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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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October 31, 2011|Events
Miriam Montes is the editor-in-chief of Elmhurst’s much-lauded student newspaper, the Leader, which means her journalistic beat extends not much beyond the fringes of campus. But in the lobby of Cureton Hall last week, Montes was talking about her chance to change that.
Montes and the rest of the Leader staff were excited about a recently announced partnership between Elmhurst and the Washington, D.C.-based Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, which offers fellowships for student-journalists who want to report from global news hot spots. Montes plans to apply.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” she said.
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October 25, 2011|Podcasts
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When author and social critic Naomi Wolf spoke at Elmhurst as part of the College’s Democracy Forum on October 20, she told students that it was “time for Americans to start acting like Americans again.” For Wolf, that means organizing “to stand up for your rights” and “demanding transparency” in government.
Wolf’s 1991 feminist classic, The Beauty Myth, was hailed by The New York Times as one of the most important books of the 20th century. Her 2007 book, The End of America, warned of a “fascist shift” in the United States. In the latest edition of the Quick Studies podcast series, Wolf discussed threats to American democracy and the hope offered by activist movements on the left and right.
October 17, 2011|Academics
Gene Losey’s new chemistry lab is in an unlikely location. Every so often, especially after a heavy rain, or what Losey likes to call “a real gully-whumper,” you might find him at work in the parking lot just west of West Hall. In an unremarkable-looking white utility box there, tucked among the prairie plantings that border the student parking spaces, Losey, a professor and chair of the chemistry department, collects samples of stormwater runoff. For the last two years, he has been analyzing the water he collects there, looking for insights into the workings of the innovative stormwater-control system the College installed around West Hall before the state-of-the-art “green” residence hall opened in 2008.
“This is a natural laboratory,” Losey said one afternoon last week as he was crossing the parking lot. “It gives us a chance to collect stormwater and see what we can learn from it.”
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