Class of 2013

You can’t get anywhere if you don’t know where you came from. In my case I hadn’t met my entire family. My mother was an immigrant; she came to America from a poor Central American Country. At age 16 she entered high school not being able to speak a word of English. She graduated and went on to college. Coming from Honduras she was raised in a strict home that provided her with a “family over everything” attitude, as well as a mentality to work as hard as you can for everything and to appreciate all the opportunities given to you. Before embarking on my college journey, I felt it was necessary for me to find my roots and return to the place my mother and grandmother and aunts and uncles came from so I could proceed to make my family proud and return to Honduras a successful man. Seeing the family I had only seen in pictures and heard over the phone was almost as fulfilling as going on a missionary trip, or working at a soup kitchen. When I got there I had no idea what to expect, but when I left I realized what was expected of me and how much family I had to make proud. I left Honduras with so much motivation, so much drive to succeed in all aspects of my life. My twenty-one day trip was more of a realization than it was a vacation, and I will remember it for the rest of my life.

SATURDAY AT HOME:  CHEER ON THE CARDINALS TO VICTORY!!  

 MEN’S SOCCER  

 NESCAC Semi-final

vs

Middlebury

11 a.m.

 FOOTBALL

vs

Williams

1 p.m

AWAY:  BRING HOME THE CHAMPIONSHIPS!!

 WOMEN’S VOLLEYBALL

NESCAC Championships

at Tufts

WOMEN’S & MEN’S CROSS-COUNTRY

at Mt. Greylock H.S., MA

GOOD LUCK TO ALL!!

Think you and your friends got game???  Well here is your chance to prove it.  The Deans Office and The Office of Public Safety are sponsoring a “Midnite Madness” 3 on 3 basketball tournament at the Freeman Athletic Center fieldhouse on Friday night November 13th.  The tournament will begin at 12 midnight.  Registration is open to all current students and will be limited to the first 32 teams to sign up by November 7th. Teams can consist of 3 or 4 players.  Awards will be given to the top four teams.  For more information and to register you can go to www.wesleyan.edu/publicsafety/basketball .

Amazing that it is already time to be thinking of courses for next semester!  The planning period begins tomorrow and runs through Mon., Nov. 16 at 5 p.m.  Scheduling is the next day and the adjustment period starts on Wed., Nov. 18 at 8 a.m. through Tues., Dec. 1 at 5 p.m. 

As you think of your program of study, keep in mind the importance of exploring new areas of the curriculum and choosing courses that will stretch your mind, get you thinking and engaged in your work.  At the same time, keep an eye on gateway courses needed for possible majors, GenEd courses, and courses that emphasize Essential Capabilities you would like to strengthen. 

Take advantage of WesMaps’ categories to help you navigate the curriculum in anything from FYIs to  intellectual clusters to departmental descriptions to anything in the above paragraph.

Remember to spread your courses throughout the week and the day, and seek variety in the kind of coursework you will be doing. 

Any questions?  Talk with your professors, your faculty advisor, me as your class dean, Dean Lazare, and any other person with curricular expertise who you think will be helpful in your decision-making process.

Not Happy with Mid-term Grades…

Many of you will be getting your mid-term exam, papers, and projects back soon, if you haven’t already.  While I hope you will be pleased with how you did, if you are not, it can be quite an eye-opener and rattle your confidence a bit. 

Suggestions for next steps:   Review the exam with your professor and/or your TA and talk with them about study strategies specific to the discipline; meet with your faculty advisor and with me for study suggestions and time management tips; talk to a peer advisor and strengthen areas that you’ve identified as trouble-spots by going to an academic skills workshop (keep your eye out for exam prep and exam taking workshops for the next round of “mid-terms;” check out the SARN resources through the class blog, below; seek out some support at OBH or the chaplains; and come see me with any other questions or concerns. 

Always remember that you never would have been admitted if you didn’t have the chops!  We all run into times that are difficult or seem overwhelming.  It’s how you deal with them that makes a difference.

