time sleep even more.
