So, let’s be real here: musicals are not for everyone. They can be tacky, predictable, and honestly, pretty annoying. The music stays in your head for days and the sets never look realistic enough. The characters are archetypical and often lack depth. However, if you’ve ever seen a production, whether at your school or on Broadway, there are elements that are impossible to ignore: the enthusiasm of the performers, the loyalty and dedication of the cast and crew, and the positive attitude of every ensemble member. If there is one thing you cannot deny, it is that musicals take a hell of a lot of work.

Musicals are like bridges: they take ages to build, but once they are finished, they connect everything together. They integrate the essential elements of both visual and performance art to create the pinnacle of entertainment. Musical theatre requires time, dedication, patience, and passion. The musical industry is competitive beyond belief, and while it is common knowledge that all theater divas are out to get each other, musicals require extensive teamwork. The cast of a production can easily range from four to forty, depending on the location and the popularity of the musical. On Broadway, some productions have run for decades due to demand. The longest running production on Broadway, The Phantom of the Opera, opened in January of 1988. The Times called it “God’s Gift to Musical Theatre” and it grossed a record 18 million US dollars at the box office on the opening night.

Not only is musical theatre capable of bringing together a multitude of art forms, it brings together people from all walks of life. From tourists to locals, musical theater has an unexplainable feature that all audience members find themselves drawn to. Whether it’s the empathy that one feels for the characters, or the inspiration found from the struggles of a protagonist, musicals make the audience feel strong emotion. This makes theater both a popular attraction and pastime; a survey conducted by Statista in January of 2015 found that 47.31 million people in the United States attended live theater over the course of one year. Furthermore, musical theatre contributes greatly to the economy of the area. In 2015, the ticket sales of Broadway productions in one season grossed 877 million USD and another 216 million USD per season can be attributed to production merchandise and food and beverage costs. In short, the average total revenue of Broadway productions per season is a whopping 1.38 billion US dollars.

All in all, individuals who are unable to appreciate musicals as an art form may just be ignorant of the myriad of social and economic benefits that theater provides. Not only are they capable of building bridges between artists of all fields, but they also strengthen the economic and social atmosphere of a region. 

This article originally appeared in the August/September, 2015 issue of UNIT-E. It was written by Ellie Hu, a student at the Western Academy of Beijing.

About UNIT-E
UNIT-E was founded in the spring of 2010 with the aim of establishing a non-profit, student-run magazine for international students in Beijing. Staffed by current students from a range of international schools, the magazine provides an amalgam of cultural tidbits, fragments of Beijing student life, and a broad spectrum of unique perspectives from a diverse group of young adults.

Photo: Eva Rinaldi Celebrity and Live Music Photographer (Flickr)

With all the twists and turns of high school, it can be difficult to find ways to effectively manage your time and sort your priorities. Here are some apps to help you stay organized, efficient, and successful for the rest of the year.

 1. Note taking& Revision Apps
If you’re looking for an app that contains everything in one tap or click, Evernote is the best of the best. It’s a note-taking app that includes countless features such as composing, clipping, bookmarking, to-do-listing, and more. This app is free within all devices and platforms (iOS, Android, Windows), and gives the option to sync files across mobile devices and computers. For power users, you can always pay and upgrade from Basic either to Plus or Premium, which allow for more space, offline access, annotations, and many more features. Using Evernote on the iPad comes with a particular advantage – you can use Evernote Peek, a popular revision app that uses notes made on Evernote in order to quiz users on what they’ve learnt so far.

If you’re a flashcard fanatic searching for something free of charge, consider Quizlet, the ultimate flashcard revision app that includes millions of study sets for numerous subjects (you can also make your own). However, if making flashcards manually seems tiresome, try considering StudyBlue, a modern-interfaced favorite flashcard app that allows you to make flashcards just from your notes. It uses your course information to present you with a selection of card sets for revision and tests you on the material. For Evernote lovers, there’s a bonus: StudyBlue allows you to connect to Evernote to import your notes and vice versa. Both of these are available online and as apps for iOS and Android devices.

2. Exam Prep Apps
High school presents us with a plethora of standardized tests that we’re bound to get overwhelmed with unless we take action. Though there are always exam prep tutors or outside institutions, there is also Benchprep, an interactive course library exam prep app for iOS, Android, and the Web that helps students prepare for standardized examinations such as the SAT, ACT, AP Exams, and TOEFL Speaking and Writing. It includes hundreds of practice questions, tests, flashcards, and study lessons in the form of games and other creative mediums that can make studying for standardized tests actually fun (or at least less stressful). You can also track your learning progress as you learn, making revision manageable. The pricing plans and the duration of study materials available to you differ from test to test, but they are all reasonably priced and considered.