I love corn, whether eaten grilled at my house or dipped in butter and salted at the Minnesota State Fair, but this summer is the first time I ever truly appreciated it because I dug, sweat, watered, and begged corn into existence on my family’s new plot at a Minneapolis community garden. As a sustainable garden, I couldn’t use power tools or synthetic fertilizers, so in the fashion of Little House on the Prairie, I used only a shovel and pitchfork to remove the sod, turn over the soil to add air, shape the beds, and plant corn, lettuce, beets, and peas. When sprouts started to appear, I was surprised to find how invested I was in the success of each plant. I knew where each new carrot shoot was, observed the bees pollinating the corn, and mourned the bug- eaten lettuce. So now whenever I bite into a corn cob, I taste the sweet kernels, but also the hard work of my summer, and the often forgotten work that someone did somewhere to grow the food on my plate.

No, I do not wear silver face paint nor am I one of the intense Raiders’ fans so brilliantly depicted on television. Instead, I am just a local to the Bay Area, and someone who got to participate in an organization I never would have imagined. This past summer, I had an internship with the Oakland Raiders, but no, I was not a Gatorade go-getter. Instead I took part in the business side of the organization. It was by no means glamorous, although, granted, I did get to go to an event in Los Angeles and guard the Super Bowl Trophies.  And, yes the Raiders do have Super Bowl wins! And yes, putting me in charge of the trophies may have been a silly idea, as most of the fans were twice my size and looked like they played football. But just so the Raiders’ fans know, the trophies are back under lock and key, so I guess I did my job. This internship was a great opportunity for me to see the interworking of not only a sports team, but also a business, and although I am not much of a football fan, I now greatly appreciate the Oakland Raiders and even the amount of work put into each luxury box ticket.

Tuesday, November 3 in the Chapel at 8:00 p.m.

Four weeks before the nations meet in Copenhagen to try to avert global catastrophe, Mr. Blakemore will identify many often surprising psychological factors at play as people in all walks of life deal with the latest “hard news” on climate.

He’ll explore new definitions of sanity that may pertain, and give examples displaying different “psychologies”, as well as manmade global warming’s place in the long history of narcissistic insults to humanity itself.

Two new time-line graphs of rapid and dangerous climate change will give fresh global context to the psychological challenges and experiences he has observed in the five years since he began focusing on global warming for ABC News.

Computer modelers trying to project the speed and severity of global warming’s advance often say that “the biggest unknown” in their equations is not data about ice or atmosphere, carbon or clouds, but “what the humans will do.” This talk probes that field and many states of mind already engaged.

Sponsored by the Wasch Center, Department of Psychology, and the Robert Schumann Lecture Series in the Environmental Studies Program.  Follow-up discussion on Wed., Nov. 4 at 4:15 p.m. in the Wasch Center.

WesFiles is a centralized, web-based, document storage system that enables users to have easy network access to all their documents from anywhere. WesFiles replaces the old system of different storage locations for different types of documents, often requiring different front end programs and different usernames and passwords to gain access to files stored on different systems. There are many advantages to storing your documents in WesFiles

• Easy network access to all your documents from anywhere.
• Easy web access. You simply have to connect to https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu and provide your credentials to access all your documents.
• WesFiles system can also be mounted on your desktop so it appears as though it is another disk on your computer.
• Ease of collaboration – you can set the access control for any document yourself; you can also share documents with anyone who doesn’t even have a Wesleyan email account.
• You don’t have to worry about backing up your files because WesFiles is backed up for you on a regular basis.
• WesFiles lends itself to extensions easily. For example, ITS has written a dropbox function that the faculty can set up in WesFiles.
• WesFiles provides a document workflow engine that is very powerful.

More information is available on the WesFiles blog.

One of the most enduring and celebrated sagas in Wesleyan’s history is the Douglas Cannon. In the late 1860s, a yearly contest, the “Cannon Scrap,” began between the freshmen, whose mission it was to fire the cannon on February 22, and the sophomores, who were charged with foiling the effort.

Today, its empty gun mount sits near the flagpole, between South College and Memorial Chapel. In 1957, the tradition of stealing the cannon began in earnest. The cannon has traveled widely since that time: It has been hidden in dormitories, presented to the Russian Mission at the United Nations as a “symbol of peace, brotherhood, and friendship,” appeared unexpectedly in the offices of the managing editor of Life magazine, presented to President Richard M. Nixon as a protest against the war in Vietnam (Nixon declined), and baked into Wesleyan’s sesquicentennial birthday cake, among many other escapades. After resting again briefly on its pedestal in 1995, the cannon disappeared, and then briefly reappeared in December of 1997. Its present location is unknown.

For a more detailed history of the Douglas Cannon, click here.