Recent Posts

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  Workout of the Week: The unsung aspect of exercise, stretching

  Sports February 26, 2013 at 2:31 pm Comments are Disabled

    Dedicating yourself to a healthy lifestyle is all about one idea: commitment to change. It is not just about commitment to going to the gym or eating healthy, but committing to changing your entire life. It is hard to go to the gym each day and perform the same routine. Working out should be a fun learning process, where you come to understand yourself and your body more than you did before. We are all Mason students, which means we have a desire to learn. However, our learning should not only be limited to the classroom. I like to think of the gym as just another class. Granted it can be more fun than a class, but it can also be just as tedious. The great part about working out is that you get to make it what you want. As students, we are limited by what the teacher decides we will do. However, at the gym we are allowed to explore in any number of ways. This does not mean that you should simply go to the gym and pick whichever exercise looks the most fun. Working out requires you to do your homework before you even think […]

   
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  Mason Makes Careers

  Lifestyle February 26, 2013 at 2:23 pm Comments are Disabled

  Every week, Broadside features a student or alumnus with a great internship or job to highlight the opportunities and potential earning a degree at Mason offers       NAME: Craig Haseler GRADUATION DATE: Fall 2013 DEGREE: BS in Computer Science; Minor in Business INTERNSHIP: Information Technology Assistant at the American Lung Association (ALA)     How would you describe the place you are interning at? The American Lung Association is one of the oldest non-profits in the country, founded to fight tuberculosis in the early 20th century, and now focusing on air pollution, asthma, anti-smoking campaigns and many other modern lung-related concerns. I work at the National Headquarters office on Pennsylvania Ave. in DC. What are some of your day-to-day responsibilities? I am in charge of the project to create a new internal intranet for the ALA and its volunteers nationwide that we are calling “LungNet.” A typical day might start with a conference call to our office in New York City, but I’m also working closely with national and local employees in Illinois, California and various places in between. Each day has a new challenge. A big project like this has many complications, so, I’m solving new problems every […]

   
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  Chocolate Lovers Festival sweetens Fairfax

  Lifestyle February 26, 2013 at 2:17 pm Comments are Disabled

  Chocolate cakes, candies, fudges and other sweet confections float around a chocolate lover’s paradise—or something Fairfax- natives know as the annual Chocolate Lover’s Festival. From March 2-3 the festival will return to Old Town Historic Fairfax and bring wafts of sugary-sweet cocoa with it. For the past 20 years, the event has drawn thousands of people from all over the Northern Va. area. Dozens of vendors sell an assortment of chocolate-flavored confections at their main event, a ‘Taste of Chocolate.” This year, the main event will be held at Old Town Hall, right off of University Drive, a short walk or CUE bus ride for Mason students. Last year, this event included a wide range of chocolate concoctions, including chocolate-flavored cotton candy and chocolate-covered Twinkies. One of the committee members from the City of Fairfax, Chris Cohen, believes that the annual Chocolate Lover’s Festival caters to more than just the average family or couple— it caters to the student population at Mason as well. “[The Chocolate Lover’s Festival] is a little different than most other festivals. This is more of a community event, where there are multiple organizations that participate in multiple events and bring something fun to the City […]

   
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  Mason undergraduate alumni’s salaries highest in the state

  News February 26, 2013 at 2:14 pm Comments are Disabled

  Report by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia puts Mason at the top of Virginia schools for the highest average starting salary of students who received a bachelor’s degree.  The Wall Street Journal published a graphic on Feb. 12 that made the conclusion that students who receive a bachelor’s degree from Mason, get the highest starting salary out of the public schools in Virginia. The statistics are from a report from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) from the 2009-2010 reporting year. The information released only includes graduates working in Virginia. Those who work for the U.S. government are self-employed or moved out of Virginia are not included in the statistic. In the same report, SCHEV released other statistics about the students who completed a four-year bachelor’s degree in the degree years between the reporting years 2005-2006 and 2009-2010. Out of 19,391 graduates, 47.7 percent have full-time wages, 11.2 percent enrolled at another institution in Virginia, 11.3 percent have part-time wages. The SCHEV is able to report salary and graduation outcomes due to the Virginia’s Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2011. This information also includes the amount of debt students have after attending private and […]

   

• Mason in the News

  News February 25, 2013 at 4:20 pm Comments are Disabled

  “The program recruited the human flotsam and jetsam of the discipline and pretended it was recruiting the best. Treating taxpayer money as if it were water, it paid under-qualified 20-something anthropologists more than even Harvard professors. And it treated our ethics code as a nuisance to be ignored.” — Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology professor said to USA Today about the Human Terrain System program which sends in civilian scientists to locations overseas so that soldiers will have better interactions with locals. Gusterson has studied the program and its impact on anthropology.   “They get reminded each and every day anytime their models don’t prove to be correct. For them, the whole notion of projecting what the climate will be 30, 50, a hundred years from now, they’ve got a fairly high degree of skepticism” — Ed Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication said to NPR about meteorologists’ opinions on climate change.   “Clearly, you don’t want to introduce a kindergartner to slaves being shackled on a boat. But you do introduce them to Harriet Tubman [and similar black American icons]…The greatest challenge for our instructors is to know they have to have those difficult conversations and find […]

   

