Archive for the ‘University Business’ Category
First in Northwest: WSU a finalist for first generation student support
July 24th, 2011
PULLMAN, Wash. – Washington State University is vying for funding that would establish a First Scholars Program on the Pullman campus. The program specializes in providing support for first generation college students.
The Suder Foundation established the First Scholars Program in 2008 as a way to dramatically increase the graduation rate of first generation college students – those whose parents have no education beyond high school. This is accomplished by providing students with individualized academic and social support, personal development opportunities and financial assistance.
According to the program website, only 36 percent of first generation students complete a bachelor degree within six years of enrollment, compared with 43 percent of their peers whose parents had some college and 60 percent of their peers whose parents have college degrees.
Many first generation students lack roles models who can help teach them the keys to academic success, said John Fraire, vice president for Student Affairs and Enrollment. But with the right knowledge and support, these students can be as successful in college as everyone else.
It is this same belief that led Eric Suder to create the Suder Foundation and the First Scholars Program. Suder is founder and chief executive of Estech Systems, Inc., a Texas firm that specializes in manufacturing phone systems for businesses. Along with Diane Schorr, executive director of the foundation, Suder spent two days in Pullman last week to get a better feel for the campus and community.
WSU Development Director Ris McGill said the planning team that submitted the grant proposal believes WSU is an ideal location for the First Scholars Program.
As a land grant institution, supporting first generation and low income students is already a big part of our culture, she said. Programs and services are already in place that clearly demonstrate our commitment to serving these students.
This program would allow us to provide a more transformative, affordable and accessible education that will impact students for generations to come, said Luci Loera, assistant vice president for Enrollment Management.
The Suder Foundation funds First Scholars Programs at the University of Utah, University of Alabama, University of Kentucky and Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. This year it aims to support three additional universities. WSU is one of four finalists.
I think the fact that we would be the only school in the Pacific Northwest to have the First Scholars Program bodes well for us, as I know Eric would like to see this program expand to all corners of our country, McGill said.
Consistent with what other universities are receiving, WSU is seeking $860,000 over five years to establish the program. The amount includes $60,000 in start-up funds. If WSU is successful in securing the grant, it will use the first year to establish an office on campus, hire a mentor for students and develop a comprehensive array of support services.
The plan calls for the first cohort of 20 students to arrive on campus in fall 2012 – with new cohorts of 20 students arriving each year until the maximum of 80 students is reached. The funding will provide each student with $5,000 a year for four years.
Leading this effort for WSU are representatives from Student Affairs and Enrollment, Institutional Research, University College and the WSU Foundation.
McGill anticipates a decision on the grant to be announced within a couple of weeks.
Tags: Support
Posted in University Business | No Comments »
Carousel animals exhibition hours will extend
July 22nd, 2011
In an effort to make it easier for families to attend the “Carrousels at Fresno State” exhibition of carousel animals, opening hours will be extended on two weeknights and added on Saturdays.
The exhibition of ornate, hand-sculpted animals dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries at the Henry Madden Library at California State University, Fresno, began Saturday, July 16 and runs through Aug. 31. It originally was scheduled to be open during the library’s regular summer hours (8 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday).
However, the sponsoring College of Arts and Humanities worked with the Madden Library to keep the exhibition open until 7 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday (beginning July 26) and add 10 a.m.-2 p.m. schedules on Saturdays (July 30, Aug. 6 and 13).
Only the exhibition is open, the library is not providing services Tuesday and Thursday evenings, nor on the three Saturdays.
On Aug. 22, when classes resume for the fall semester, the library will be open until 11 p.m. Monday-Thursday, until 5 p.m. Friday, 1-5 p.m. Saturday and 2-10 p.m. Sunday.
The carousel animals were collected by Larry Freels of Fresno and are installed in the Leon S. Peters Ellipse Gallery on the second floor of the Madden Library and in the third floor Pete P. Peters Balcony Ellipse Gallery. Other animals are displayed on the library’s main floor.
The exhibition is free. There is a $3 fee to park on campus.
Tags: Carousel Animals, Extend
Posted in University Business | No Comments »
Five days on campus: Yakima Valley students ‘Exploring Health Sciences’
July 22nd, 2011
PULLMAN, Wash. — Select high school students from Yakima Valley participated in classes and activities at the WSU College of Pharmacy this past week as part of the “Exploring Health Sciences” camp.
The students were selected by the Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic in Toppenish and spent three weeks in community college classes and shadowing health care professionals . Following that, WSU’s College of Pharmacy hosted them for five days, providing them with exposure to various health sciences fields on campus and in the Pullman community.
The WSU camp is co-sponsored by a college donor fund established to increase minority participation in pharmacy and by Walgreens. This is the seventh consecutive year for the program, which usually hosts about 20 students.
