Author: jplucas

A University of Wisconsin student was killed by a motor vehicle in Hong Kong. Kurt Leswing, 21, was traveling as part of the Semester at Sea program.

Hong Kong authorities said the driver of the vehicle that struck Leswing was intoxicated. The driver was arrested at the scene.

About one in five University of Wisconsin-Madison freshmen have parents who did not attend college.

The university says that’s consistent with previous incoming classes. It has been tracking enrollment of first-generation college students for three years and says they usually make up about 20 percent of the incoming class.

This year, about 5,800 new students enrolled at UW-Madison, and 1,170 are first-generation.

Admissions director Rob Seltzer says the number of first-generation students shows the university’s “commitment to ensuring that all residents have an equal opportunity to get an education.”

MADISON, Wis. — According to Men’s Health Magazine, Madisonians are addicted to their cellular phones.

The November issue of the magazine gave Madison an “F” for being fixated on cell phones, ranking the city 98 out of 100 â??Cell-Addicted Cities.â?

“I call people, I text message, I look things up,” said UW student Ally Root.

The latest directives from Falk to the 911 Center comes seven months after the 911 Center came under fire for not dispatching police after a call from University of Wisconsin-Madison student Brittany Zimmermann, who was later found slain.

The Zimmermann family said it can’t believe Falk hadn’t conducted the review already and that another person is dead.

“It’s absolutely incomprehensible,” said Zimmermann’s aunt, Kim Heeg, of Marshfield. “I’m angry; very angry. I cannot believe after everything that has come up with Brittany’s murder and mishandling that occurred with her phone call that again they could do this

Class rank still matters when it comes to being accepted at destination universities, such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but most admissions officers take a holistic approach to determine which students have the most potential, educators say.

New statistics report first-generation students, students whose parents did not earn a college degree, comprise roughly 20 percent of the University of Wisconsinâ??s freshman class.

Of the freshman class of 5,577 new students, 1,170 of them share this distinction as first-generation college students.

A sketch of the suspect who robbed a University of Wisconsin junior at gunpoint on Langdon Street was released by the Madison Police Department Thursday.

The woman robbed was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority, and she was getting out of her car in the parking lot outside of the sorority house on the 100 block of Langdon Street when the incident occurred.

The seven leaders of the University of Wisconsin group Action in Sudan set out on the road â?? literally â?? to end genocide in Darfur Thursday night as they traveled to a national conference on the topic in Washington.

Nearly five years after being warned the Dane County 911 center was short-staffed, and seven months after a communicator mishandled a call from a homicide victim’s cell phone, county officials are being told that staffing levels at the beleaguered center are insufficient.

According to university officials, over the last three years the UW-Madison Office of Admissions has accepted many freshman students with first-generation status or whose parents did not earn a college degree.

The admissions office not only takes test scores and course rigor into account, but also factors in the importance of the diversity that a first-generation status provides to each freshman class.

Rob Seltzer, director of admissions, said the office has an interest in the success of first-generation students because it affects the stability and strength of the freshman class as a whole.

Dane County’s 911 center, created to respond to emergencies, has now become an emergency in need of a response.

A recent foul-up follows last spring’s mishandling of an emergency call from the phone of UW-Madison student Brittany Zimmermann on the day she was murdered in her Downtown Madison apartment.

On American college campuses, where some two out of three students voted from Democrat Barack Obama, it wasn’t so much “get out the vote” in this election but rather “text out the vote.”

The savvy use of text messaging and Facebook networking combined with a political activism not seen at universities in decades roused what may be the biggest youth voter turnout since 1972, according to exit polls.

Bryon Eagon, 20, took off a semester from University of Wisconsin at Madison to work for Obama, citing his “unique ability to connect with our generation” on issues like the war, affordable education, health care and green jobs.

Although the official numbers aren’t in yet, those who obsess over such things say that the youth vote was out in full force yesterday and might prove to have been the key to Barack Obama’s presidential victory. Polls on and near college campuses saw significantly more voters than past presidential elections, while exit polls show that young voters preferred Obama over John McCain approximately 2 to 1â??the highest share of the youth vote obtained by any candidate since pollsters started recording such data in 1976.

The chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse told students Wednesday heâ??s more open now to supporting a national discussion on how the 21-year-old drinking age is not working.

A campus forum Monday on the Amethyst Initiative demonstrated itâ??s an issue worth looking at, Chancellor Joe Gow told the UW-L Student Senate.
â??If you want to do this and others do, too, I think we can do this as a model for other universities,â? Gow said. â??There is a way to talk about this without getting drawn into the emotion.â?