Searching for something that requires no charges? There are cost-free mobile alternatives such as ACT Up (iOS only) and SAT Up (both iOS and Android) that work like Benchprep. For users taking the ACT, play2prep (iOS, Android) is also an excellent alternative.

3. To-Do Apps
We have so many things to do on a daily basis that it’s easy to forget some of them. Todoist, a free to-do application that holds a minimalistic and practical interface that is similar to an inbox layout, helps us to untangle our busy lives with to-do lists and reminders. To gain access to unlimited notes, productivity tracking, improved reminders, and syncing processes, users can upgrade to Todoist Premium. If you don’t like the minimalistic feel of Todoist, try Wunderlist, one of the more aesthetically pleasing to-do-list app out there with similar features. Both of these are available on most devices and platforms.

4. Student Planner Apps
Planners are essential for time management. iStudiez Lite is a great digital option that lets students record their course schedule, assignments, and tests with appropriate color coding. It allows you to move around and sort your tasks by date, course, and priority and helps you to track your GPA when you input your scores for assignments. There is also iStudiez Pro, the premium option, that gives you access to more features such as notifications, backup options, and iCloud sync. Both are only available for iOS and Mac OS X users.

If you’re an Android user, try Timetable, a free app that is very similar to iStudiez that features a sharp and clean interface which you can map your timetables on it with ease. If you’re a Windows user, try Power Planner, a free app that holds the essentials to planning your assignments and classes effectively.

5. And many more…
We’ve all been there: it’s finals week and you’re trying to study, but Facebook and Youtube compete for your attention and you eventually give in. If this happens to you, SelfControl, available for free for all Mac OS X users, is right for you. SelfControl lets you set a period of time in which certain websites or mail servers that may distract you are blocked by adding them to a “blacklist.”One caveat to this is that there is no use in trying to finish your work earlier than the given time – restarting your computer or trying delete the application do nothing to disable it.

Avoid interrupting class and getting on your teacher’s bad side with Studious. Exclusively for Android users, Studious silences your phone during your class times once you input your class schedule and times, keeping you safe from that dreaded in-class cellphone symphony. In addition, it also acts as a planner, giving reminders and allowing you to input different assignments with dates.

Add Dictionary.com’s mobile dictionary app for all your English-related learning needs. The main app is free and comes with many features like word etymology, search history, Words of the Day, synonyms, antonyms, a thesaurus, and many more that will only help to broaden your vocabulary. It operates on both iOS and Android devices.

This article originally appeared in the August/September, 2015 issue of UNIT-E. It was written by Daisy Yang, a student at the Western Academy of Beijing.

About UNIT-E
UNIT-E was founded in the spring of 2010 with the aim of establishing a non-profit, student-run magazine for international students in Beijing. Staffed by current students from a range of international schools, the magazine provides an amalgam of cultural tidbits, fragments of Beijing student life, and a broad spectrum of unique perspectives from a diverse group of young adults.

Photos: thecontemporaryteacher.com, graphite.org, catchmyapp.com, todoist.com, appsonic.com

Over the last three years, online retail has dramatically grown in sophistication, accessibility and magnitude. As our market gradually deviates towards vast online transactions that consume our daily lives, it is evident that numerous conventional retailers and local stores have been shutting their doors. Most people now carry a virtual shop in their pockets in the form of mobile phones or tablet devices. With so many purchasing options literally in the palm of everyone’s hand, it is clear that e-commerce has drastically altered our perception of retail and shopping.

Before the upsurge of e-commerce, all shopping had always been done conventionally through the stores themselves. Nowadays, with companies like China’s e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba spearheading this revolution, it is evident that online shopping will only continue to grow. As more and more people diverge from traditional shopping towards websites such as Taobao or Amazon, the already enormous-commerce market expands. This expansion creates a positive reinforcement loop, generating more and more revenue and attracting more and more consumers –and how could they resist? The allure of having purchases delivered to your doorstop without any physical effort is effective and efficient.