In picture #26, Clinical Assistant Professor of Pharmacy Megan N. Willson guides two high school students from the Yakima Valley in learning to listen for a heartbeat using the College of Pharmacy’s Human Patient Simulator.
#34, Yakima Valley Students in Pullman for a five-day “Exploring Health Sciences” camp crowd around a research assistant in a College of Pharmacy laboratory to learn about research techniques.
#59, A Yakima Valley high school student learns to listen to a heartbeat with the help of a Human Patient Simulator as part of a five-day summer camp in Pullman, “Exploring Health Sciences,” sponsored by the College of Pharmacy.
Tags: Exploring Health, Exploring Health Sciences, Health Sciences, Sciences
Posted in University Business | No Comments »
The Summons of Love
July 21st, 2011
We end this week by looking at love. Specifically, Mari Rutis new book The Summons of Love.
Below are some excerpts from the introduction of the book. You can also follow Mari Rutis blog on Psychology Today, The Juicy Bits: Love, lust, and the luster of life or follow her on :
Romantic love summons us to become more interesting versions of ourselves. It speaks to those dimensions of our being that reach for enchantment—that chafe against the mundane edges of everyday existence. If much of life entails a gradual process of coming to terms with the limitations imposed on us by our mortality (by the tragically fleeting character of human experience), love boldly pursues the immortal. This does not mean that it grants us everlasting life. It cannot, unfortunately, rescue us from the relentless march of the clock. But to the extent that it rebels against the undertow of everything that is trite or prosaic about the world, it touches the transcendent; it ensures that we do not completely lose contact with the loftier layers of life.
Traditionally, the sublime has been envisioned as what inspires awe while resisting our ability to fully fathom its scope or power. The most common examples of the sublime—stormy oceans, rugged mountains, immeasurable deserts, starry skies, the darkness of night, absolute solitude, or some misfortune of soul-shattering magnitude—possess an enormity, force, or mysterious depth that escapes human control. We can neither tame them nor capture them within the folds of our imagination. Yet the very fact that we feel inadequate in the face of the sublime induces us to stretch our minds so that we can at least draw closer to what eludes us; it invites us to activate a greater range of our conceptual capacities so that we come to fill up more of the space between ourselves and what we cannot attain. This is why the sublime stirs us: it speaks the language of the immortal giant within us.
The same can be said of love. Love ruptures the canvas of our everyday experience so that we feel transported beyond the ordinary parameters of our lives. The French critic Julia Kristeva conveys this perfectly when she states that love gives us the impression “of speaking at last, for the first time, for real.” It allows us to feel fully and exuberantly alive, as if we were finally saying something enormously significant. If the normal organization of our lives tends to be a bit monotonous, love represents a sudden fissure—an unexpected break, swerve, or deviation—in that organization. This is why we often experience it as a stunning revelation that allows us to view the world from an unsullied perspective. It is as if everything that is dazzling, radiant, hopeful, and untarnished about the world slid into view from behind the familiar screen of our everyday reality. We feel oddly rejuvenated, connected to the deepest recesses of our being. Our daily routine becomes animated so that even its most humdrum facets seem heavy with potential. In this way, falling in love accelerates our personal process of evolution.
Tags: Love
Posted in University Business | No Comments »
Taking it to the limit
July 19th, 2011
It is summer in Napa Valley and a man is running through the suffocating heat. Ten hours ago, he started swimming through the Russian River. He has swum, biked and run for more than 130 miles today, and now, 15 miles into a marathon, he is suffering from severe dehydration and gastrointestinal problems that should have him bedridden. Just eight days ago, he got off an Alaskan fishing boat after 40 days at sea.
.
UW senior Tanner Tennyson was a promising baseball prospect before an accident left him in a coma for three days.
.
Tennyson is currently training for the World Championships in Beijing this September.
The man shouldn’t be here. By all rights, he should have been in a wheelchair for the past 10 years.
On Sept. 14, 2001, Tanner Tennyson, now a UW senior, fell off a 10-foot high breezeway and landed on the back of his head. He fractured his skull and suffered a brain bleed in his left frontal lobe that left him in a coma for three days.
But Tennyson was lucky. These are serious injuries, ones which could have killed him, or left him a paraplegic, or in a vegetative state. Instead, he escaped with mild memory loss and pains in his head.
“I’m just kind of like, ‘How did I not break my spine? How did I not break by back? How did I not break the bones inside my skull?’ you know,” Tennyson said with an incredulous shake of his head. “I didn’t have a scratch on my head, which was wild. There was no blood. It is kind of amazing.”
When his coma ended, Tennyson faced an even greater problem: How to live a life that had previously been defined by athletics while dealing with the side effects of a traumatic brain injury.
