Archive for October, 2011
2nd annual L.A. Student Media Festival seeks films
October 30th, 2011
Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Krekorian today urged high school students across the county to submit films for the second annual Los Angeles Student Media Festival by Jan. 20.
The festival debuted early this year with about 100 submissions, but was limited to students who live in the city. This year it was expanded to include the entire county.
Krekorian said the festival “showcased an immense amount of talent — movies that made us laugh, cry and consider a different cinematic vantage point.” He said the festival is a chance for young filmmakers to grow as artists and “will no doubt play a role in the start of many promising careers.”
The festival will take place in March at the El Portal Theatre in the North Hollywood Arts District.
Films must be limited to seven minutes and fit into one of eight categories: animation, comedy, commercial, drama, documentary, general, newscast/public affairs and narrative series.
The deadline for submitting a film is Jan. 20, 2012. More information can be found at .
Tags: Films, Media Festival, Student Media, Student Media Festival
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Report: Tuition up more slowly in Conn.
October 30th, 2011
A report says public university students and their parents in Connecticut can find some consolation that pricey tuition and fees are rising more slowly than elsewhere in the U.S.
The Hartford Courant reports the College Board said Wednesday that tuition and fees at Connecticut’s four-year public universities for the current school year rose about 2.5 percent. It’s among the smallest increases in the country.
Nationally, the average price for tuition and fees at public four-year colleges for in-state students increased 8.3 percent, to $8,244.
Tuition and fees of $10,670 for in-state students at the University of Connecticut is higher than the national average.
At the state’s four smaller state universities — Central, Southern, Western and Eastern — the charge for in-state students ranges from $8,055 to $8,555.
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Tags: Conn
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Instant Style
October 27th, 2011
As a fashion design major, inspiration can come from everywhere. I find strangers on the streets the most inspiring; those cool stylish people you see for only one unexpected moment—but why not capture that moment, that style, in that exact instant? Here, every Friday, from now on, I bring you the raw, unedited swag of the San Francisco streets. 
This week among the sea of Halloweek concert head-bangers, punk style prevailed. This ‘anti-fashion’ has been more fashionable than ever in the past year; Balmain being the biggest influence on the mass population. Main ingredients? Jean vests, dyed hair, studs galore, and killer attitude. According to these girls, “Punks Not Dead”, and won’t be anytime soon.
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What to Look for in Your First Job
October 20th, 2011
Even if you’re still not certain what you want to be “when you grow up,” odds are that you have already started to form some pretty strong feelings about what will and won’t make for a good first full-time job after college. I’ll skip most of the “you need to be willing to get your hands dirty” advice that I normally dispense to college grads and instead discuss three traits that can make for an ideal first job for you, no matter what career you eventually want to pursue. If you can find a job that has at least a couple of these traits, then you may have found yourself a perfect first stepping stone to your future career path:
• A chance to interact with a wide range of people. Sometimes the most valuable lessons you learn on the job are the things you never considered at the start of your career. When I took my first job out of college, working for a software company in a marketing and business development role, I was eager to learn about customer research, pricing theory and enterprise software sales strategy. While I certainly did learn some lessons in those areas, after a couple of years I realized that my most marketable experiences were in fact ones that I had never even thought about going into the job. What made me most valuable in future employers’ eyes were my experiences dealing with senior management; comfort in working with people from the technology, sales, and finance departments; and my experience in coordinating teams consisting of members from across the company. If I had been chained to a desk and had only worked with the same few people over and over, I never would have even sniffed most of the opportunities that ultimately made me ready to take on bigger roles later on.
• The opportunity to go beyond your job description at times. One of the best ways that hiring managers (and graduate-school admissions officers) identify budding leaders is by looking for a willingness to go beyond one’s job description to make things happen. Imagine a customer-service representative who not only handles calls and fixes customers’ problems, but who also identifies chronic problems and makes an effective case to management for fixing customers’ most common pain points. While a good employee would take those calls and make dissatisfied customers happy again, a great one would go the extra step to help prevent future problems from coming up, campaigning for big changes when needed. Jobs that give you those opportunities will help you keep growing, even if your day-to-day role itself isn’t the most exhilarating job in the world. Of course, the key is to take advantage of those opportunities and make things happen when the chance arises.
• A capable manager who’s willing to mentor you. The best manager I ever had took my success as seriously as her own, and devoted countless hours to helping me master the things that she knew an early-twentysomething simply wouldn’t yet know. While I probably could have figured things out on my own, I got up to speed much more quickly—and ultimately reached a higher ceiling, I believe—thanks to the effort she put in. If it weren’t for her willingness to invest in my development, who knows how far I would have gotten while still in my 20s? Apprenticeships haven’t been in vogue (at least not in the U.S.) for the better part of a century, but managers who view their young employees as apprentices are worth their weight in gold. Find one, and learn as much as you can for as long as you can.
