Category: Campus life

The University of Wisconsin-Madison makes the top 10 on many lists, but one list officials don’t brag about: the ranking of party schools. [Third item]

University of Wisconsin-Madison freshmen will have a new opportunity to perform community service projects before they begin classes.

Student move-in began Thursday, and student orientation begins on Tuesday. On Wednesday, up to 79 students will have the opportunity to participate in the UW-Madison’s Day of Caring.

The event will be held in conjunction with the United Way, which is holding community Days of Caring this week. This is the first year the Days of Caring will be a part of freshman orientation, although the event has long involved volunteers helping out in the community.

The family of a UW-Madison student missing in Japan is heading home, after searching for him there for five days.

20-year-old Andy Lathrop had spent the last year teaching English through an exchange program. He was last seen in northern port city of Hakodate on August 15th.

MADISON � Some University of Wisconsin campuses routinely violate a federal privacy law in asking students to disclose Social Security numbers without explaining how they will be used, an audit said Thursday.

Some students at UW-Milwaukee and UW-Madison also continue to use student ID cards that contain their Social Security numbers despite a state law requiring campuses to have randomly generated student ID numbers instead, the audit by the UW System found.

While some students moved into residence halls Thursday, most of the 6700 students are moving in this Sunday and Monday.

With all kinds of road construction going on downtown as well, traffic could be crazy.

MADISON, Wis. — Dane County narcotics agents tell WISC News 3 they are seeing an increasing number of heroin overdoses this year.

Many of those overdosing are teens or college students.

Michael Waupoose is the program director at the University of Wisconsin’s Health’s Gateway Recovery program. There, counselors deal with many caught up in a risk taking culture.

A Selma High School junior with dreams of one day becoming a surgeon received an opportunity of a lifetime this summer to work alongside and learn from some of the country’s top physicians and researchers.

Gregory Ware, 17, participated in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Summer High School Apprenticeship Research Program (NASA SHARP) at the University of Wisconsin.

Enough, already! Princeton Reviewââ?¬â?¢s ranking of the University of Wisconsin-Madison as the top party school in the country is the type of thing that belongs in Mad Magazine or one of the sensationalizing tabloids in the supermarket checkout lines. We agree with UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley who tossed the ranking aside and called it ââ?¬Å?junk science that results in a day of national media coverage.ââ?¬Â

If I want to know what’s going on at UW-Madison, I can consult The Princeton Review, which just came out with its annual highly unscientific survey naming Madison as the top party school.

Or I can just ask my daughter, Carly, who is about to start her second year there. We had this conversation on Tuesday.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has been crowned the top party school in the country, according to an annual survey by The Princeton Review – a title drawing cheers from some students and scorn from the university’s administration.

Three months after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention formally recommended that all freshmen living in dormitories be vaccinated for meningitis, college officials seem to be taking the recommendations to heart � and that response is contributing to a shortage of the vaccine around the United States.

MENASHA ââ?¬â? Half a world away and relying on strangers to search for her missing 20-year-old son, Lesley Lathrop is ââ?¬Å?beyond worriedââ?¬Â and scared.

An international search is underway in Japan for a missing exchange student from UWââ?¬â??Madison.

20-year-old Andy Lathrop of Menasha is teaching English in Japan.

Japanese police have launched an investigation into the disappearance of a 20-year-old Menasha man who had been teaching English in Japan before he went missing three days ago. Andrew Lathrop is a 20-year-old who moved to Japan after his freshman year at UW-Madison last August to teach English as a second language through the Labo International Exchange Foundation.

MADISON, Wis. — Mayor Dave Cieslewicz’s office is trying to get bars to voluntarily stagger closing times on Halloween weekend.

Bar owners and Cieslewicz’s staff will meet in the coming days. It’s just one of the suggestions Cieslewicz is pursuing to prevent another State Street riot.

At today’s Halloween planning meeting, city leaders are planning, and bracing for what they hope will be a successful and safer event. And it’s crunch time for this group — they met today, with just more than two months left until Halloween on State Street.

Two weeks before some 40,000 students begin fall classes at UW-Madison, advocates for cheaper college textbooks released a new federal study today that backs their complaints about escalating costs and questionable extras.
Among the findings of the report, compiled by the Government Accountability Office at the request of U.S. Rep. David Wu, D-Ore.:

Textbook prices have increased at twice the rate of inflation over the last 20 years.

Elizabeth Waters Hall, a longtime bastion of all-female living, will go co-ed in fall 2006, the university announced this morning.

A smaller building will take over as the sole all-women’s hall on the UW-Madison campus.