“When I had my body stripped from me, it was like, ‘Oh, who am I?’” Tennyson said. “You go through an identity crisis, totally.”
At the time, Tennyson was a promising baseball player already being contacted by colleges as a 15-year-old. But the pain caused by his brain injury proved to be an end to that dream. Every time Tennyson experienced any sort of jarring motion, from swinging a baseball bat to simply walking too fast, the inner bones of his skull jabbed at his brain, no longer inhibited by protective tissue that was destroyed in the accident.
Tennyson searched for answers, going from one doctor to another in the hope of an answer to one simple question: How could he be an athlete again?
But one after another, the doctors told Tennyson to be careful. They said the pain and the after-effects would simply be a part of his life, something he would forever have to deal with.
And for four years, he did what the doctors said.
“I didn’t do anything,” Tennyson said. “It was terrible. It was really, really terrible. Because I have so much energy, and I’m athletic, I want to do things. I would [have] liked to play athletics in college, but I [couldn’t] really do anything.”
Just as the frustration of stillness became too much to bear, a chance encounter with an old acquaintance changed Tennyson’s life.
“I was eventually going to community college and bumped into a guy from my high school who had lost 145 pounds,” Tennyson said. “And I was like, ‘Whoa, you’re kidding me?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, I’m marathon running now.’ And I was like, ‘That’s insane. If he can do that, I got to figure my thing out.’”
Tennyson could not accept being careful anymore. He kept going to doctors, kept seeking opinions — until a fortuitous trip to Virginia Mason. Tennyson serendipitously wound up in the office, not of a neurologist, but of an ear and eye injury specialist who had a few much-desired words of advice.
“She was like, ‘Well, I am not really the specialist for you,’” Tennyson said. “But then we ended up chatting, and she was like, ‘What if you tried [treating it as a soft-tissue injury]?’”
That advice came with a few magic words: If it hurts, do it. If it makes you want to cry, don’t do it.
So Tennyson started to walk, faster and for longer distances. Then he started to run. Before long, he entered a half-marathon. And within just a few months of his re-entry into the world of athletics, Tennyson entered his first triathlon.
“I just wanted to be able to use my body again,” he said. “I had no idea what [a triathlon] was. I was like, ‘That sounds really hard, I want to do it.’ That is basically how I got interested in it — I was just curious.”
Shortly after his interest in triathlons was piqued, Tennyson met a seasoned triathlete named Aaron Scheidies — a UW graduate student at the time — at a fundraiser for the UW triathlon club. Scheidies, who is legally blind and holds multiple world records in the triathlon, took Tennyson under his wing.
“At first, I tried to be that mentor and show him the ropes,” Scheidies said. “[But] once he learned some stuff, he has been able to branch out and kind of pave his own way.”
Before long, Tennyson realized he had found something he was good at it. Better at, in fact, than just about everyone else who raced triathlons. While he was good from the start, he was at first unable to fully dedicate himself to the sport due to the lasting effects of his brain injury. It took about a year after the start of his career for Tennyson to begin training to compete on the national, and eventually international, scale.
Simply racing triathlons wasn’t enough for Tennyson. In the summer of 2008, shortly after competing in his first triathlon, he was offered a spot on a commercial fishing boat in Bristol Bay, southeast of Alaska. Each of the past three years, Tennyson has left home just after the end of school, around June 15, for about 40 days of fishing in some of the toughest conditions in the world. In two weeks, he will leave for his fourth summer at sea.
For the first year, this worked fine — it didn’t interfere with his training because he couldn’t fully train in the first place. But by the next summer, and the summer after that, going away to fish for a month and a half once a year put a serious strain on Tennyson’s competitive ability.
“It makes a big difference, for sure,” he said of spending so much time on the boat. “You don’t get any fruit, and you don’t get any vegetables. … You put on a little bit of weight, or at least I do. Everyone else starts to lose weight, because they are working like, ‘Oh, this is the hardest work I do all year,’ and I’m like, ‘This is not enough for me.’”
Last year, Tennyson decided he had to find a way to remain in shape while on the boat. He did it the old-school way. To work on his cycling, Tennyson found an old exercise bike on Craigslist and had it craned onto the boat. For running, he convinced his captain to make periodic stops so Tennyson could run through the beaches and forests of southern Alaska.
It would seem that finding a chance to swim would be no problem while bobbing in an ocean. But the fishing waters are cold — deathly cold, in fact. So Tennyson brought a set of elastic exercise bands on to the boat and, at every opportunity, hooked them around the boat’s stern roller and emulated a swimming stroke, using the bands as resistance.
