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Winston-Salem Journal
The UNC board of governors awarded the 13th Annual Awards for Excellence in Teaching May 11 during a recognition luncheon. These area educators were among the recipients: Melanie Greene of Appalachian State University. Read full story
Employment officials don’t expect it to drop much lower; market for unskilled jobs is tighter
he Triad’s unemployment rate reached a six-month low of 4.5 percent in April, the N.C. Employment Security Commission reported yesterday.
But local economists and employment officials said they don’t believe that the rate will fall much lower in the near future. The March unemployment rate was 4.6 percent.
“Considering the economy actually has been a little more sluggish, I would have thought that the rate would have gone up,” said Todd Cherry, an economics professor at Appalachian State University.
“It appears that in the current economy, we’re not likely to get much below 4 percent in the unemployment rate. Many employers are still uncertain about the key fundamentals that tell them when it’s right to add staff.” Read full story
Russell Warriner finished his 12-day, 390-mile jog across the state last week with a 51-mile spurt to Atlantic Beach on his final day.
“Man, it felt awesome to finish,” he said. Warriner, 21, of Cary took off running this month from the state line near Trade, Tenn., to help raise money for research on multiple sclerosis, the disorder that has left his mother’s legs weak and unsteady. He estimates he raised about $3,000 for the National MS Society.
Warriner, a newly minted Appalachian State University graduate, also made the trip to sate his thirst for adventure. Read full story
Dr. J. Mark Estepp has long admired one of Southwest Virginia’s best kept secrets.
“All of Southwest Virginia is a hidden jewel,” Estepp, the newly selected president of Southwest Virginia Community College in Richlands, said. “This whole area is a hidden gem. We are just happy to be here.” For more than 20 years, Estepp traveled past SwVCC in Richlands while visiting his family in the Matewan community in neighboring West Virginia. Estepp, who currently serves as the dean of the college of fine and applied arts at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., hopes to be on campus in Richlands as early as July as the new college president.
Estepp will be the second president of SwVCC, Glenn DuBois, chancellor of Virginia’s Community Colleges, said. Estepp will succeed Dr. Charles King as the first president and founder of SwVCC in Tazewell County. Read full story
Standardized tests won’t be going away anytime soon for students applying to some local colleges.
It may have to be a decision of the UNC board of governors, the state’s public college system’s board, to make the tests optional for students applying to those schools, said Bobby Konay, the system’s senior associate vice president for academic and student affairs.
Even so, some local admissions officers don’t want that to be an option. They say that the SAT and the ACT provide a well-known yardstick to measure thousands of applicants who apply from hundreds of school systems, many with heavy course loads and high GPAs.
Admissions officers also caution that the tests are just one piece of the admissions pie.
The SAT may not be a perfect instrument, said Paul Hiatt, the director of admissions at Appalachian State University. “But it supplies some measure of standardization.
“Obviously students who have more exposure to reading materials and so on, I would think, would perhaps have an added advantage. That’s not always the case,” he said. “We notice that some of the school systems regularly produce students who seem to score consistently higher than other systems. It has to do with the individual and it has to do with the school and the school systems.
“The academic record is the most important factor,” he said, “but we’re looking at the SAT as another measurement with the whole record.
“I don’t know that we are at the point where we would discontinue the use of the SAT or the ACT. We’re familiar with the national debate. I think there’s validity to both sides of the argument.” Read full story
Winston-Salem Journal
The job market for the class of 2007 is considered the brightest for college graduates since 2001, according to career-services officials at local universities and several employment surveys.
A factor in a successful job hunt is students’ willingness to move where job opportunities can be found, including out of the country, said Marjorie Ellis, the director of the career development center at Appalachian State University.
“If students are willing to be mobile, there is a pretty good job market out there,” Ellis said. “But some students are landlocked as to where they are willing to go.
“Our students are hearing from recruiters that they’ve got to be more knowledgeable and savvier about the field they want to enter.” Read full story
CareFair.com (Switzerland)
How many times have you and your friends swapped stories of diets gone wrong and skinny jeans that just won’t fit? It’s second nature – we talk about our fat and our constant fight against it. It’s part of our make-up. But its’ not just you and your friends – it’s all of us. In fact, according to a new study co-authored by Denise Martz of Appalachian State University, it’s socially mandatory. Read full story
Asheville Citizen-Times
Lew Ebert, president and CEO of the N.C. Chamber of Commerce (formerly NCCBI), will present the luncheon keynote address at Appalachian Regional Development Institute’s Leadership Summit “Doing Our Part: The Role of North Carolina’s Rural Public Universities in Economic Transformation.