While the e-commerce industry has provided us with virtuous increases in convenience, criticism of the market is widespread; many condemn the lack of personal touch and finesse, while others point out the frequent absence of quality control. However, while these disadvantages may be evident, the bigger problem that e-commerce generates is the demise of small, intimate boutiques and personalized shops. In Beijing in particular, we are witnessing small, family owned businesses close their doors for good due to lack of revenue. This raises distressing questions regarding the direction of online retail: will our future will be consumed and engulfed by the big cooperate name brands of e-commerce? Will small and intimate stores cease to exist?

However, e-commerce prevails is in its cost effectiveness, which is not only beneficial for consumers, but also for businesses. Products in online retail websites are often cheaper than their store-bought counterparts, as firms forgo the cost of running a physical shop. Furthermore, e-commerce businesses lack traditional limitations of shelf size or store capacity; therefore, everything businesses intend sell can now be listed and presented to the consumer.

In the years to come, e-commerce will most likely be the most popular means of retail; but for e-commerce to flourish even further, it must begin to emphasize personalized consumer products. It is essential not to neglect the power of a direct relationship with the consumer, as doing so will fill the void left by the eventual absence of intimate boutiques.

There are countless advantages and disadvantages when it comes to online retail, but the undeniable fact is that the e-commerce revolution is in full swing and is indisputably changing the way we live. The convenience of e-commerce has cemented its place within our lives, and almost every one of us is engaged in the market in some way or another. So sit back and relax until your next package arrives – I’m sure it will be worth the wait.

This article originally appeared in the May/June 2015 issue of UNIT-E. It was written by Matthew Ding, a student at Dulwich College Beijing. 

About UNIT-E
UNIT-E was founded in the spring of 2010 with the aim of establishing a non-profit, student-run magazine for international students in Beijing. Staffed by current students from a range of international schools, the magazine provides an amalgam of cultural tidbits, fragments of Beijing student life, and a broad spectrum of unique perspectives from a diverse group of young adults.

Photo: bfishadow (flickr)

This summer, I received the most amazing opportunity to intern with Phillip Anderson, a Princeton physicist. In 1977, he won the Nobel Prize for the Anderson Localization Theory, a concept that explains why insulators are insulators.My task was to read a draft of a book he was writing on the history of high temperature super conductors.

The more I read of Professor Anderson’s writing,the more interested I became in his life story. Books and interview transcripts wrote mostly of his physics career, which is oftentimes incomprehensible to the average person.I wanted to be able to understand him. He may be called the God of Princeton, but he was a person just like the rest of us.

As a little kid, he was known as a “bad boy”, having gained this reputation to by throwing a cabbage out the window and copying answers. But as he matured and adjusted to school, things became easy for him.He particularly enjoyed math in his high school in Urbana, Illinois; the kids in his class were all very competitive and made a sport out of racing each other to finish the problems.

Though he admitted that school was relatively easy, at every phase of transition, “there would be a period of getting into it [because]no one is successful at all stages.”

At sixteen, he embodied the dream of any high school kid after receiving a full-support national scholarship from Harvard. It was evident that he was brilliant, but college was an abrupt change.

“Well, as I said, high school was easy and Harvard wasn’t,” he recounts.Phil came from an academic family; it was a given that Andersons always got A’s. In high school, if his A dipped to an A-, he would immediately start working very hard in that class, but overall, high school was easy. College was a completely different story.

“I started getting A-’s and B’s right off the bat,” he recounted.

Physics class was an especially radical change for him. He had previously learned that physics was qualitative; the students at his high school were given apparatus to play with but no one had ever explained to him that physics could quantitatively explain everything.

However, his apathy towards high school academic physics didn’t belie his true attitude towards the discipline. He had read some books on relativity and was immediately intrigued.

“So I was already a physicist but I didn’t know it,” he commented.

He said the turning point was then he read a textbook and correctly derived Maxwell’s Distribution in his head.

“I was gone,” he recalled. “I had been intrigued by physics before but I didn’t know it was physics I had been intrigued by.”

As someone who went to college as a sixteen year old, he was bound to have a profusion of advice for high school kids on transitioning and adjusting to college life.

He laughed in response. “Well, my advice would be worthless because I didn’t adjust very well. I didn’t really adjust that first year.”
Perhaps it was his age. His freshman year wasn’t the glamorous party college was made out to be.

“I remember going over to the dining hall and seeing all the people gathered in groups chattering gaily,” he said,“And I would be sitting alone or with my college roommate. It was kind of lonely. There were no girls around and I didn’t know how to approach girls.”

However, just as he had worked hard in physics and immediately began to understand it, so too college life seemed to become easier. In his sophomore year, all his courses seemed simpler and he spent a lot of time having fun with friends. From then on, he coasted through Harvard.