Competitive triathletes race according to age groups separated in five-year chunks. As a rule, divisions get more competitive and post faster times the older they are. Last year, with his 24th birthday on the horizon, Tennyson realized his last chance to be a member of Team USA, and thus to race at the world championships, as a member of the 20-24 age group was rapidly approaching.
In a spur of the moment decision, he decided to enter the national championships in Tuscaloosa, Ala., last Sept. 26. Despite having only trained at the race’s distance (a .46-mile swim, a 15-mile bike ride, and a 3.6-mile run) for a month and a half, Tennyson placed sixth in the nation for his age group, qualifying him to represent the United States at the World Championships in Beijing, this coming September.
“I am nervous, I am really nervous,” Tennyson said of the upcoming race. “Because this distance isn’t as popular in the U.S. as it is everywhere else. The sprint distance isn’t cherished in the U.S.— everyone gets their rocks off on Ironman. I want to get as fast as I can and represent the U.S. as well as I can, especially being one of the top guys on the U.S. team. I feel a little bit of pressure on my shoulders, for sure.”
Scheidies, who is himself experienced on the international stage, thinks that the main adjustment for Tennyson may be getting used to the magnitude of the event.
“The thing about it is that Tanner hasn’t done a lot of big races,” he said. “So it is time that he races the big boys. [But] I think he has improved a lot, and I think he can maybe surprise some people.”
In preparation for the world championships, Tennyson has tailored his training in the past nine months to better fit the sprint distance, which included a little practice at school.
“I taught a spin class at the IMA this year, which actually did help me a lot,” he said. “Everything that I wanted to do for my distance of training, I put them through. They liked it.”
For most Americans, as Tennyson said, the holy grail of triathlon is the Ironman. An Ironman triathlon is a massive, draining adventure that takes a full day to complete. The athletes begin by swimming 2.4 miles, follow it with a 112-mile bike ride, and end by running a full marathon, 26.2 miles. Suffice to say, it is not for the faint of heart.
In 2009, Tennyson and a friend were contemplating entering their first Ironman. They had their sights set on the Vineman, the longest-running Ironman in the lower 48 and a crazy dash through Napa Valley.
The plan sounded fine and dandy until the pair looked at the date of the Vineman: July 31, about a week after Tennyson would return from his annual 40 days spent fishing.
“I was just like, ‘F it, let’s do it. This will be ridiculous,’” Tennyson said. “Everyone was like, ‘You’re stupid, that’s the dumbest thing. You are going to hurt yourself.’ And I’m going, ‘No, this is sweet — you’re probably right, but this is sweet.’”
So Tennyson signed up for the ride of his life. He arrived home from Alaska July 23, dropped his bags off at home and hopped a flight for California.
Scheidies was one of those who thought Tennyson was just a little bit crazy.
“I was shocked that he decided to do that,” he said. “I was very impressed with how he did … because that is not optimal, and probably in most cases not healthy. It is kind of fearless, you know, and pretty amazing to be on a boat for 40 days and then get off and do an Ironman eight days later.”
There’s a lot of time to think in an Ironman (Tennyson ended up finishing in 12:50:14). For Tennyson, it was an opportunity to reflect on just how amazing his journey to Napa Valley was.
“Really like giving thanks to God, big time, because it was like, I shouldn’t be walking,” he said. “I could have all these crazy disorders, I could be going into a seizure in 10 seconds, but I have none of these issues.”
It wouldn’t have been quite right, though, for Tennyson to go through this race, the ultimate triumph of the power of his once-broken body, without just one debilitating injury.
At about the ninth mile of the run, Tennyson felt a sharp pain in his lower abdominal. As a childhood survivor of often severe stomach problems and complications, he recognized the pain for what it was: A stop sign.
But, just like being careful, stopping isn’t really an option for Tennyson. He had promised to himself before the race that he would not walk the marathon — he would run, or he wouldn’t finish at all.
“A lot of people swim, and then they bike, and then they walk the marathon,” he said. “And then they get an Ironman tattoo, and they wear the Ironman hat for the rest of the year, and they want a pat on the back, and I am not into that. I was like, ‘No, f that, I’m not walking.’ With internal bleeding, I am still not walking. So I didn’t.”
So, in between harried trips to the restroom, Tennyson finished the race.
“I got to the finish line and about 10 minutes after the adrenaline wore off, I got myself to the medical tent, and they did a lot of work,” he said.
There he is. The man is running through Napa Valley, sick and suffering, but with a smile the size of a sockeye salmon on his face. A triumph of the athletic and human spirit. Because Tanner Tennyson knows he shouldn’t be here.
“Everyone is like, ‘Ironman,’ and I’m like, ‘Are you kidding?’ There are so many harder things in life than Ironman,” Tennyson said. “There has got to be.”
Posted in University Business | No Comments »
v>