Kate Duby sat with me and discussed the retention rates of black students in Arkansas
I recently interviewed fellow Lemke Digital Media Lab member, Kate Duby, over her research on black student's retention rates throughout the state, factors contributing to the rates and efforts being made to improve them. One of the most alarming factoids she presented in the interview was despite the constantly rising admission rates of both black and white students in Arkansas, the retention rate of black students is still consistently lower than whites. I found the whole interview process to be extremely rewarding and satisfying. I really enjoyed seeing my work come into fruition and Kate's expertise on the topic made the whole process a lot easier.
Here is the link to the Razorback Reporter where Duby's story will be published:
https://razorbackreporter.uark.edu/
Kate Duby, Lemke Digital Media Journalist
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The average female student loan debt in Arkansas is $10,051, which is about $1,250 more than the average male student debt in 2016-17, according to a College Scorecard study, a U.S. Department of Education database. The amount of debt students accrue throughout college varies depending on the degree field. Furthermore, certain degree fields have higher percentages of men. In many instances, these male-domintaed fields pay higher salaries. Juliet Sittler, a UofA junior majoring in accounting, has noticed that her field is male-dominated, Sittler said. Enrollment in the Walton College of Business in 2017 was 64% male and 35% female, according to the UofA Student Degree, Enrollment and Demographics. “I would say that I'm not the only female, but there are way more guys than girls in all my classes,” Sittler said.20, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, Sittler has around $19,000 in student loans from her first three years of college, she said. She intends on taking out more loans for graduate school and hopes to pay them off in less than five years. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the top male-dominated fields are civil engineering, which is 14% female; chemical engineering, 18% female; and electrical engineering, 9% female.. In each of these fields, women earn only about 89% of what men do, according to a study by the Department of Labor. On top of the amount of student debt accrued throughout school, students and professionals feel that the gender discrepancy is still prevalent within their area of study. For example, engineering is a male-dominated field, according to the U of A Office of the Registrar. There are 76% males and 24% female in the engineering field at the university. UA Junior, Summer Smith works on homework on campusMany female engineering students said that the gender discrepancy was felt in the environment, but they noticed various initiatives in place to lessen the gap. “In your average engineering pre-req courses for sure, the physics classes are all very male-dominated” said Meaghan Roberts, 20, of Valdosta, Georgia, a junior biomedical engineering student at UA, of the noticeable discrepancies between male and female engineering enrollment. Summer Smith, a junior biomedical engineering student, said she is aware of her place as a minority within her field, yet she feels it could be used as an advantage for those hoping to stand out. “I think it’s kind of cool because you get a lot of different opportunities that women that are in a female-dominated field don’t have,” Smith, 20, from St. Louis said. “Since people are looking for women engineers, I think it really makes me stand out.” Smith, 20, studies before an engineering testUA senior Katharine Jovicich, 23, from Dallas, who is majoring in chemical engineering, said she has acquired over $100,000 in student loan debt. Jovicich will be paying off her loans with no help from her family, besides living at home rent free, she said. “My goal is three years, but I think I could pay the minimum payment and it goes maybe 10-20 years,” Jovicich said. “But I just want to be out of it and so I will live very simply and still at home and get all of that paid off.” One University of Arkansas alumni, Jeremey Porterfield, 32, from Bryant, Arkansas graduated with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. He currently works as a project manager for Garver Engineers. During his four and a half years at the UofA, he received about $4,000 in scholarships from the university, Porterfield said. He still had to borrow about $40,000 of student loans, which he still has about half that amount to pay off since his graduation in 2012. “In school, engineering is definitely male-dominated. I’d say at least 80% male, and in certain disciplines it was even more so,” Porterfield said. “You feel it in the culture of the company. Smith, an engineering major, embraces the opportunity to stand out as a female in a male-dominated field
Completed renovations at the Pat Walker Health Center have officials excited about the easier access to services related to sexual assault, mental health and other important services.
