Features Technicianpage 6 • friday, february 10, 2012

Top5 Reasons to buy

a Yearbook

1. MemoriesRemember what the campus and your fellow students looked like

2. Year in ReviewSee the events that took place and look fondly on a great time in your life

3. Future GenerationsSomething your children and future generations can make fun of later

4. DecorationIt will make a great coffee table book and conversation starter

5.Wolfpack Pride!

Order your book at

ncsu.edu/agromeck

College fashion gets thrifty

Consignment and thrift stores offer adventure, creativity and quality items at a cheap price; thus their allure for college students is not surprising. The Triangle is home

to almost 20 different thrift and consignment stores, offering a continuous and intriguing hunt.

Whether students have a budget of $3 or $30, consignment stores are never too expensive or restrictive in selection. Luke Miller, a junior in bio-logical sciences, shops at thrift stores for a few reasons.

“I like shopping at thrift stores be-cause it’s cheap and I’m a poor col-lege student. I always find awesome stuff in thrift stores and it’s just fun to search for stuff,” Miller said.

Miller has a few favorite stores in the Raleigh area such as Rugged Warehouse, Uptown Cheapskate and Father & Son. Whenever Miller goes shopping though, he usually doesn’t search for anything in particular, ex-cept for maybe shoes, and he tries to stay away from tank tops. “I have so many tank tops that I’ve gotten from thrift stores,” Miller said. “Every time I go I buy a tank top, and I never spend more than $2 to $5 per item.”

Miller said he doesn’t have a system or certain secret when he’s looking through thrift store clothing. Instead, he just looks for versatile pieces of clothing he can be creative with.

“I always find things that I can cut up, and then it will still look good,” Miller said. “So I buy gigantic T-shirts and cut them up.”

Glenna Teague, a sophomore in fashion and textile design, differs from Miller in store preference and shopping style. Her favorite stores consist of the PTA Thrift Shop in Chapel Hill and the Goodwill in downtown Raleigh.

“When I’m shopping at thrift stores I have a routine; I skip over shirts and look at dresses, accessories and jackets,” Teague said. “As a textiles student you also begin to learn what brands are good—I usually look for Free People, Betsy Johnson or any-thing funky that I wouldn’t normally spend a lot of money on.”

Teague began shopping at thrift stores when she was in third grade, which eventually became a ritual when she got older.

“My mom has actually started a small business by buying quality things from thrift stores and selling them on eBay,” Teague said.

Steven Buning, 21, of Raleigh, vol-unteers at Dorca’s Thrift Shop in Cary, and has also been involved in thrift store shopping since a young age.

“I’ve been volunteering there every Tuesday since I was ten-years-old,” Buning said. “My mom used to make me, but then it just became more fun and I wanted to go everyday.”

Buning said that when he was younger he thought all kids shopped at thrift stores.

“Literally everything in my closet is from thrift stores, except for maybe some jeans, because I’m tall,” Buning said. “I have way too many sweaters and button-up shirts; probably like 35 sweaters and 40 button-ups.”

Thrift store shopping can be espe-cially efficient for college students, who can have problems keeping track of things.

“When you have a lot of thrift store clothes you don’t get upset if you lose an article of clothing, because it was so cheap,” Buning said. “Sometimes when I go to the club I forget my coat at the $5 coat check, but it doesn’t matter that much because my coat costs less than it did to check it.”

Shopping at thrift shops is a good option for college students on a lim-ited budget, those who are forgetful and those with the creative ability to design their wardrobe. Regardless of the motive, thrift stores will continue to offer adventure, thrill and discov-ery at a bargain rate.

ing. “We just dropped the cam-era and ran.”

While studying raccoons in the Everglades to test the amount of mercury humans were releasing into the ecosys-tem, Wooding had an interest-ing time actually catching his raccoon specimens.

“I set traps and baited them with cookies,” Wooding said.

Wooding also participated in a project in Florida to es-timate the population size of alligators.

“We were in the swamp, and to go from one little patch of vegetation to the other… you had to use boards to connect clumps of vegetation. They were called Jesus boards be-cause you looked like you were walking on the water through the swamp,” Wooding said.

That project is also an exam-ple of how his job can put him in dangerous situations while working with wildlife. His job was to catch and tag alligators, and one in particular did not

take kindly to being trapped.“He hit my friend with his

tail—lifted him up and threw him out of the boat,” Wooding said.

Overall though, Wooding thinks the rewards have been worth the risk.

“I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the jobs. They’ve been a lot of fun,” Wood-ing said.

He remem-bers in par-ticular work-ing with a team on the preservation of manatees. There was a recreational area with a lot of businesses that would bring people out to snorkel and swim with crea-tures, but conservationists were afraid that the people were scaring the manatees out of the spring. Wooding was hired to test the actual human impact.

“It was wintertime and the water was warm—that’s why they would come [into the spring]. They can’t stand cold

weather,” Wooding said. The combination caused steam to come out of their noses every time they surfaced.

“It looked almost like a dragon breathing—it would hiss too. It was wonderful,” Wooding said.

Now Wooding doesn’t do as much re-search—he works as a consulting biologist. He mostly stud-ies construc-t i o n s i t e s to see if the building will affect wildlife on the prop-erty, but also

conducts deer surveys, to help with increasing or decreasing the population.

“There’s all kinds of different work [for environmental biol-ogy majors],” Wooding said. “I’m a big fan of State; it pre-pared me well for everything I experienced over the past 30 years work-wise.”

coyotecontinued from page 5

John Wooding is a conservation biologist. Here he is checking rabbit traps in western N.C. He had to mark the traps with ribbons tied to branches. The rabbits remained unharmed.

“He hit my friend

with his tail—

lifted him up and

threw him out of

the boat.”John Wooding, wildlife biologist

THrifT sTore CHarm seems To domiNaTe College Campuses.Story By Josephine Yurcaba | photoS By alex sanchez

shoesGoodwill - Mebane, NC $4

skirtGoodwill - Stewart, FL $4

blue bagGoodwill - raleigh, NC $2

VestptA thrift Store - Carrboro, NC $3

V-neckForever 21 - raleigh, NC $3.50

belthand-me-down - $Free

sweaterDorca’s thrift Store - Cary, NC $2

pantstJ Maxx - raleigh, NC $15

shirtDorca’s thrift Store - Cary, NC $5

socksDorca’s thrift Store - Cary, NC $Free

shoesGot from a friend - $Free

the breakdown

FeaturesLiFe & sTyLe