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(02/06/15 5:30pm)
Auburn University's Dance Marathon is a yearlong fundraiser to benefitting Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. Children's Hospital at Midtown Medical Center at Columbus Regional Health is Auburn's campus fundraising recipient.
AUDM's fundraising efforts culminate in a 12-hour event each February.
AUDM will feature 15 specific families with children that have faced or are currently facing life-threatening conditions. These families will be in attendance to discuss their situation and thank the organization for their efforts.
Auburn students involved in the fundraising event will dance for 12 hours. During the event, sitting down is not allowed.
To register for the event, students must go online and pay a registration fee of $25. They are then placed into a color team. Registering requires the student to set a fundraising goal of a suggested $75 minimum.
The color teams will be a "family" group. Students will dance and eat with throughout the 12-hour dance marathon, according to the AUDM website. Being a part of a color team is not required; students are also able to register alone or with a group of friends.
This is AUDM's fourth year of operations. Last year, the organization raised a total of $176,589.65.
The event will be held Saturday, February 7, in the Auburn Student Center from 10a.m.-10p.m.
(02/03/15 10:00pm)
The Performance Enhancement in Academics and Knowledge-Acquisition program, designed to help improve the academic performance of students who feel they lack the ability to perform as well they could will begin its "brown bag" lunch sessions on Feb. 5.
PEAK was created by Dustin Johnson, Ph.D., licensed staff psychologist of the Auburn Student Counseling Services; he will also be conducting the program.
"We are promoting improved performance rather than correcting a problem," Johnson said. "This has a more positive spin, and it is based on performance psychology."
Performance psychology is generally used to help people improve in sports, performing arts and businesses. Johnson said performance psychology is used in the real world when large companies, such as Google, encourage productivity by boosting morale, which promotes more productivity in turn.
Johnson said he thought of PEAK when he taught at a high school in Texas from 2006-08.
He helped student-athletes with mental disabilities develop a positive mindset to help them perform better on the playing field. He found the same results applied to those athletes in the classroom when they applied his mental techniques to their studies.
He brought the idea to other students and achieved the same results.
Johnson said the goal of this technique is to find a student's "GO" zone. When the student is in the blue, "cold zone," or the red, "too hot zone," the student is not performing optimally. The goal to the PEAK system is to find the green, "GO" zone.
Johnson said he believes a student must be in the correct mindset to perform at their best just as an athlete must be in the correct mindset on game day.
"Just as an athlete would practice to perform in front of 80,000 people and deal with the pressures of that, a student would study to perform well on a test," Johnson said. "Although it may not be 80,000 people, a student has some pretty stressful elements in their performance they have to get ready for too."
Johnson said he is not dealing with fully diagnosable conditions. Someone students may have anxiety when they sit down and take a test, but not a full anxiety disorder.
These are not problems that need to be corrected, but students can enhance their mental skills and habits to help curb the mental setback anxiety can cause.
"I don't have anxiety, but when I go to take a test, I get nervous just like everyone else," said Cassidy Baumann, freshman in journalism. "It's college, where every single test you take matters, and if I focus on that, I always freak myself out so that I don't do as well as I could."
PEAK aims to train students to develop a mental toughness that will allow them to learn new ways to study, new ways to prepare for the stresses college tests, new ways for students to deal with minor mental setbacks and have the capacity to "bounce back" from them easily, according to Johnson.
"I feel like a program like that would be beneficial to me, but not only me," said Samuel Murphree, sophomore in health service administration. "It would be helpful to probably everyone to learn new ways to deal with tests and just college in general."
(01/28/15 4:30pm)
The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art hosted Auburn University's 2015 Breeden Scholar recipient, Rick Lowe, as he gave his talk, "Social Community Engaged Art: The Genuine and the Artificial," on Thursday, Jan. 22.
Lowe discussed his past experiences and future plans involving Auburn University.
Lowe first encountered by Auburn University when Wendy DesChene, associate professor of art, first met Lowe in 2011.
At that time, Lowe was the master artist-in-residence for the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach. Florida.
President Barack Obama appointed Lowe to the National Council on the Arts. Lowe is also a MacArthur Fellow, a prize awarded annually to people who show promise in their field.