Paul Evans, director of University Housing, said demand for living in an all-female hall was markedly down.

The corrupted Latin on Michael Forster Rothbart’s shirt said it all.

Cogito ergo recyclo – “I think therefore I recycle.”

That was the mind-set of the roving group of garbage pickers Rothbart assembled Saturday.

La Crosse has had an alcohol task force that made many recommendations on new enforcement measures to deal with binge drinking and other alcohol-related problems.

Now a Common Council committee is looking seriously at those recommendations with an eye toward putting them into law.

Many students have spent all day packing their moving trucks, so they can move in tomorrow. There are piles and piles of garbage dotted along the streets.

Travis Abell considers himself one of the lucky ones. His landlord allowed him and his three roommates to move their belongings into their new mifflin street home earlier this morning. He won’t be able to stay here tonight, But at least his moving day is done.

Rather than move those old clothes or the sofa, Uââ?¬â??W students toss it on the curb. But the City of Madison wants to change that.

City officials are really struggling to come up with crowd control ideas for State Street during the annual Halloween celebration.

The Halloween festivities have gotten out of control in recent years, and there is no question that city and University of Wisconsin officials need to do a lot more strategizing to determine the best way to manage 75,000 people and avoid disturbances. But, so far, the strategizing has a seat-of-the-pants quality that fails to inspire confidence.

….What’s disturbing is that, at this late date, officials seem to be grabbing for straws rather than advancing a coherent plan.

UW-Madison students moving out of their apartments this week can donate clean clothes, quality furniture, unopened nonperishable food and other household items in good condition at several sites. Anything in poor condition should be thrown away.

It seems everyone has a college horror story, and it often involves a roommate. Although my freshman-year roommate actually neared perfection, I do remember a girl on my floor who drove her roommate to the brink of insanity. Her quirks included phobias of fruit, carpeting and taking phone messages. When her roommate spilled juice in the bottom of their mini-fridge, she threw all of the food away and proclaimed the mini-fridge “contaminated.”

As a personal mental health counselor at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, Susan Fee saw the same trend in the students who came to her for help.

Amber Ault, director of diversity at UW-Madison’s School of Pharmacy, wants to set an example for future pharmacists by learning the Hmong language and cultural practices using traditional herbal medicine, which could interact negatively with modern drugs.

Katy France, who graduated from UW-Madison’s Law School on Friday and plans to work as a public defender, sees a need for lawyers who can communicate with Hmong defendants. Sarah Allen, who teaches English as a second language in the West Allis School District, is striving to better connect with her Hmong students and their families. And Kazoua Xiong, a student at St. Olaf College, yearns to know more about her Hmong heritage.

For the past two months, they and other students and educators spent four and a half hours a day, five days a week, studying Hmong culture and language at the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute (SEASSI) at UW-Madison.

Everyone’s heard of the “freshman 15,” that insidious weight gain that creeps up on first-year college students. But is there truth to it?

Researchers say there is. A study at Cornell University found that students gain an average of four pounds during the first three months of their freshman year of college – a rate that is 11 times higher than typical for 17- and 18- year-olds.

Think about it: For every student who maintains pre- college weight, there’s another who is eight pounds heavier by Thanksgiving. And the first semester isn’t even over.

UW-Madison will see a surge of new students this fall in an alternative enrollment program designed to relieve pressure on the freshman class and give applicants what they want – at least eventually.

The initiative, known as the Connections program, offers qualified students the opportunity to be dual-enrolled. That means they are considered to be UW-Madison students from the start – with certain campus privileges like student rates on games and concerts – but they must complete the first two years of general education courses elsewhere before coming to campus for classes starting their junior year.

UW-Madison senior Will Temby, 22, an online poker player who considers it his part-time job, said while poker’s popularity may indeed breed more gambling addicts, these people probably would have become addicts of some sort anyway.

“I think it’s sort of a genetic disposition that some people have to become addicted to things,” he said. “I think that’s a shame, but people who gamble and play poker responsibly shouldn’t be punished by it.”

Brett Hartfiel, 22, is his own boss for the summer. He wakes up at about 10 a.m. and works sporadically throughout the day.

If his friends go to the beach, he can go with them. If he wants to work in his pajamas, he can. That’s because Hartfiel has turned online gambling, a pastime that has recently exploded among college students, into his summer job. In the past six or seven weeks, he has made more than $6,000.

….Professional poker has its perks for the recent UW-Madison graduate. Hartfiel job-hunts and fills out applications online while he plays. Plus he can enjoy the college lifestyle for one last summer.