A Look On Campus

Walk Around Winthrop

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Fitting in at College

1. Attend the first week events!! This will make it much easier to meet new people and bond with your peers.
2. Meet friends as SOON as possible. It is much more difficult making friends after everyone has already met and decided who they will spend their time with.
3. Know the campus - walk around. This is something that will come with time, but is much better to know starting off.
4. Become involved in groups that relate to you. This will fill your time and make you feel welcome on campus.
5. Make yourself at home!

An Interactive Guide to Living on Campus

The Struggles of Living On Campus at Winthrop

           When a college student first lives in a dormitory, it is certainly a new experience. The student must adjust to living with a stranger, sharing a bathroom with several strangers, homesickness, and all of the other changes that occur with living away from home. Very often, the student will experience problems during this adjustment process.

            One of the most common issues arises with roommates. People from all over the world are coming together on one campus, and through the process of random selection are becoming uncomfortably close to one particular stranger, with completely foreign living habits, who is to become their roommate. There are several students who are more than willing to share their horror stories. One particular student was gracious enough to share one of her experiences with a roommate.

            This female talks of her roommate, who was a foreign student, having severe mood swings and constantly complaining. She would become angry when the student had visitors and at one point she even pushed her down the stairs. The girl was miserable and ended up moving back to her home country. “I’m just really glad she’s gone,” the student says, “It was a nightmare.”

            Another student talks of her previous roommate, who simply did not want to live in the dormitory and wanted a different roommate. "She was a dance major," says the roommate. "I went home for the weekend and when I came back she was gone. She texted me saying that she had moved in with her friend who was a student on campus, and that was it."

            Another common complaint among students living on-campus is parking. There are two types of parking for students, commuter and resident parking. Resident only parking lots are far and few between. The only actual Resident only parking lots at Winthrop University are the few parking spaces that are located in front of the actual resident dormitories. There are at a maximum around 10-20 parking spaces in front of each of these dorms. Anywhere from 200-300 students live in these dorms, many of which have cars. These parking spaces are clearly not enough for the number of students living on campus. There are only a couple of other parking lots that residents can park in. They are: Legion, the area around Wofford and Richardson, and the Stewart parking lot. With the exception of the parking around Wofford and Richardson, these parking lots are also available for Commuters to park in, even though Commuter students already have several other large parking lots to themselves as well, such as Sumter Drive, Eden Terrace, Charlotte Avenue, and Myrtle Drive parking. These Commuters will often even leave cars on campus overnight for several nights in a row. This leaves Residents without anywhere to park except Legion, which a long walk from every resident dorm that is not Wofford/Richardson.  

            Among the stress with roommates, parking and other college student issues, comes homesickness. Most students that first enter college have never lived away from home previously. They have never had to hold the responsibility that comes with living away from parents. This is a huge change, and one that many students find difficult to cope with. Also, there are usually no friends or family members around to ease the burden of solitude and help with the adjustment process. This may cause first year students to visit home often, leaving their grades to the wayside. In extreme cases, they may even drop out.

            Here is a link to the Frequently Asked Questions page for freshman students at Winthrop University. It not only deals with incoming students, but also current students.

Top 5 Books

Downtown Greenville, South Carolina Tour

View Greenville, SC in a larger map

An Interview of the Presidential Candidates

Wheels

Winthrop Tour

The Herald editor speaks to Winthrop University students

 

This past week at Winthrop University was Mass Communications week. On Monday the editor from the Herald in Myrtle Beach, SC came to talk about his career and experiences. His name is Charles Perry and he is a Winthrop alumni. At the start of the event, he talked about his experiences with journalism in crime and government, but that he much more prefers working in a local community, rather than a large corporation. He said that it is not only much more personal but that with the low economy big businesses are letting more and more people off.  On a local newspaper, there are more opportunities to report something rather than trying to beat people to a story that several hundred other reporters have already covered.

 Someone in the audience asked Perry how user generated content sites effect the journalist industry, to which he responded that those sites can be beneficial to journalists if they worked along with them. If people tweet something they heard, then link it to the article, it would definitely give the news company more reputation. Perry talks about how the job market for journalism is tough to get into, but in order to get noticed you have to be unique. Be unique in your writing, in your photography, in your tweets, and get yourself out there using all different kinds of mediums. He said one of the big challenges for local newspapers is to not accept everything they hear from larger news corporations as gospel, but to question things and give accountability to people. 

One of the members from the audience stated that she was from Myrtle Beach and had never heard of The Herald, but had only heard of the Sun News. He responded by saying that his newspaper is very young in relation to other papers, not even 18 years old. He accepts that his paper has a challenge in getting the word out about it, and also warns that is one of the problems of local newspapers. There are rival ones that are often accepted as the default news source of the area. His paper just has to market itself more, which is what anyone has to do if they want to start any type of company.

 On another note, he talks about how everything is going digital, and how he sincerely hopes that print will still be alive at least somewhat in the future. With the new social networking sites, the availability of internet now, and the speed at which things are spread across the internet, it is very likely that print will become almost obsolete eventually, because they will not be able to keep up with rate that news spread online. Hopefully, there may still be a place for print in the future, however small a place it is. As Charles Perry left, a lot of the Mass Communications students were reassured by his words on local papers. Hearing that community news is not so bad after all alleviates a lot of the pressure put on journalists to report for the biggest and most successful papers.

http://myhorrynews.com/v2/content.aspx?ID=42772&MemberID=2156

Digs or Thompson?

