When it comes to incidences related to safety on campus, up to 90 to 95 percent of them are due to excessive alcohol consumption.
That’s what UW-Madison Police Lt. Eric Holen told students and others at a safety forum Tuesday night.
Jeff Carnes reads his This I Believe essay. Carnes served in the Army and Army Reserves for six years, and did tours of duty in Kosovo and Iraq. He is now completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin. Carnes hopes to go back to Iraq as part of his linguistic studies.
MADISON, Wis. — As many as 30 students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are sick with the norovirus.
Many of the students lived in the Sellery dorm hall.
Campus health officials said students are showing up with bad flu-like symptoms such as stomach cramps and diarrhea.
University of Wisconsin-Madison police will be concentrating patrols along Langdon Street and other campus areas hit by recent violent crime.
That is one of the decisions following a meeting Tuesday night between students, campus and community officials.
Students expressed concern and brainstormed ideas to help prevent more attacks. Many said they want better lighting along Langdon Street and more blue-emergency boxes installed around campus.
Last week a UW student was robbed at gun point on Langdon Street just feet from her home.
Now students are working with officials to guarantee their safety.
Maggie Molter used to think her Langdon Street neighborhood was safe.
In light of recent armed robberies, including a mugging of a Kappa Alpha Theta sorority member last week, the university will host a forum Tuesday to discuss safety on campus.
UW-Madison professors said Monday the current state of the world economy will affect the future of studentsâ?? loans.
A $2.8 million grant has been given to a University of Wisconsin research group to develop a â??smart phoneâ? aimed at helping prevent recovering alcoholics from relapse.
Kurt Leswing, a UW-Madison senior killed in Hong Kong by a drunken driver Friday, is being remembered as a wonderful friend and excellent student who was easygoing and cared about others.
For those unfamiliar with the burgeoning field of synthetic biology, the annual iGEM competition might seem more like science fiction than a college event.
The international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, which took place this past weekend outside of Boston, bills itself as the largest synthetic biology conference in the world. Much like an electrical engineer might build a circuit, synthetic biologists construct devices from cells and genes using standardized biological parts, called BioBricks.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison student killed by a drunken driver in Hong Kong was remembered Monday as an adventurous guy who worked as a volunteer at a Milwaukee soup kitchen.
Last Monday, Nov. 3, a UW-Madison student was robbed at gunpoint on the 100 block of Langdon Street. This followed a string of recent robberies on campus.
In response, the Greek community, UW police, the Associated Students of Madison, Ald. Eli Judge, District 8, and Dean of Students Lori Berquam are holding an impromptu campus forum Tuesday night at the Armory and Gymnasium at 6 p.m. Although a portion of the forum will address ongoing investigations, the forumâ??s primary focus is to generate feedback and problem-solving suggestions from the audience.
A UW-Madison senior killed in Hong Kong by a drunken driver Friday is being remembered as a “tremendous student” who was very easygoing and cared about others.
Kurt Leswing, 21, of Milwaukee was in Hong Kong traveling in the 15-week Semester at Sea program, a shipboard study abroad program administered by the Institute for Shipboard Education, with the University of Virginia as the academic sponsor.
Due to a string of recent armed robberies, UW-Madison students, faculty and staff are invited to a campus forum to discuss downtown safety issues on Tuesday.
The session, which will begin at 6 p.m., will be held at the Armory and Gymnasium, commonly known as the Red Gym, located at 716 Langdon St.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison student was struck and killed while studying abroad.
Authorities say 21-year-old Kurt Leswing of Milwaukee was hit by a drunken driver in Hong Kong. The driver was arrested.
Leswing was a senior business major traveling as part of the Semester at Sea program. It sends students on a 15-week voyage that circles the globe.
Kira McCoy spent her summer biking Madison. She got a great tan and good exercise, but she was also a key component in a project with UW-Madison and the city to revamp the city’s bike parking facilities and create a healthier urban environment.
A 21-year-old student from the University of Wisconsin-Madison was killed over the weekend while traveling in Hong Kong, according to the Institute for Shipboard Education.
Sometimes, professors are more than just classroom instructors. Sometimes they’re mentors, or cheerleaders. Other times, they’re citizens doing their civic duty.