The renovation included a 20,000-square-foot addition that offers a new home to several services as well as improved space for services already offered. The expanding health center added three classrooms, student study areas, a new home for the Women’s Center and larger space for Wellness & Health Promotion and Administrative Services. A major development of the finished renovations is a resource center for sexual assault victims and services. The Garland center, across the street from Pat Walker, was rented for extra space for the wellness center during the renovations and has since been transformed into the full-time home for the sexual assault services, with the wellness services being relocated back to the Pat Walker center. While 18-24-year-old college-age women are three times as likely to experience sexual assault as all other women, according to a study by the National Crime Victimization Survey, only 20% of female student victims report the incidents to authorities. RESPECT, or Rape Education by Peers Encouraging Conscious Thought, and STAR, or Support, Training, Advocacy and Resources, provide the university with services aimed at helping victims of assault as well as providing information on statistics and advocacy throughout campus. “They are there for victims of sexual assault but also for preventing it. Anybody who is impacted by it we hope to have the support that they need,” said Mary Alice Serafini, associate vice chancellor of Student Affairs and executive director of Pat Walker. “We also hope to help talk about things that impact the occurrence of sexual assault and one of those things is alcohol.” To prevent assaults, an NCAA CHOICES grant was used to create an RSO, Razorbacks Offering Accountability Resources. ROAR pairs multiple organizations throughout campus, including services offered through Pat Walker, and aims at offering options for students wishing to avoid drug and alcohol peer pressure. The goal of ROAR is to “create student-led initiatives, including, public service announcements, bystander intervention, alcohol awareness week and sober spring break,” among healthful activities that reduce alcohol misuse and abuse behaviors among a variety of student populations. The program is a campus-wide effort to help UA students make better decisions regarding alcohol usage. Another development is the expanded counselor-in-residence services. Two counselors live and have offices in Reid and Gibson halls, which offer direct access to counseling services for students living on campus. “A counselor-in-residence is a doctoral student in the counselor education program with advanced training in counseling, helping skills and crisis situations. Some of the issues a counselor-in-residence can help with are adjusting to college, anger, stress, grief, relationships, roommate problems, and time management, to name a few,” according to the UA website. Within the last five years the Health Center has expanded its hours to offer evening availability, part of Pat Walker’s constant mission to improve accessibility to students, Serafini said. “We constantly look at patient flow and patient access and we want it to be as easy as possible for people to access any of our services and if were getting into overload for one aspect then we look how we can balance that out,” Serafini said. The counseling center was also transformed with group therapy rooms, a multi-purpose classroom, new office space and a larger waiting area. “That’s why I love my job, nothing remains the same and things change all the time,” said Serafini, Another motivation behind the center’s renovation was to have services available to help students with whatever they may need, medical or not. -Mary Alice Serafini, Executive Director of Pat Walker
“We’ve always felt that we were educators in addition to technicians and so if you see a provider here, real often you’ll get some education not only about perhaps a medical condition but how to navigate taking care of your good health,” Serafini said.
With studies done on the health centers impact on student retention and graduation rate, Serafini said one of the main goals of Pat Walker moving forward is to have an impact on student’s lives post-graduation. “We want to have an impact that goes well beyond earning your degree,” Serafini said. “We really want to help people build themselves to be strong and known how to access resources as they need them so that’s part of the lifetime thing I’m always focused on.”
In order to create a text over video production, I utilized the Quik app's easy to understand system and implemented a score over the video. While the task did seem daunting at first, the app's layout and my experince i watching similar videos made the production much easier than anticipated!
The new “Adohi” residence hall will serve as the home of a long-term project studying a renewable building material with less waste than traditional concrete or steel. The residence hall was constructed with Cross-Laminated Timber, becoming the first residence hall in the U.S. to be built with the material and the first multi-story advanced timber structure in Arkansas. The College of Engineering and the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design came together through a $100,000 research grant from the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities to study CLT and whether fluctuating moisture levels would threaten the integrity of the structure. “Architecture is really excited about this new material, about CLT, and in engineering were always interested in studying new materials and so it made sense that we would come together and contribute to this project,” said Dr. Cameron Murray(cq), assistant professor in the College of Engineering, who helped oversee the project. Dr. Tahar Messadi(cq), associate professor in architecture and the 21st Century Chair in Sustainability of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, oversaw the architecture school’s participation in the project’s installation. Kameron Elliot Bacon(cq), an architecture undergraduate student and Elizabeth Poblete(cq), a Civil Engineering graduate student, managed the installation of the moisture sensors. “There was definitely a learning curve for us as a research team using the monitors within CLT because it’s not something any of us had ever done,” Poblete said. “We spent quite a bit of time with some sacrifice pieces we received from the contractor doing different tests to see how close we could place them without making them fail and how far we could be away from our data receiver.” The moisture sensors were installed in shallow, center and deep depths within the wood to get a concise impression of the effects of moisture on the material. The sensors were installed inside of prefabricated electrical box enclosures and secured with tamper resistant screws. They were placed in a wide range of locations within the residence hall including bedrooms, behind drop ceilings, maintenance spaces and kitchen and bathroom areas, which are especially susceptible to moisture. Courtesy diagram Courtesy diagram CLT differs from traditional building materials in that it is made from wood, a renewable resource, and produces little waste during construction. APA-The Engineered Wood Association(cq), a non-profit trade association of the US and Canadian engineered wood products industry, described CLT as “Lightweight yet very strong, with superior acoustic, fire, seismic, and thermal performance, CLT is also fast and easy to install, generating almost no waste onsite.” The structure is 200,000-sqaure-feet with two 5-story buildings connected by a “common area” building. The hall offers recording studios and practice booths, which benefit from the optimal acoustic environment that the CLT creates, as well as a Living Learning Community (LLC) which is open to all students not just residents of the dorm. The name of the residence hall “Adohi” is a Cherokee word for “from the woods.” According to the Adohi website, “This name honors the Cherokee who passed nearby the site following the Trail of Tears between 1837 and 1839. It was chosen in consultation with citizens of the Cherokee Nation, including members of the Cherokee speaker’s bureau. A Trail of Tears marker is located approximately 1,500 feet south of the new residence hall. It also references the sustainably sourced wood used in the cross-laminated timber construction.” With Arkansas being one of the nation’s largest timber producers, this study has the potential to encourage economic growth within the region if other schools follow the precedent set by constructing a dorm of lumber. “I hope that the construction of this dorm and the use of mass-timber on our campus will lead to better utilization of the states timber resources,” Murray said.
