Students come to terms with midterms

Emotions ran high as students wonder how Abbott will address their issues

share my voice because I knew as a young person it was my job to show up and vote,” she said.

Issues such as the power grid, gun control and abortions were on everyone’s minds and they were the main reason for some to cast a vote.

NE Campus hosted three informal seminars to teach students, staff and faculty the best ways to navigate social encounters and difficult conversations.

NE speech chair A’Isha Malone held “Communicating in a World of Chaos” Nov. 10, where hosts shared tips and tricks with audience members to help them improve their communication skills.

“Good communication skills are important,” NE speech instructor Jamie Melton said.

Effective speech is a necessary element in a person’s day-today life, Melton said.

“Communication is how the world works,” she said. “This is how we establish our relationships. It’s how we work. It’s how we communicate with those at work. It’s how we communicate with our family members.”

During the event, Melton said changing approaches while talking to others can be beneficial.

“We talk to people with diverse communication styles every day,” Melton said. “We are living in a very diverse world, and it helps us understand different people with different world views.”

NE student Hannah Morcha said she thinks the event was created to inform and empower people.

“I think the motivation behind the event was to help people learn better communication skills,” Morcha said. “I think it helps you build more confidence when communicating with other people.”

She said the event allowed people to understand why learning how to speak effectively with others can be challenging.

“I think communication can be very hard,” Morcha said. “It’s easy to get nervous, and it can be a very shaky experience.”

NE student Tin Nguyen believes the idea behind the event was to teach people the benefit of talking with others.

“I think the purpose of the event is to have professors spread their knowledge to the students to help them become better when they’re on their own,” Nguyen said.

The important lesson from the event was understanding the benefit of good communication skills, Nguyen said.

“Connection – making people connected is the benefit,” he said. Event co-host and NE speech instructor Amber Meyers said she hoped people walked away from the event understanding the significance of different forms of speech and where to apply them.

“I hope to share that conflict arises from the perception of a threat,” Meyers said. “There are ways we can act when those around us feel threatened or act in ways we find disagreeable...I wanted to share that we have the

For students, the 2022 midterm elections represented a time to use their voices to create change, and the results will now determine what that change looks like.

Nov. 8 was the last day to cast a vote, and for some students the days beforehand were tension-filled to say the least.

“Honestly, leading up to the midterms I genuinely felt terrified,” said NE student Ashley Foster. “I was terrified for women and our rights and what could possibly continue to be stripped away from us.” Foster was a first-time voter. She spoke about the importance of making her opinion heard and the genuine excitement she felt of being able to speak up for what she believed in.

“It was very important to me to

For students like Foster, many issues were unresolved on the front line when it came to the midterms. Having the chance to resolve them felt more crucial than ever.

“Gun control and abortion are at the top of my personal list of importance,” said Foster. “I think the fact that after the tragic shooting in Uvalde, action needed to be taken.”

Much like Foster, NE student Jake Sembritzky also had a lot riding on the election. For him, the main concerns were regarding the issues with Texas’ power grid and the large number of mass shootings.

“Texas is in a bad spot when it comes to the power grid,” he said.

“Nearly the entire state is cut off from the two major international power grids. Yet if we had access to these, millions of people wouldn’t have had to freeze for days on end, resorting to caveman-like survival.”

“I voted this year, and the main area of importance to me was fixing the power grid and solving the mass shooting crisis here in Texas that has gripped the entire nation,” Sembritzky said.

Sembritzky also spoke about his opinion on Gov. Greg Abbott’s performance during the previous term and how it affected the way he decided to vote this year.

“I think Greg Abbott has done a fair job as governor of Texas the past eight years, keeping taxes low and keeping Texas open to business,” Sembritzky said. “But I personally think Beto would have been a better fit for the next four years as governor of Texas.”

For him, choosing a candidate was about more than picking a side. It was about choosing someone See Election, page 2 power to create a calmer society by intervening when we see bad behavior in public.”

Meyers said she wanted to help people sharpen their communication skills because of her past experiences.

“As an autistic person, communication has never come naturally to me,” she said. “I guessed that if I struggled, others must struggle too so I decided to polish my skill set to learn and then be able to present ideas in a hopefully fun and interesting way.”

Throughout the event, discussions were had about the best aspects of speech and Meyers said speech’s greatest strength was its ability to allow others to understand different types of people.

“Language development allowed us to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next,” she said. “Nonverbal communication enhanced those verbal utterances and allows people who don’t speak the same language to still communicate, trade and prosper.”

After being asked why many people struggle when talking to others, Meyers said poor communication comes from underexposure and an inability to change.

“Mostly it comes down to a desire to learn and a desire to change,” she said. “Change is always hard, but the benefits of learning to communicate are worth the discomfort of change.”

NE government instructor Lisa Uhlir was passionate about bringing attention to the lost acknowledgement of Native discoveries.

The NE presentation “How Native Americans Transformed the World,” on Nov. 9 was given by Uhlir, a member of the Ojibwe tribe. She brought up the importance of not only talking about Native struggles but celebrating and calling attention to the positive effects Native people have had on the world.

“What I was trying to go for was several things,” she said. “First was I wanted people to start thinking from a new perspective of not how we negatively affect each other as different ethnic groups, but how we positively affect each other as different ethnic groups.”

The potato was something largely attributed to the Irish, yet Uhlir said this was not so much the case. Where Natives developed over 3,000 different types of potatoes, two of the types found their way to Ireland from the New World.

NE student Isabella Parsons said that though she felt a lost connection to her Native blood through erasure, she felt a sense of enlightenment. Being able to educate herself more on original Native knowledge made her realize what she unknowingly did have a connection to, like the potatoes.

“You always think ‘Irish, Irish, Irish,’ and that’s part of my dad’s history,” she said. “So, I was always thinking ‘Oh, that’s my connection to that!’ and then it was actually,

‘No, that’s my mom’s connection to that!’”

Ranson Mears, another NE student, had discussed his thoughts on Natives gaining more recognition for the things they discovered before Western Europeans, saying they deserved to have more.

“I feel like we stole a lot from them, not just land but ideas, culture, so I feel kind of bad about that,” he said.

Philosophical thought in the New World influenced Western politics, Uhlir said. Freedom and equality were egalitarian concepts to Natives, she said. The Great Spirit created the community as equal, and these ideas existed long before Western philosophers began to explore it.

“We as indigenous populations, we as Native Americans, have affected your everyday life in ways you don’t even realize or understand,” she said. “They get credited to Western inventors or Western discoverers like James Lind with the cure for scurvy.”

NE Intercultural Student Engagement coordinator Marjeanna Burge, part of the Comanche tribe, had considered how people proceed in helping to advocate for more Native voices being heard despite the silence.

“The more that people understand what these things are and become knowledgeable then they can become an advocate for what is going on,” she said.

The most important thing for Uhlir is students staying educated.

“Always my answer as a professor: The more we know about things, study. The more you know, the better,” she said.