Which is how it came to be that faculty, administrators and students at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University together marched to the polls on Oct. 20, the first day of early voting in Florida. More than 1,000 strong, they cast their ballots for the next president of the United States.
Student engagement requires a campuswide commitment, but much of the heavy lifting occurs in the classroom. For some faculty, that means rethinking their approaches to teaching.
“You can’t just show up in class with yellowed notes,” says Jeff Abernathy, vice president and dean of the colleges at Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill.
Good writing assignments are definitely a good thing. When courses provide extensive, intellectually challenging writing activities, the NSSE report found, students engage in a variety of positive activities. They are more likely to analyze, synthesize and integrate ideas from various sources. They grapple more with course ideas both in and out of the classroom. And they report greater personal, social, practical and academic development.
Keeping transfers engaged can sometimes pose a challenge. They lack the personal contacts on campus that other students have built up. And almost two out of three transfers are older than most of their classmates.
Despite the challenges, many transfers thrive in their new settings. The NSSE identifies schools where transfers are as at least as academically engaged as their native classmates, thanks in large part to their schools helping them make a smooth transition.
Lasha Carey wasn’t especially interested in community service work before she enrolled last year as a freshman at The College of New Jersey in Ewing, N.J. But that’s changed in a big way through the power of peer influence.
Inspired by classmates who gave her a taste of their work in Trenton neighborhoods, Carey now tutors inner-city kids, helps the homeless learn basic job skills and leads fellow students on one-day, urban outreach trips.
Nearly one in five college seniors and 25% of freshmen say they frequently come to class without completing readings or assignments, a national survey shows. And many of those students say they mostly still get A’s.
The survey doesn’t address whether those students are lazy, busy, intimidated, bored or geniuses. But it supports other studies that suggest a gap between what college professors expect from students and what students actually do.
This year, 386 four-year colleges and universities in 46 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico are participating in an ongoing collaboration between USA TODAY and the National Survey of Student Engagement to provide new tools and information to help college-bound students assess the quality of the undergraduate experience at schools they’re considering.
The long-term research initiative, known as NSSE (pronounced “Nessie”), is grounded in studies that show that the more engaged students are on their campuses, the more likely they are to learn.
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.
The enthusiastic atmosphere of the celebration on State Street Tuesday following the 2008 presidential election has illicited comparisons to the campus political activism of the past.
The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents will convene today to examine two major issues challenging the system, including the graying and retention of faculty.
Madison police have released a sketch of one of the suspects involved in an armed robbery of a female UW-Madison student Monday night on Langdon Street.
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?
With safety being one of the most important concerns on the minds of students, any initiative on behalf of university and city leaders to combat crime is worthy of recognition. Such is the case with a recent initiative by Ald. Eli Judge, District 8, to improve lighting conditions for residents of downtown Madison. The Downtown Residential Lighting Initiative, as it is called, provides grants for downtown property owners who wish to install lighting around their residences to ward off potential intruders.
A 20-year old UW-Madison student walking in a parking lot near her residence in the 100 block of Langdon Street was robbed of cash and her laptop computer at gunpoint by two men at about 11 p.m. Monday night, Madison police reported.
Alysia Mann Carey, 19, a UW-Madison sophomore, voted in her first presidential election Tuesday and watched the returns from her dorm. “I can’t even explain how proud and excited and happy I am,” said Mann Carey, who is black. “It’s a step toward getting rid of racism.”
At 10 p.m. Tuesday, when the major networks projected that Barack Obama had won the presidency, Sharmarke Hamud, 19, and his five roommates grabbed an American flag and hit the streets.
What started at the Palisade Apartments, an upscale building at Johnson and Marion streets just off campus, turned into a spontaneous parade that made two trips to the Capitol, went up and down State Street, paused outside the beer garden at State Street Brats, went through the Union Terrace, picked up more revelers at Helen C. White Library and stopped traffic as it headed up University Avenue.
It gained and lost strength, but at its height, the parade was more than a thousand strong.
Barack Obama won this election in a landslide as well.
University of Wisconsin-Madison’s International Student Services held a mock election Tuesday for those on campus who are unable to vote because they’re not American citizens.
With 160 people casting mock ballots between noon and 8 p.m., the Obama-Joe Biden ticket received 134 votes — or 83.7 percent. The Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin received 15 total votes (9.4 percent), while the independent ticket of Ralph Nader and Matt Gonzales got five votes (3.1 percent). No other candidate received more than two votes.