This week I am working on a story over the recently signalized intersections of Stadium and Maple and Maple and Razorback, and the intersections that are planned to receive signalized stops in the near future. The story will examine the reason for implementing these stoplights, the process the University has to go through in order to get these stops made as well as the benefits hoped to be achieved through the installation. Mike Johnson, the Associate Vice Chancellor of Facilities Management, here at the UofA spoke with me about his department’s participation in these projects as well as what future projects they have in the works.
Slug: 0StopLight07
What is this story about: This story will detail the facilities management’s participation in implementing stoplights within intersections on campus, as well as plans for future signalized intersections. Also detailed are the effects of the installation. Why now: This story is relevant because of the recency in which they have been implemented. 3 people to interview: - Mike Johnson, Associate Director of Facilities Management
How to make it visual: Post pictures of the intersection to accompany the text. Other information needed: The process in which the University has to go though in order to receive funding for these types of projects. Who do I need to contact: AR Department of Transportation A groundbreaking ceremony on campus officially marked the beginning of the demolition of the Social Services building, in order to make way for the new Student Success Center. With colleges like the J. William Fulbright College of Arts & Sciences lacking a student success center, many people on campus had been advocating this projects creation in order to provide a fair distribution of the University’s resources to all students. “I’m excited as an academic adviser, that we'll have a true space to accommodate our students,” said Fulbright College adviser Suzanne Wyatt. This new space will be a 71,000-square-foot, $45 million, Collegiate-Gothic limestone structure, located between Old Main and Memorial Hall, where the former Social Work building was. That building will be destroyed in a two-part demolition plan, beginning with the removal of paneling and other fixtures no longer up to code. The second phase will consist of removing the remaining structure. The new building will offer a Fulbright advising studio, a life design studio, a STEM studio, as well as tutoring and classroom space. Other programs offered are the 360 Advising Program and the Accelerated Student Achievement Program (ASAP), both of which aim at assisting first-generation Arkansas students with counseling and resources to help them graduate on schedule. “We’re particularly interested in first-generation students and ensuring they graduate with a degree,” Chancellor Joseph Steinmetz said. “The center will enable us to work on a better and bigger scale.” Associated Student Government President, Jared Pinkerton said that the new center will create over 300 new job opportunities, many of which will be available for students. The center will also offer more resources for Supplemental Instruction. “From the perspective of Student Government, we are always looking for ways to help students be successful,” Pinkerton said. “Students in this building will be investing in themselves.” The director of student success and associate vice provost, Trevor Francis agreed. Francis said, “you’re not going to have an excellent program in student success without students helping students.” “We’re trying to make sure we reach and exceed graduation and retention goals,” said Francis, who led the ceremony. “Our overarching goal is to make more students graduate.” The Associate Vice Chancellor of Facilities Management, Mike Johnson, described the center as a “centralization of the overarching structure of what a student success center does, trying to create a consistency among students; trying to put scholastic, economic, wellness and all of those things into one building.” With these new resources having a centralized location as well as new outdoor dining and courtyard areas, this new center “is a key part of the University of Arkansas’ strategy to advance student success,” according to a statement from the University. As Chancellor Steinmetz said, “above all this facility will allow us to embrace more students.” “We emphasize one student at a time,” Steinmetz said, “students are the unique individuals that have the hopes, dreams, and aspirations.” This week, I worked on a multimedia production detailing a local program that offers learning opportunities and real world experience to girls possibly interested in careers in technology. The process of assembling the video was slightly more difficult than i anticipated, however the "Videolicious" apps easily accessible platform was ultimately very helpful. I felt very satisfied to see my finished project and look forward to creating more multimedia presentations.
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