How to Become a Successful Twitter...er

1. Follow.
Search the topics you are interested in on twitter, and follow those with the same interests. Following several people interested in the same topics as your a day will help to increase the news on your news feed, and also increase the chance that they will follow you. Your name is more likely to become known when several different twitter accounts are getting e-mails notifying them that you follow them. 

2. Tweet Daily. Hourly, Even.
People become less interested in you if they are not constantly reminded that you are on their news feed. It is much easier to remember a person's name that you may have never met before if they are constantly updating on a news feed that may consist of hundreds or thousands of different twitter updates.

3. Re-tweet, Respond, and Recognize.
Re-tweeting celebrities or people that you share interests with will attract others that share interests with the same person. Responding to others that tweet will bring people to your page to decide whether or not they will follow you. As long as you can get them to that point, you will make followers.

4. Go Mobile.
Remember when I said "Tweet Daily. Hourly, Even"? Yeah, that goes hand in hand with this. Tweet consistently. When a sudden inspiration hits, when your neighbor's hand gets eaten by a vicious guard dog, whenever. 

5. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
It may take more than just a few days for your twitter to become the bee's knees or the belle of the ball, but it can definitely be worth the wait. Be consistent with tweeting and following, spread the news around Facebook, Tumblr, etc. How do people become popular? They get talked about.   

*Some Material From Journalism Next by Mark Briggs
 

Roommate From Hell

Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory

      In this sound article, a guy talks about Apple products and where they come from. In his story he first questions the program on Apple products called Siri. He asks her where she was created, and she responds by answering "I am not allowed to tell." He uses not only people to interview, but also a computer voice. He then goes on to turn the iphone over and say that on the back is printed that it was made in China.
      He then finishes his dialogue and introduces a new speaker named Mike Daisey. Mike Daisey's dialogue is about how much he loves technology, and especially Apple. In the background the listener can hear an audience laughing in response to Mr. Daisy's dialogue. As his dialogue continues, he takes on a more serious tone. He talks about pictures that were found on a factory iphone, and the expressions of the people in the pictures. He takes pauses after a serious statement to let the impact hit the listener.
      He will signal that he is changing topics by taking a pause, and maybe stating facts about what he is about to talk about. For instance when he talks about China, he first states facts about China and places in China. He then talks about his translator, who he also describes and gives funny anecdotes about. along with the city named Shen Jen, who he describes as a city that looks like "bladerunner threw up all over it."
      His fact stating and funny anecdotes sort of gives the listener a feeling as if they know and understand everything he's talking about. It lets the reader get to know the people and places he is talking about. Such as the air in Shen Jen, he compares it to a boot pressing down on your chest. He will randomly go into a serious moment such as that, and he pauses every time he does so as to enunciate the solemness. He pauses after he says that after just a few days, you get so used to the pressure on your chest, that you don't even realize it.
      He will also use irony and pause during a funny moment that will make you think for a split second that it is supposed to be serious, until you realize what he said. In this case he was talking about a "Single... solitary.... cone...," and the audience has a brief moment before they laugh until they realize what he is talking about. I think things like this keep the audience on their toes. They have to actually listen to his words to understand what he is talking about, and to be able to laugh along with the audience. 

Storify

Look at my storify.

Winthrop student named women's basketball Big South Player of the Week

After helping Winthrop's ladies basketball team win 2-0 finishing one of them with 32 points, Diana Choibekova was named player of the week for the Big South's Player of the Week Conference

Choibekova is currently averaging 16.2 points per game, but beat her record with an average of 28 points in last weeks games and 15 rebounds in all, which was the deciding factor for her player of the week award.

Winthrop's womens' tennis defeats Wofford in first match of 2012

The Winthrop University women's tennis team starts the 2012 year off with a staggering victory over Wofford

Winthrop cleaned house with Wofford when the girls' tennis team defeated them 7-0 on Sunday.Winthrop is now ranked 67th and on Jan. 21st will go up against North Carolina State who is ranked 34th.

MLK is remembered through community service at Winthrop University

Winthrop University honors MLK by giving back to the community

On MLK's birthday, Winthrop University students and locals from Rock Hill will be involved in various community service projects that involve providing food for the young and elderly. There will also be a free cultural event with re-enactments from King's life.

Jazz, contemporary ballet and modern dance featured in senior schowcases

Students control auditions and choreographing of senior showcase pieces

The senior dance majors at Winthrop University created 5 pieces for the Department of Theater and Dance's Fall 2011 Showcase. Every aspect of the pieces including the auditions and choreography will be decided by the seniors.

Primary elections bring political analysts from CNN, NBC, and The State to Winthrop University

Reporters analyze the media's coverage of the primary elections

CNN's Steve Brusk, NBC's Chuck Todd, and The State's Steve Brook will be coming to Winthrop University 2 days before the GOP's First in the South to talk about the media coverage of the candidates and elections. http://www.scgop.com/