The other night, as I was walking home from rehearsal, I overheard a conversation that disturbed me more than anything I'd heard in a while (interviews with Sarah Palin notwithstanding). I was walking down 40th Street in front of a couple of guys, clearly Penn students, who were talking about a woman they knew.

Cornerback Tyson Maugle knows his captaincy designation is ephemeral, passed annually and non-transferable in the brutal economy that awaits the Class of '09. Thankfully, the third-year starter has a plan to trade in the "C" for another, more practical title: M.

In 1975, the men's soccer team went undefeated in its nonconference schedule. Tonight - a third of a century later - the Quakers can repeat that accomplishment. The Quakers (7-0-3, 1-0 Ivy) visit Lehigh tonight with the opportunity to put a punctuation mark on their stellar non-Ivy performance.

On Saturday, the Penn women's volleyball team opened its Ivy season at home with a familiar result: a loss to Princeton, its sixth-straight loss to the Tigers. Senior co-captains Steph Gwin and Kathryn Turner have had enough of it. "There was definitely anger and frustration on the part of Steph and myself, and I know that the two of us decided we're not going to stand for this kind of level anymore," Turner said.

Sen. Obama visited Abignton High School in Abington, P.A. this past Friday to address his plans for national education and push voters to register before the October 6th deadline.

It should have been a routine play, a no-brainer. Down just a touchdown with more than 14 minutes left to play, Dartmouth faced 4th-and-10 on its own 38. What ensued should never have decided the game. But punter Brian Scullin never put the ball to his foot, and instead tossed a short pass to special teamer Matthew Dornak.

Alicia Puglionesi is a College senior from Havertown, Pa. Her e-mail address is puglionesi@dailypennsylvanian.com.

This year, students are clicking their way toward a more interactive classroom environment, though some think the costs outweigh the benefits. This semester is the first in which many School of Arts and Sciences professors are requiring students to purchase "clickers" - small devices that allow professors to collect and display data from students during class time.

That 9 a.m. math class just got a little better. Three lecture halls in the David Rittenhouse Laboratory will be renovated next summer. Rooms A1, A2 and A4 will be renovated in time for the fall semester. While A1 will become a 240-seat classroom, the capacity of A2 and A4 will be increased to 80 seats each.

Fifteen year-old Logan Levkoff's parents pulled out bananas and condoms one evening in 1991- - during the onset of the AIDS crisis. Her parents declared, "You are going to learn how to do this," and from that night on Levkoff has been educating peers, parents and pupils about sex.

You may know him best as the Silver Fox. Or as the host of CNN's Anderson Cooper 360. But he prefers to be known simply as Anderson, a non-partisan news anchor who considers himself privileged to have his job - a job he did not know that he would want upon his 1989 graduation from Yale as a political science major.

"Look around this room," said Samuel Griffin, president of the male singing group the Orpheus Club of Philadelphia. "We are Bruce's children, we will carry on what he did . he will be there everywhere we are." Bruce Montgomery's impact on the Penn community as the school's longtime director of musical activities was the theme his memorial service yesterday.

Have you noticed the financial crisis developing right before our eyes - this country's worst since the Great Depression? Most of us know it exists but don't understand it to the extent we should. I randomly surveyed over 120 Penn students, and only 31 percent reported that they were "extremely confident" or "pretty confident" in their ability to understand the current financial dilemma.

Three-plus seasons of the unexpected (and the outright ridiculous) has made me hesitant to draw broad conclusions whenever Penn beats an unremarkable team like Dartmouth, especially in a game lowlighted by a 7-7 half. So I'll refrain from doing that. What, then, does one say about Saturday? The consensus in the pressbox and my inbox pegged the big developments as (a) Penn's inability to sustain drives, and (b) kicker Andrew Samson's three-for-three afternoon on field goals - notable only as a contrast to seasons past.

After his team wrapped up first-round play on Saturday, women's golf coach Mark Anderson knew the day was far from over. The Quakers had carded a 46-over 336 on day one of the Eastern College Athletic Conference Championships, and he wasn't ready to let them head back to their Williamsburg, Va.

"If Botswana does not tackle its AIDS problem head on, then the country will not survive," announced then President of Botswana Festus Mogae in 2000. Now, at the end of Mogae's decade-long presidency earlier this year, Botswana is at the forefront of the continent's battle with AIDS.

The long road to a university presidency has been getting longer. According to a recent survey, the amount of time it takes to progress through the ranks of academia is increasing, resulting in older presidents, said Jacqueline King, the assistant vice president of the Center for Policy Analysis of the American Council on Education.