【推荐1】When Marybeth Hearn was 10 years old, she asked her parents to let her train a dog to become a guide dog. It turned into a lifelong thing. Over more than fifty years, Hearn has raised 56 dogs to help visually impaired (视力受损的) people. But her influence doesn’t end there — the longtime high school teacher has encouraged several of her family members and some of her students to train many more.

When she looked to her parents for support years ago, things were different from what she expected. Her mom didn’t like dogs, and her dad doubted she would be able to find any money to pay for the cost of the training. However, Hearn presented the project at a Lions Club and raised $2, 500. So on a sunny summer day in 1962, the family drove home with a black Lab named Letta, the first of a long series of dog trainees.

Two sons and a granddaughter have followed in Hearn’s footsteps, but her greatest influence has come from guiding student trainers, who since 1992 have worked through a school club with 170 dogs that ended up in different service posts. They spend 14 months with each dog teaching them skills. The dogs live full-time with the students, attending their classes and field trips to become socialized.

The dogs then go to trainers employed by Guide Dogs for the Blind, an organization that partners with the program, before graduating and being paired with two-legged companions. Those that aren’t up to the difficult task of helping the blind can become other kinds of service animals. Often students attend the graduations and help pass the dogs on.

“I love seeing the look on kids’ faces ... when they get to see that dog again after three or four months and the dog remembers them,” Hearn said. “It’s a great feeling.”

【推荐2】Originally from Binghamton, Senior Jonathan Shapiro, the Business major decided to pursue his degree to further his music career. “The reason I came here was because in my senior year, I had a manager who was the owner of 105.5 The Beat, a radio station here in Rochester, and he invited me to come to this Kevin Gates concert,” Shapiro said. “I worked with him for months, and I never ended up signing … but this school was close to him.”

The majority of fellow rappers that Shapiro has encountered in Rochester live different lives than he does—they don’t go to college, and they’re born-and-bred inner-city Rochester residents. They have, according to Shapiro, “a lot of real-life experiences” that come through in their work, which he admires. “I’ve met kids as young as 15 and people as old as 30 in the studios.”

Shapiro himself has been shifting into, in his own words, “a more hyperpop sound” in comparison to his earlier work. He started making his own music in seventh grade after breaking his back, which shattered his dream of becoming a professional soccer player, and never stopped.

In the future, Shapiro is planning a joint concert with some other Rochester musicians and rappers in the spring at Water Street Music Hall, as well as releasing further music across the course of the year. “It would be a mix of local artists and some UR artists, like a festival,” Shapiro said. “I want it to be a showcase of multiple artists if I can make that happen.”

When asked about advice that he would give to ambitious musicians and rappers here in Rochester, Shapiro had this to say: “Don’t get discouraged by results and don’t be results-oriented (导向). If you want to get out there, do it because you love it and because you want to make good art, and that will always have an impact.”

【推荐2】There’s a clear difference between knowing how to make friends and knowing how to maintain (维系) friendships for a long time. Do you have trouble keeping friends around, or are you tired of losing many friends over the years?     1    .

1.     2    

Interact (互动) with your friends in a way that’s meaningful and fruitful and you’ll be able to maintain your friendship better. You can either share your interest or talk about your family, work or daily routine. All in all, The more you know about each other, the stronger your bond will be.

2. Stay in touch

To keep a friend or a group of friends for a long time, you need to see or talk to them from time to time. For the people you go out with the most, I recommend once a week or twice a month. For long-distance friendships,     3    

3. Deal with fights

Fights are likely to happen.     4     Instead, you should face the problem bravely. Having an open-hearted talk with your friend and listening to each other may be the easiest way to solve your conflict. Do remember if you don’t resolve the conflict, you might lose a very dear friend.

4. Everyone changes

Change cannot be avoided and it happens to people too.     5     So When it happens to a friend, embrace the change and be happy for them. Just be sure that it is change for the better and not the other way around.

【推荐1】Sometimes too much pressure can make us angry, fed up or sad. But you can actually remove some pressure before it gets the best of you.    1    .

Forget about being perfect.    2    It’s just you who put unnecessary pressure on yourself and reduce your ability to do excellent work. Take a look at the next point to find a better replacement for being perfect.

    3    It is wise to reduce many of your inner, mental problems such as performance anxiety and other worries. So you’d better ignore the possible outcomes and just keep your focus on the work you are doing, which makes it easier to live up to your potential.

Be calm with mistakes and failure.    4    When you learned to ride a bike, you fell off it time and time again. Just brush yourself off, perhaps cry for a moment and then get up on the bike again. See failure not as something negative but simply as a lot of room for improvement.

Just do it! It is often easy to get stuck in procrastination (拖延) and get little done.    5    That will make you upset about yourself. “Just doing it” is a great way to get out of a procrastination state and just get going with what you want to do. But that’s not always so easy. You have to get started at once.

【推荐2】You may look nice or just fine; however, you will never be happy with your looks if you don’t feel good about them. Here is how you can feel better about yourself and the way you look.

Know what is attractiveness

We are told from a young age what is attractive and what isn’t.     1    . Then we feel bad about our looks. So this needs to change. It isn’t possible to change society’s ideas on beauty, but it is possible to change your own ideas. Who do you respect in real life?     2    .

It’s not just about looks

Your overall confidence does not need to depend on the way you look. You should care about your inner quality too. Those qualities include your abilities and what you are good at, your personality, how you look at the world, and the relationships you have within it.     3    .

Remember to smile

Smiling always makes people look more attractive. This might seem like an easy thing to do, but for some people their “resting” faces always look sad, even they really aren’t.     4    . People are attracted to those who smile, and doing so can also lift your spirits.

Have less stress

The more stressed out you are, the more it will show on your face. This can make you look less attractive.     5    . These happy thoughts can change the way you look as well as the way you feel.

【推荐3】The Positive Effects of a Positive Affect

Parents often have high hopes for how their children will turn out in adulthood, such as wanting them to be healthy, to feel satisfied with their career, and to have strong friendships.    1    

Recent research suggests that a teen’s affect—especially positive affect—is one critical factor. What exactly is affect? Affect is the tendency to express positive or negative emotions, which in turn influences how we experience things and determine whether to judge a given situation as positive or negative.    2     Moreover, research suggests that a person’s affect is relatively stable over time, especially by the time one reaches adulthood.

Affect is typically described in terms of being either positive or negative, and it seems that positive affect, in particular, is related to a number of beneficial outcomes in adulthood.

In support of this crucial role that positive affect has in development, a study by researchers at the University of Virginia followed teenagers and young adults from ages 14 to 25, allowing them to understand the predictive power of positive affect across the critical developmental period from adolescence to young adulthood.    3     For example, teens with a higher positive affect reported had a stronger, healthier attachment to their friends.

    4     Positive affect also predicted increased self-worth and job competence, suggesting that, overall, positive affect seems to be a key predictor of young adult success across several important areas of functioning.

But what about the effects of negative affect? The researchers also examined whether negative affect would predict problems in young adulthood.    5     Thus, the important takeaway is that adolescent positive affect may have powerful links to important life outcomes in the domains of personal well-being, career, and social relationships up to a decade later.