Gretchen Toddy

Adley Rutschman soaking it all in when he took the field for the first time as a big leaguer will always be awesome

“You can’t reach the playoffs, you can’t win a championship if you don’t win the day in front of you. Just getting better every single day in the weight room, in the training room, on the court. Trying to maximize the day is the main goal,” Paige Bueckers Habits build winners.

D3 offers a unique balance of sport & school Over 2/3 of D1 athletes say they spend as much (or more) time on their sport in the offseason D3 athletes have more time to nurture academic interests, get internships, and enjoy down time (source: NCAA Stats)

This is why Shen Yun can’t perform in China.

UO is more than a campus, with 295 acres and 4,000+ trees, we're a designated arboretum 🌲🌿

A beautiful place to learn and grow.🌷 Happy Earth Day, Yellow Jackets! 🌎🐝

5 Leadership Lessons from The Andy Griffith Show: I grew up watching The Andy Griffith Show, and I still find myself coming back to it several times a week. There’s something about that whistling theme song—and the simplicity of Mayberry—that never gets old. (And let’s be honest: the black-and-white episodes with Barney Fife are the best.) Over the years, I’ve realized something: beneath the humor and nostalgia are some surprisingly powerful leadership lessons. Here are five that stand out. 1. Integrity Matters—Always In “The Horse Trader,” Andy warns Opie about dishonesty, only to stretch the truth himself while trying to sell an old cannon. When Opie calls him out, Andy is reminded of a hard truth: integrity isn’t situational. Great leaders earn trust by aligning their words and actions. They don’t just teach values—they live them. 2. Trust First—and Own It When You’re Wrong In “The Keeper of the Flame,” Andy assumes Opie is responsible for a barn fire. When he discovers the truth, he does something many leaders struggle to do—he apologizes. Trusting your people—and being willing to repair the relationship when you get it wrong—is essential to strong leadership. 3. Empower Others to Step Up In “Lawman Barney,” Andy helps Barney find the confidence to handle a difficult situation. He doesn’t take over—he builds Barney up. That’s what great leaders do. They don’t create dependence; they develop confidence, courage, and ownership in others. 4. Protect People—and Their Dignity In “Back to Nature,” Andy helps Barney and Gomer recover from getting lost—without embarrassing them. Strong leaders look out for their people, not just in big ways, but in small, human moments. They understand that dignity and morale matter. 5. Representation and Belonging Matter In “Opie’s Piano Lesson,” one of the few episodes featuring a Black actor, it’s hard not to notice how rarely diversity appeared in Mayberry. It raises an important leadership question: Who feels seen here—and who doesn’t? As leaders, we have a responsibility to ensure that everyone we serve feels valued, included, and represented. Every student—and every person—should be able to see a place for themselves. Final Thought: If we’re paying attention, the things we watch can do more than entertain—they can teach, challenge, and inspire us. I’ve found leadership lessons in Mayberry. Where have you found yours?

A community college professor taught the same study skills lecture for 30 years, and the video quietly became one of the most watched educational recordings on the internet. His name is Marty Lobdell. He spent his career as a psychology professor watching students fail not because they were lazy, but because nobody had ever taught them how their brain actually works under the pressure of learning something hard. The lecture is called "Study Less Study Smart." Over 10 million views. Passed around in Reddit threads, Discord servers, and university study groups for over a decade. And the core insight buried inside it has been sitting in cognitive psychology research for years, waiting for someone to explain it in plain language. Here is the framework that completely changed how I think about effort. Your brain does not sustain focus the way you think it does. Studies tracking real students found that the average learner hits a wall somewhere between 25 and 30 minutes. After that, efficiency doesn't just decline. It collapses. You're still sitting at your desk, still looking at the page, but almost nothing is going in. Lobdell illustrated this with a student he knew personally. She set a goal of studying 6 hours a night, 5 nights a week, to pull herself out of academic probation. Thirty hours of studying per week. She failed every single class that quarter. She wasn't failing because she lacked effort. She was failing because she had confused time spent near books with time spent actually learning. The 25-minute crash hit her at 6:30pm every night. She spent the next five and a half hours sitting in the wreckage of her own focus and calling it studying. The fix sounds almost too simple. The moment you feel the slide, stop. Take five minutes. Do something that actually gives you a small reward. Then go back. That five-minute reset returns you to near full efficiency. Across a six-hour window, the difference is not marginal. It is the difference between thirty minutes of real learning and five and a half hours of it. The second thing he taught destroyed something I had believed about how memory actually works. Highlighting feels productive. Going back over your notes and recognizing everything feels like knowing. But recognition and recollection are two completely different cognitive processes, and your brain is very good at making you confuse them. You can see something you've read before and feel completely certain you understand it, even when you couldn't reconstruct a single sentence from memory if the page were blank. He proved this live in the room. He read 13 random letters to his audience. Almost nobody could recall them. Then he rearranged the same 13 letters into two words: Happy Thursday. The whole room got all 13 without effort. Same letters. Same count. The only thing that changed was meaning. The brain stores meaning. Not repetition. The moment new information connects to something you already understand, the retention changes entirely. This is what the cognitive psychology literature calls elaborative encoding, and it is the mechanism underneath every effective study technique. The third principle was the one that hit me hardest, and the one almost nobody applies. Lobdell cited research showing that 80 percent of your study time should be spent in active recitation, not passive reading. Close the material. Say it back in your own words. Teach it to someone else, or to an empty chair if no one is around. The struggle of retrieval is where the actual learning happens. Reading your notes again is watching someone else do the work. His parting line has stayed with me longer than almost anything else I have read about learning. He told the room that if what he shared didn't change their behavior, they hadn't actually learned it. It would just live in their heads as something they had heard once and felt good about. He was right. And most people leave every lecture exactly like that. The students who remember everything aren't putting in more hours. They stopped confusing the feeling of studying with the fact of it.