Recent Posts
February 21, 2012|Academics
For most science majors, the presentation that Pat Brambert is set to deliver at the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research in Utah next month would be the highlight of a semester. For Brambert, it’s just a warm-up.
Brambert, a junior from Bloomingdale, has spent much of the last year working with Assistant Professor Stacey Raimondi on investigations into the genetic triggers that make cancer cells grow more aggressively. He was selected to present his findings at the annual NCUR meeting in late March, a showcase for the nation’s top undergraduate researchers.
But that’s just the first of two high-profile appointments Brambert has on his calendar for that week. After finishing his presentation in Utah, he will hustle back across country to offer his work at the prestigious American Association of Cancer Research conference in Chicago, a stage even more impressive than the NCUR conference.
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February 13, 2012|Podcasts
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Father Robert Barron uses new media to tell a 2000-year-old story.
Barron is a Catholic priest of the Chicago archdiocese, and he preaches from an extraordinary pulpit. His podcasts, tweets, online videos and 10-part television series Catholicism, which ran on many PBS affiliates last year, are part of his mission “to reach out to the culture” to communicate his faith’s message. Barron has been called a successor to the pioneering mid-20th century Catholic televangelist Bishop Fulton Sheen. But in this edition of the Quick Studies podcast series, Barron acknowledges that he is working in the midst of the greatest crisis in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States.
February 7, 2012|Pursuits
In a meeting room in the Frick Center, Elizabeth Romano was casting an icy stare at Joey Carrillo, asking him one more time to tell her the truth about what really happened that fateful night at Chuggy’s Bar.
Romano and Carrillo are members of Elmhurst’s mock trial team, and Chuggy’s is the fictitious nightspot at the heart of the criminal case they and hundreds of other collegiate teams are trying this year. In mock trial competitions, students and their teams earn points for convincingly simulating the roles of attorneys or witnesses in an ersatz courtroom trial. So in this early-morning practice session, Romano was playing a prosecuting attorney; Carrillo, a defendant charged with murder after the death of a passenger in the car he crashed following a long night of drinking at Chuggy’s. Romano’s mission was to punch holes in his account of the night.
“Did you turn on your radar detector even before you started your car for your drive home that night?” Romano’s prosecutor character asked at one point. And when Carrillo, seated in front of her, hesitated, she asked again: “Did you know you were going to drive recklessly that night?”
Romano, Carrillo and the other members of the mock-trial team have been grilling each other like this since August. That’s when they began preparing to try this year’s case, the details of which are laid out in a 300-page black binder supplied by the American Mock Trial Association. Every mock trial team in the nation gets the same black binder, and mastering the evidence and the statements between its covers is one of the basic tasks for competitors. But that’s the easy part. The real challenge has less to do with knowing your facts than with convincing everyone else in a courtroom that you know your facts.
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January 17, 2012|Podcasts
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Ask Elmhurst students which of their classes made the biggest impact on them, and you likely will hear about a course that Michael Lindberg teaches each year during the College’s January Term. Called “Facing History and Ourselves,” the course connects historical episodes of racism and intolerance with the everyday ethical decisions that students make in their own lives. In this edition of the Quick Studies podcast series, Lindberg, chair of Elmhurst’s geography and geosciences department and director of the College’s First Year Seminars, explains why so many of his students call the class a life-changer.
December 14, 2011|Events
In a back pew of the nearly deserted Hammerschmidt Memorial Chapel one afternoon last week, the Reverend H. Scott Matheney was watching and listening, an audience of one.
Matheney is the College’s chaplain, a job that ordinarily requires him to work from the front of the room. But this afternoon, he was rehearsing readers for the College’s annual Festival of Lessons and Carols. One by one, Elmhurst students and staff were taking turns stepping up to the chapel’s lectern, now flanked for the season by ribboned Christmas trees, to read through the Bible texts they had been assigned for the holiday service. After each reading, Matheney’s voice echoed from the rear of the church: “Thanks be to God!” Then he offered the same advice again and again: “Slow down!”
December on a college campus is not a propitious time for slowing down. Final exams loom. Long-procrastinated papers come due. Malls beckon. Stress levels soar.
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December 6, 2011|Pursuits
When Meghan Merklein heard the pop, she knew she was through with basketball for a while.
Merklein already was a high-scoring hoops standout at Plainfield Central High School when, late in her sophomore year, she landed awkwardly after leaping for a rebound and badly injured her knee. Doctors would later tell her that she had torn both her anterior cruciate ligament and her medial collateral ligament. But the pop she heard when she injured the knee had already told her all she need to know.
“I knew I was done,” she remembered recently. “It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt.”
Now, nearly six years later, Merklein is a senior pre-med major at Elmhurst leading the Bluejays women’s basketball team to one of its best starts ever. The Bluejays top scorer and rebounder, Merklein scored her 1000th career point last week in the team’s fifth win, a 64-58 road victory at Webster University. Two dates loom large in her plans for 2012: Merklein hopes to lead the Bluejays in NCAA tournament play in March; and in June, she intends to take to take her medical-school admission tests.
The pain she felt in the aftermath of her knee injury helps explain her determination to succeed at both challenges.
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November 29, 2011|Podcasts
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Every January for the last twenty years, Professor Judy Grimes has been leading groups of Elmhurst students on two-week trips to Jamaica. But this is no midwinter vacation. Grimes and her students work in the impoverished schools around Montego Bay, teaching music to Jamaican children and donating instruments and school supplies that have helped launch and sustain band programs there. The trip is part of Grimes’ popular January Term class, “Educational Experiences in Jamaica.” In this edition of the Quick Studies podcast series, Grimes talks about how the annual trips change lives in Montego Bay and in Elmhurst.
November 22, 2011|Pursuits
MiddleWestern Voice, Elmhurst’s stylish, student-produced arts journal, is both a national award-winner and something of a local mystery.
Last month, the magazine won an Associated Collegiate Press Pacemaker award, sometimes called the Pulitzer Prize of student media. Winning recognition on campus, though, has proven more difficult.
“I’ll tell people that I work on MiddleWestern Voice and they’ll say, ‘MiddleWestern Voice? I didn’t know you were in the choir,’” Creative director Annie Balavitch, a senior graphic design student from Muskegon, Michigan, said in the MWV offices in the basement of the Frick Center last week. “They don’t know we exist.”
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November 14, 2011|Events
If all goes according to Matthew O’Malley’s plans, by the end of January he and a few dozen friends will be sequestered in a room somewhere on campus, living out a computer-game enthusiast’s ultimate dream: Forty-eight hours of nonstop videogaming.
But O’Malley and company won’t be playing games. They’ll be creating them.
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November 4, 2011|People
One afternoon last week, Ally Vertigan was hanging out in the Frick Center lounge, getting ready to tackle a writing assignment. She probably wasn’t the only student in the room facing a looming deadline, but Vertigan’s task was unique. She had to write an acceptance speech.
Vertigan learned earlier in October that she would be honored by the Human Rights Campaign of Chicago as its college student of the year at the group’s annual black-tie awards dinner at Chicago’s Fairmount Hotel on November 12. That was the good news. Vertigan seemed slightly less excited about the responsibility that went with the award: speaking for three minutes or so in front of about 1000 well-dressed people at the dinner. She’d been mulling over the speech ever since.
“That’s today’s project, to write the speech,” Vertigan said. “I don’t know if I should do the Academy Award thing and list everyone who’s ever helped me, or just say how grateful I am.”
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