Notice that “A Lot of Money” never came up in this list. While you certainly have a right to pursue a good wage, remember that—no matter how smart you are or what you majored in—you’re going to be a development project for whatever company hires you, at least for your first few months. And while several years in a relatively low-paying job may not get you excited, keep in mind that this is the start of a career that may last more than 40 years. So think broadly about what you want to gain from your first job, and you may very well be on your way to a successful career thanks to some less obvious job traits that you might have otherwise missed.
Tags: First, First Job
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Universities need Pepys as much as Newton
October 19th, 2011
For more than 800 years, the University of Cambridge has been a crucible of knowledge and culture. Our students and scholars – from Wordsworth, Wittgenstein and Pepys to Newton, Darwin and Crick – have contributed to society across the centuries. We value, in the widest sense, creativity and research across all disciplines.
Yet the current economic climate is encouraging many outside academia to assess universities’ impact in narrow, utilitarian terms, concentrating only on economic benefit or benefit to individual graduates and their employability. I believe that as global political and economic uncertainty increases, so does the danger of this viewpoint.
Cambridge is rightly celebrated for its innovation in science and technology – from the structure of the atom to the structure of DNA – and the university has more Nobel Prize winners than any other higher education institution in the world, in literature, economics and peace, as well as chemistry, physics and medicine. This reminds us that a university is not defined solely by science and technology but by the breadth of its mission.
And so it is essential that the full range of universities’ contributions is valued appropriately by the society we serve. The arts and humanities – which my colleague Professor Stefan Collini describes as “a series of disciplined attempts to extend and deepen understanding of human activity in its greatest richness and diversity, across times and cultures” – are an indispensable part of that contribution.
I am not alone in my concern. Reflecting on Cardinal Newman’s ideas on the role of the university, my predecessor as vice-chancellor, Professor Dame Alison Richard, observed: “The dichotomy between ‘useful’ and ‘not useful’ is itself increasingly ‘not useful’.” With an anthropologist’s view of the benefits of biodiversity, she made a powerful case for its academic equivalent: “The case for breadth centres on the proposition that the greatest challenges facing the world today are of huge complexity and global scope, best tackled by people whose education enables them to integrate different fields of knowledge and work across conventional academic boundaries.”
As we face the aftermath of one recession and struggle to avoid another, governments are, reasonably, focused on short-term financial perspectives. But as an 800-year-old academic institution and one of the world’s leading universities, Cambridge has a responsibility to take the long – as well as the broad – view.
Recent debates on higher education have focused on undergraduate teaching, obscuring the true scope and nature of universities by neglecting their research role – even though the benefit to students of being taught by those with active research careers is transformative.
To address complex questions of critical importance requires research across many disciplines and over the long term. Cancer prevention offers a good example, not least because the disease presents a complex challenge: the core problem cannot be addressed by science alone.
I trained as a doctor and spent most of my career in academic clinical medicine, studying cervical cancer. A UK-wide vaccination programme has been under way since 2008 and take-up has been excellent. But just as a safe and effective vaccine depends on the best clinical research, in a society that exercises free choice, successful take-up depends on a programme whose acceptability to patients must be informed by rigorous social science research that complements and completes the medical science.
This is not to argue that humanities and social science research exists only to serve science, technology and medicine. Understanding the causes and consequences of human behaviour is an end in itself, and there are many examples of arts and humanities research at Cambridge that bring social benefit or help illuminate pressing global concerns.
Migration and multiculturalism are two of those concerns, and in March this year, Cambridge launched a collaboration with two German universities using the latest research on German history to shed new light on immigration and guest workers.
Given that declining populations mean Western Europe as a whole must face up to a need for immigration, we should welcome the fact that historical scholarship can help inform this debate.
Closer to home, academics from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics recently set up the Cambridge Bilingualism Network. Working in local primary schools where pupils speak dozens of languages, the Network is bringing the latest linguistic research into the classroom to help parents and teachers nurture the gift of bilingualism.
In economic hard times, who will look to the long term? Governments will not; stockmarkets cannot; businesses dare not. Instead, we must look to our universities, which by virtue of their autonomy can build the disciplinary breadth and long-term vision to discharge that responsibility.
Over 800 years we have discharged it to the benefit of Britain and the world, and we discharge it best by remaining committed to the arts and humanities. Cambridge this week is celebrating these disciplines and how they enrich all our lives, in the third annual Festival of Ideas – a showcase for Collini’s description of richness and diversity, across times and cultures.
Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz is vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge
Tags: Newton, Pepys Newton
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