• News & Notes

  News February 25, 2013 at 3:54 pm Comments are Disabled

  CHSS Panel on Obama’s Second Term The College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS) will be hosting a panel entitled “Obama’s Second Term: Impact on the Global Community” on Feb. 27, at 7:30 p.m. in the Meese Conference Room in Mason Hall. The panel will feature three experts from the fields of journalism, politics, history, and national security. They will focus on how the Obama administration may impact the United States and its place as one of the major world powers. One of the speakers, Bill Schneider, Mason faculty member and political journalist from CNN and Politico, will talk about the United States’ economic situation and what Americans can expect in the economy this coming year.   New dean of CHSS The College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS) recently appointed Deborah Boehm-Davis as its new dean of CHSS. Boehm-Davis has been serving as the associate dean of the school and has been serving as University Professor in the department of psychology since 1984. She holds degrees in psychology from Rutgers University and University of California, Berkeley. An author of several scholarly articles, Boehm-Davis also serves as president of both the Applied Experimental and Engineering Psychology divisions of the American Psychological Association […]

   

• College cohort has higher stress levels than other generations

  News February 25, 2013 at 3:47 pm Comments are Disabled

  College students are no strangers to stress and trying to manage it. Between studying for classes, having a job, extra curricular activities and trying to manage a social life, stress is an ever present factor of college life. When looking at the stress levels of freshmen in college, freshmen aremore likely to be stressed because they are trying to find the healthy balance in their lives. “Since it was my first semester, everything was stressful,” freshman Nilou Kazemzadeh said. “I didn’t know how to study for my classes. I started studying differently for each class and I got scared that I wasn’t studying enough and I wasn’t studying the right way.” It’s easy to say that the stress levels college students experience are normal, however, these days they might not actually be and not just for college students, but for the entire Millennial Generation. According to the study titled Stress in America, released on Feb 7 by the America Psychological Association, the Millennial Generation (ages 18-33) are experiencing increasingly high levels of stress with 39 percent of Millennials reporting an increase of stress from the previous year. Compared to the other generations survey in this study, Generation X (ages 34-47) […]

   
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  Jewish students take sponsored trips to Israel

  Featured, Multimedia, News February 25, 2013 at 3:06 pm Comments are Disabled

  Ten-day Birthright trip provides once- in-a-lifetime experience and memories  College is a time that many use to explore their heritage in the hopes of discovering their identity. For some Jewish students, this may involve the exploration of their religious or cultural roots, for which many look towards Israel. As the world’s only Jewish state, Israel is the cultural and religious center of Jewish heritage, and for this reason, many Jewish students choose to go on 10-day Birthright trips to Israel. “Birthright is an opportunity for Jewish students between the ages of 18-26 who have never travelled to Israel on a peer trip before,” said Mason’s Hillel Director Ross Diamond. “It’s an opportunity for students to travel to a country that’s talked a lot about in the news, and to experience it for themselves.” Diamond stated that while the trips generally differed based on organization, most generally included the holy sites in Jerusalem, Israel’s national cemetery Mount Herzl, the Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem, visiting a Bedouin community, the city of Safed, a night out in Tel Aviv and the famous fortress Masada. Sophomore Carleigh Ladden-Stirling noted that the many hours on the trip that had been spent travelling from one location […]

   

• Mason’s changing identity impacts retention rates

  News February 25, 2013 at 2:43 pm Comments are Disabled

  Initiatives to reduce the number of students who leave after sophomore year  The univeristy’s identity has changed over the past few years; from local alternative and commuter school to having one of the biggest on-campus student presence in Virginia, Mason is creating a new identity that is evolving everyday. With Mason’s identity, a trend had been for students to attend Mason for two years and then transfer to another university. “We do a pretty good job at keeping students their first and second year. We drop a little bit second to third year, so the sophomore level,” said Jeannie Brown Leonard, dean of student academic affairs, advising and retention. The Institutional Research and Reporting has a report on Persistence and Graduation Rates for First- Time, Full-Time Baccalaureate Degree-Seeking Cohorts which shows the retention rate for each cohort, meaning the percentage of an enrollment group (one- year, two-year, etc.) that enrolls for the next year. The report shows that in 2002, the percent of the two-year cohort, consisting of mostly sophomores, was 72.8 and dropped to 69.2 in the three-year cohort (mostly juniors). In the latest report in 2009, the two-year rate was 79.4 and the three-year rate was 75.2. A […]

   

• Pitch Mason 1.0 sparks ingenuity

  News February 25, 2013 at 2:22 pm Comments are Disabled

  Student entrepreneur startup program leads to unconventional careers  In today’s economy, people are constantly looking for new forms of employment. Many have turned to social entrepreneurship. Particularly, more and more college students and young adults are entering the field. “I think most people in college get caught up into the thinking of ‘finding a job,’ rather than even exploring the idea of creating jobs or coming up with a new innovative idea. In my opinion, college is one of the best places for that to occur because a lot people are here to help you,” said Ibi Pashaei, a sophomore at Mason studying kinesiology and business. David Miller, director of entrepreneurship at the Mason Center for Social Entrepreneurship (MCSE), noticed this phenomenon, and recently started “Pitch Mason 1.0” as a way to engage more people in entrepreneurial work. “We are trying to create a network of Mason students, alumni, faculty, staff and community members who are interested in entrepreneurship, and a place where they can go to pitch their ideas, gain feedback, and eventually start-up,” said Miller, an entrepreneur himself, who is also a faculty member in Mason’s School of Management as well as a Ph.D. candidate at Mason’s School […]