News • Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Daily Wildcat •
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WillPower expands reach outside UA By Samantha Munsey Daily Wildcat
A UA clothing and fundraising club is expanding its efforts to help fund cancer research with a new spring clothing line and by selling merchandise in additional stores around the country. Since launching its line in October 2011 at the UofA Bookstore, WillPower has sold more than 1,700 units of merchandise, including T-shirts and wristbands with the UA and WillPower logos. “We sold out of everything,” said Jimmy Ware, a regional development senior and the sales director of WillPower. “We made a whole line, which will give more emphasis to male clothing because we sold a lot of female clothing last time.” On Wednesday, the UA club will be introducing its spring line at the bookstore with new items that are of higher quality than their previous shipments, according to Sami Zarifi, a civil engineering senior and founder of WillPower. “This new spring clothing coming out on Wednesday is going to show how our style has gone from basic, generic clothing you would wear to work out to much more trendy items,” Zarifi said. “I think we are really stepping up and everyone will be able to see how much is has progressed.” Zarifi was inspired to create the club and clothing line after his older brother, Will Zarifi, died of brain cancer in 2008. A portion of the sales made will go to the Steele Children’s Research Center, part of the Diamond Children’s Medical Center at the University of
LOBBY CON from page 1
Bennett also said that the state was forced cut about a half a billion dollars out of the higher education budget. On the second day, students focused heavily on financial aid and the proposed House Bill 2675. The bill would require some in-state students at the UA, ASU and NAU to pay $2,000 out-of-pocket without the assistance of university aided scholarships or grants. Many students said this requirement would be the reason that prospective students would decide against attending college. Other topics the students focused on were mobilizing the voice of the youth and preparing to get more students involved in the upcoming presidential
Tim Glass / Daily Wildcat
Jimmy Hoselton, Lorenzo Torriero, Sami Zarifi, TJ McCauley. Zarifi, a civil engineering senior, displays the current WillPower clothing line with the WillPower team at the UofA Bookstore on Monday. Zarifi started WillPower, which is now a UA club, in memory of his brother, Will Zarifi, who died of brain cancer.
Arizona Medical Center. Baseball shirts, tank tops and thermal shirts are just a few of the new items being sold at the UA. They will also start appearing in clothing retail sections of campus bookstores around the country. “I think this is really exciting,” Ware
said. “We want to keep the movement strong here at the UA and eventually move into every college campus we can.” With the intent to expand the brand to more than 80 college campuses by the end of the year, WillPower will be selling its spring line to eight
election. Macario Saldate, a Democrat representing Legislative District 27, Tom Anderes, president of the Arizona Board of Regents and Anne-Eve Pedersen from the Arizona Education Network came to the conference to talk about higher education with the students and shared ideas about how student and community leaders can collaborate to improve their universities. Katy Murray, a marketing junior, said she loved the networking opportunities that Lobby Con offered to students and was able to have lunch with Saldate and Pedersen. “This conference was a great way to remind students how much power we have and that our voice truly does matter,” Murray said. On Monday, more than 150 students
of the Pacific 12 Conference schools including Arizona State University, University of Southern California and the University of Colorado this semester. The club’s merchandise distributor, Youth Monument, will be providing the licensing of these schools’ logos for the club to use. And
attended Lobby Day, where they had more than 70 meetings with different legislators. Most of their students voiced their concern about HB 2675. “When legislators are able to see students come together and rally around one single cause, it really has a lot of impact on the legislature’s view,” said Chad Travis, a business economics junior. “They (the legislators) didn’t really realize the effect that this bill had on students.” Some members of the state legislature decided to oppose the bill after speaking with the students. James Allen, ASUA president, met with Sen. John Kavanagh, a Republican representing District 8 and sponsor of HB 2675. Allen said Lobby Day was extremely successful and that this event was the “best he’s ever done advocating for students.”
just like its previous sales model, a percentage of the profit made from the clothing will go to cancer research. “It’s going to be the same type of garments but with different schools’ colors and logos,” Zarifi said. “Expanding is something that we always knew would happen and we don’t want to spread ourselves too thin – but the thing about WillPower is the support we have to take it to the next level.” The club gets a majority of its support from college and celebrity athletes who knew Will Zarifi or heard his story. “He (Will Zarifi) was a basketball manager at USC when he was in college and in the time he was there he met a lot of amazing people,” Zarifi said. “And when he got sick he did a lot of outreach, which led to a lot more people finding out how motivated and inspirational he was.” The club wants to use some of this star power to create a national movement by filming a commercial, which will air on ESPN and feature athletes including former UA basketball player Derrick Williams, Chicago Bulls basketball player Taj Gibson and retired Major League Baseball manager Tony La Russa. After the commercial is finished the club will to pitch it to ESPN, who will air the footage for free as a donation to WillPower. The club is in the process of transitioning to a non-profit organization. “We are really trying to push something that started off as a logo on a piece of paper to a real band that is a staple for Tucson and hopefully will come a staple in a lot of other college campuses,” Zarifi said.
CHEATING from page 1
“I’ve long recommended that at least the final exam be in-person and proctored,” said Richard Serlin, an adjunct professor of personal finance in the Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences.. “That still makes the course very flexible for students.” For students unable to take these exams due to geographical limits, Serlin said that it wouldn’t be hard to use an exam proctoring network the way Educational Testing Service, the SAT test proctor, does. “Even with the added expense, these courses would still be overall much cheaper than traditional ones,” Serlin added.
Taylor Simmons, a physiology major, agreed that making tougher exams would help limit cheating opportunities. “You have access to the materials for the coursework,” she said. “But you could find out if someone has done the readings if the test questions are specific.” Simmons said that she takes online classes because they free up time for extracurriculars. In the end, Gilliland said that the simplest solution to reduce cheating in online classes is for professors to make tough exams. “Assume that people are going to be using their notes and encourage them to do so,” he said. “Having a closed book exam for an online course makes no sense.”