The summit will be held June 11 at Appalachian State University in Broyhill Music Center’s Rosen Concert Hall. Read full story
Spartanburg Herald Journal
The Arts Partnership of Greater Spartanburg has selected an Appalachian State University administrator as its new leader. Perry Mixter, director of corporate and foundation relations at ASU, has been named president and chief operating officer of the local arts partnership. Read full story
A: To a team of Appalachian State University students who won a $75,000 award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for designing an affordable solar greenhouse. It was one of only six teams in the country to land a P3 award for sustainable energy solutions from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The greenhouse will allow farmers to power greenhouses with renewable energy by storing subsoil heat and using liquid foam insulation. To learn more about P3 and the award, go to http://es.epa.gov/ncer/p3/
Read full story
Winston-Salem Journal
Students and their faculty advisers from Appalachian State University won the EPA’s third annual P3 (People, Prosperity and the Planet) Award, a national student design contest for sustainability April 25. The winning entry was titled “The Affordable Bioshelters Project: Testing Technologies for Affordable Bioshelters.” Read full story
Asheville Citizen-Times
A team of students from Appalachian State University’s Department of Technology has won a $75,000 award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the development of an affordable solar greenhouse.
The ASU team was one of six college teams chosen to receive the EPA’s P3 award, the result of a national competition for college students to develop sustainable energy solutions.
“We have an opportunity to continue the work we’re doing and that’s really a privilege,” said Yonatan Strauch, a graduate student at ASU and the project coordinator. Read full story
Young people embrace communication phenomenon
Hickory Daily Record
In high schools and colleges across the U.S., students bringing their cell phones to class is almost as common as bringing their books. While talking on the cell phone is its No. 1 function, most of the younger generation uses it for another purpose: Text messaging. Dr. Richard McGarry, a linguistics professor at Appalachian State University, said it’s not surprising how quickly the texting phenomenon took off.
“The pace of life is much, much faster than it used to be, and this is just one way to keep up with it,” he said. “This is a version of a post office on the go. It’s replaced the post office.”
On ASU’s campus, McGarry said he sees students texting people or talking on their cell phones on a regular basis.
“And these are people they’ve just seen an hour ago,” he said. “Texting has replaced face-to-face communication, in a time when either the pace of life has picked up and the technology has followed, or vice versa.” Read full story
Cost, convenience persuading more students to start degree work at community colleges
As high school seniors make their college plans in the coming weeks, a growing number will likely decide to enroll in N.C. community colleges before transferring to four-year schools.
Transfers from the state’s community colleges to University of North Carolina system campuses increased by more than 34 percent from 2000 to 2005, admissions statistics show.
Appalachian State University student Ryan Barringer, 21, spent a year at CPCC, although he could have gone straight to a four-year college with his grades, he said. He wanted time to decide where to go and what to study. “I didn’t really know where to start, because not many people in my family had gone to college after high school,” he said. “I thought, since I’m not sure where I want to go, I can go here (to CPCC) and start working on what I’ll need to have, no matter where I go.” Read full story
Charlotte Observer
When area colleges and universities select books for their new students to read over the summer, I always find the list interesting.
Here’s a sampling for this year: Appalachian State — “A Home on the Field: How One Championship Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America,” by Paul Cuadros. Follows the lives of members of a Latino soccer team in Siler City. Read full story
Akron Beacon
Doctors, lawmakers and specialists are launching a large-scale public health network to change one of the stark facts of Appalachian life: Residents here are 20 percent more likely to die from heart disease than the rest of the country.
The goal is to focus attention and money on preventing cardiovascular disease in Ohio and the 12 other Appalachian states, especially their poor, rural and underserved areas.
It can be misleading to look for a single cause in the culture of such a large region, though, according to John Williams, a historian at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. Even though there are similarities in rural living the culture in New York State is much different than in Mississippi, he said.
What’s more, some of the common risk factors in Appalachia may have less to do with traditional culture than with trends that can be seen nationwide, he said.
“Does the higher incidence of obesity come from the traditional Appalachian Sunday dinner, or is it from the spread of convenience stores and fast food in the last 25 years?” he asked. Read full story
Furniture Today
The Furniture Foundation has allocated $134,000 for scholarships, education and research at four colleges and universities for the 2007-08 school year. Recipients include Appalachian State University, Mississippi State University, North Carolina State University and Lenoir-Rhyne College. Read full story