“I think an Obama win would really change how others view the United States,” said Debbie Cheung, a native of Hong Kong and a UW-Madison finance major who has been living in the U.S. for four years. “Obama is from such a diverse background that he would definitely bring some different, diverse thoughts.”
After encouraging students to sign up for WiscAlerts in light of recent downtown crime, the University of Wisconsin did not send out a text last night when a UW junior was held up at gunpoint outside her Langdon Street sorority house.
Lt. Michael Newton of UW Police said WiscAlerts are only issued in cases such as a shooter on campus or a bomb threat.
Political groups on the University of Wisconsin campus spent the daytime hours of Election Day pointing fingers at who had posted signs in unauthorized places and illegally torn signs down.
Members of Students for Obama, Students for McCain, Students for Nader, College Democrats and College Republicans were allegedly posting signs in places they shouldnâ??t have, such as street signs, bus shelters and areas too close to polling places.
By 4 p.m. Tuesday, voter turnout for the city of Madison had reached 51 percent of all registered voters with many more expected in the final four hours, said Madison City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl.
Students for McCain and College Republicans were left visibly shaken by the election of Sen. Barack Obama as president of the United States Tuesday night.
The groups gathered as a crowd of about 60 at the Cabana Room in downtown Madison, where a feeling of anger came across after Fox News declared Obama the victor.
Approaching City Hall this past Monday to vote early in this yearâ??s presidential election, I was initially repulsed by what I saw. Foolishly thinking that going at 3 p.m. would rid me of the early voter rush due to classes, I was unpleasantly surprised to see the line snaking outside to the bottom of the steps.
My impatience grew quickly, and I could not erase any hint of irritation as I slowly treaded through each section of the municipal building. This feeling of boredom and threat of doom that I would never get out of Madison City Hall alive suddenly vanished, though, when I thought of what such a crowd implied.
Despite being hundreds or even thousands of miles away from American soil, UW-Madison students studying abroad were still involved in Election Day Tuesday through absentee voting and keeping an eye on results from their host countries.
Junior Hannah Smith, who is currently studying abroad in Madrid, Spain, said she thought voting through an absentee ballot was quite simple and did not take her much time with the help of Democrats and Republicans abroad.
Although international students were ineligible to vote in the elections, they were able to participate in a mock election that closely replicated the city of Madisonâ??s official polling centers and ballots hosted by International Student Services at the Red Gym Tuesday.
Reports of illegal campaigning by UW-Madison student political groups has led to an investigation by the University of Wisconsin Police Department.
Posters hung by members of Students for Obama became the subject of controversy Monday night when unidentified students began ripping the posters down at various locations around campus.
Thousands of UW-Madison students turned out to vote for Election Day 2008. Although there were small glitches and delays at polling stations during the day, officials said the process was an overall success.
The elections provide an opportunity to voice our hopes and aspirations. On Election Day 2008, four essayists explore their beliefs in the democratic process.
Nora Lupi is an art history major at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has attended rallies and volunteered for campaigns on campus during this election season. Lupi says she continues to debate politics with her parents, who live in Manhattan.
MADISON, Wis. — Students are lining up to vote at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where many are casting their first ballots in a presidential election.
Freshman Lamel Adkins said that he’s proud that his first vote for Democrat Barak Obama. Adkins said that it’s a historic election because no other black candidate has gotten as far as Obama.
UW-Madison has had one of the most active Students for Barack Obama groups in the country, and Obama’s team is hoping to win big there.
Hundreds of people, most of them UW students, poured onto State Street in downtown Madison for a joyously spontaneous celebration of Sen. Barack Obama’s historic election victory. The celebrations included chants of “yes we can,” and “USA” — even singing the national anthem.
Voter suppression has gone viral at the University of Florida.
Several students have received text messages from friends or anonymous numbers urging them to vote on Nov. 5 — the day after Election Day — when their votes would not be counted.
UF senior political science major Delaney Rohan received the following text message from a number with an Orlando area code Tuesday afternoon: “Due to high voter turnout Republicans are asked to vote today and Democrats are asked to vote tomorrow. Spread the word!”
Chancellor Biddy Martin encouraged students via e-mail Monday to take part in the election and vote Tuesday.