After a wartime stint at a naval radar research lab from 1943 to 1945, he returned back to Harvard for graduate school. It was during his graduate studies that he met Joyce, his wife of 67 years.They met when Phil was home from graduate school one spring. She was living on a secretary’s salary at that time, so Anderson recounts she was glad to be given a free dinner.

“Well, I think it was a done thing by the end of the day,” he smiled. “Certainly my mind never changed.”

Six weeks later,Joyce gave up her career to marry Phillip Anderson and support him in his pursuits in physics.

Though he didn’t follow his own advice, Professor Anderson advised students to do“physics related summers, summer studies or [take]an internship somewhere” if they wished to pursue a physics career.

Now 90 years old, he still drives to work every day. His passion and dedication to physics make him an inspiring figure for aspiring physicists and other people as well. Through the story of his life, we can understand Phillip Anderson, not only as a physicist or the God of Princeton, but also as a human being.

This article originally appeared in the December 2014 issue of UNIT-E. It was written by Kaylee Ding, a student at the International School of Beijing.

About UNIT-E
UNIT-E was founded in the spring of 2010 with the aim of establishing a non-profit, student-run magazine for international students in Beijing. Staffed by current students from a range of international schools, the magazine provides an amalgam of cultural tidbits, fragments of Beijing student life, and a broad spectrum of unique perspectives from a diverse group of young adults.

Photo: Princeton University

From the breakup of the alternative rock band My Chemical Romance (MCR) last year comes lead singer Gerard Way’s debut album Hesitant Alien. Hesitant takes on a style largely consisting of a mix of Britpop and fuzz punk and makes a departure from the alternative rock side of MCR by including a new, retro vibe.

Overall, this record is outstanding with creative riffs and simple structures that give off an old-fashioned feel to each song. Although MCR may be gone for good, this album shows that there’s still some MCR left in Gerard. Each song seems to sound like an MCR song in one way or another, and they altogether fall in to the genres of fuzz punk and Britpop.

Starting from the first song off the record, “The Bureau”, Way showcases his abilities to write simple yet memorable lyrics and perform them using sounds ranging from distorted guitars to telephone beeps. Despite the record’s heavy emphasis on the Britpop genre, songs such as “No Shows” and “Brother” make use of vocals similar to those of Coldplay and Death Cab for Cutie while the song “How It’s Going To Be” is reminiscent of songs like “Some Nights” by Fun. However, the songs “Action Cat” and “Maya the Psychic” best embody Way’s change from MCR’s riff-heavy alternative rock sound to his imitation of 80’s style music by showcasing Way’s strong influence drawn from artists of the time period like David Bowie and The Stooges. But for the die-hard MCR fans, the songs “Zero Zero” and “Juarez” best imitate MCR’s style in their final studio album, Conventional Weapons.

Similar to the way that themes and concepts were presented in previous MCR albums such as The Black Parade and Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, Hesitant Alien exhibits a futuristic yet retrograded flair. In the music videos, casts consist of quirky aliens and humans dressed in flashy clothing that look as if they came out of a Star Wars movie. And, unlike the emo-goth type of character presented in The Black Parade and the punk-like defiant character in Danger Days, Hesitant Alien features Way simply as himself – a man who feels alienated from the world around him (hence the title).

However, despite his new direction, the music videos of Hesitant Alien are artistically confusing, borderline trippy, and hardly suit the style of music presented in the album. They display video editing skills that would be referred to as futuristic…30 years ago. Lights intentionally flare, videos are low resolution and the audio is often out of sync. Still, although the overall quality of the music videos is a bit lacking, its purpose is to contribute to the trademark 80’s vibe presented in each song and videos themselves don’t detract from the impressiveness of the album as a whole.   

Overall, Hesitant Alien is filled with a myriad of musical genres and mesmerizing lyrics and is a must for any fans of MCR or similar bands. Gerard’s new way has taken him in a positive direction, and we like where he’s going.

This article originally appeared in the December 2014 issue of UNIT-E. It was written by Alan ke, a student at the International School of Beijing.

About UNIT-E

UNIT-E was founded in the spring of 2010 with the aim of establishing a non-profit, student-run magazine for international students in Beijing. Staffed by current students from a range of international schools, the magazine provides an amalgam of cultural tidbits, fragments of Beijing student life, and a broad spectrum of unique perspectives from a diverse group of young adults.

Photo: abcnewsonline.com