"Every success that Rick gets is a success for artists who are pushing the boundaries and the boxes of what art is and how it fits in," DesChene said. "Rick has taken those boxes and turned them into houses."
Lowe is an Alabama native and began his work as a painter.
He said he would typically design pieces that addressed social issues in the world.
He said he had a life-altering experience in 1990 while he was teaching high school children about art in his studio.
"(A high school student) came up to me and said, 'Mr. Lowe, your paintings and sculptures show what happens in our communities, but that's not what we need,'" Lowe said. "'We don't need to be told what the issues are, we know what they are. If you're an artist and you're creative, then why can't you create a solution?'"
Lowe said this caused him to begin to change his perception of art and his role in finding the solutions to the problems in communities.
Lowe said he then became engaged as both an artist and community activist within communties.
Lowe said one community especially gained his attention.
His first major project stands in Houston's 3rd Ward.
A series of shotgun houses were deemed dangerous and ill fit for human residency by the city.
Lowe rallied community members together to renovate these houses to serve as a community art piece.
Each house holds a different art or history presentation about the 3rd Ward community.
The series of houses eventually became known as "Project Row Houses."
"Project Row Houses" also serves as non-profit organization working to improve the local community.
Lowe said the houses will draw attention to the area and make people not only want to visit, but also become involved with the community.
The group successfully renovated 22 of the shotgun houses.
According to Lowe, only 15 of the houses were displayed to the public.
The remaining 7 houses were used as transitional homes for struggling single mothers.
Lowe said "Project Row Houses" sparked many other undertakings in his career, but this accomplishment is the one he is most credited for and one of the reasons he is Auburn University's 2015 Breeden Scholar.
"Persons named to the Breeden Eminent Chair are nationally recognized in their field with outstanding credentials in arts or humanities," said Maiben Beard, Outreach Associate for the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities. "(Chair holders) are expected to contribute a unique quality to the teaching and learning objectives of the College of Liberal Arts, such as Rick Lowe's arts-driven community building projects."
Lowe said he will be co-instructing a course this spring with DesChene on Auburn's campus entitled "Special Topics: Social and Community Engaged Practice."
During the course Lowe said he hopes to construct a community art project in Auburn just as he has done around North America.
(01/18/15 5:00pm)
The average bachelor's degree requires 120 hours to graduate, which is approximately 15 hours per semester. So why did the majority of freshmen I know signed up to take 16 or more hours last semester?
I blame it on the lack of personal attention given to each incoming student as they registered for classes during their Camp War Eagle session over the summer. Instead of getting to know inividual learning styles and routines, students were scared into overloading their schedules.
When I arrived at CWE, I was a bundle of nerves, as most freshmen are. For the most part, counselors do an excellent job of calming concerns and explaining how daily life will be as a college student, everything from where to park to where to eat.
From my own experiences so far, everything I learned from that weekend was correct -- \0xADexcept for class loads. The climax of CWE is registration. You learn everything you can about life as a student first, and, the afternoon of your departure from camp, you finally get to do what you came for: register for classes. Neither the CWE counselors nor the advisers for the sessions directly help you with registration.
One would think they would advise each student on a personal level to ensure they are not put into a class load too difficult for their first semester. Going from high school courses to college courses is one the most frightening transitions to make.
So why would you thrust a student in 16 hours of classes or more their first semester of college? That equates to one hour above what is needed to graduate on time.
I know one hour is not hurting anyone. The problem is not that one hour. The problem is the other 15. The CWE advisers recommend you take the harder class options when registering. A majority of these entry level classes are weed out classes as well. I see the evidence in my friend, an engineering major taking 16 hours who is barely able to keep their head above water.
Their adviser paid little regard to the student's concerns when they were registering for classes and stacked their schedule with only math and science courses. That person's scholarship is at risk in a mere semester of college because of an Auburn adviser's neglect of concern for their abilities and wants.
I realize Auburn only accepts students they believe can succeed in these types of class schedules, and there are many avenues of student help available on campus. However, it should be recognized that class, social lives, sleep and homesickness can affect students' freshman year. Advisers should take this into account.