VARIETY >> PAGE 6
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Musical groups from on and off campus will perform at the music festival Saturday.
Richmond, Old Dominion rack up 30 runs against Tribe pitchers.
Bands make TWAMPs dance
Vol. 103, Iss. 45 | Friday, April 4, 2014
Pitching Meltdown
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of The College of William and Mary
STUDENT ASSEMLBY
SA talks gender
ACADEMICS
Additional creative writing minor, traveling scholarship further efforts to increase writing opportunities at College
ostering Creativity
Eight years ago, there was no creative writing program at the College of William and Mary. This month last year, no official creative writing minor was offered to College students. The official creative writing minor established in the summer of 2013 offers advanced writing classes to students and provides them with greater opportunity to express themselves. “I think the creative writing minor gives some legitimacy to the program, and it gives a name to the program and brings attention to the program,” Mildred and J.B. Hickman Professor of English and Humanities Henry Hart said. “I think for a long time it just seemed like we had a scattering of creative writing classes and that was it.” STUDENT LIFE E n g l i s h professor Nancy Schoenberger a n d assistant COURTESY PHOTO / OPENCLIPART.ORG professor
STUDENT LIFE
BY MADELINE BIELSKI FLAT HAT ASSOC. NEWS EDITOR
“It’s a great senior year thing to do — kind of taking a step back and making something rather than memorizing things,” Hensley said. “It was a nice way to spend my senior year.” Alongside the official recognition of the minor, the department is offering the Concord Traveling Scholarship for the first time. The scholarship, established by an anonymous alum, awards $3,000 to one creative writing student each year. Recipients can use the money to travel and write over the summer. Upon returning in the fall, students will present their work in an Englishdepartment-sponsored reading. “[The donor] came up with the name of the Concord Traveling Scholarship. … Apparently he was reading some of Henry David Thoreau and Thoreau made a comment that he had done a lot of traveling around Concord, Mass.,” Hart said. “What it meant was that he was, in a way, traveling among his imagination while he was in Concord reading and writing. He also traveled around New England, but I think that the idea was that travel can be imaginative as well as geographical.” A Monroe Scholar while at the College, the donor used the summer Monroe scholarship to travel and read poetry, particularly work by Charles Simic. The donor said that, during the summer between his junior and senior year, he used the money from the Monroe scholarship get in a car and drive west, eventually ending up
Beyonce may say that girls run the world, but that isn’t always the case in the College of William and Mary’s Student Assembly. Last year’s SA elections saw a total of zero women vying for senate seats. This year, three women were elected by the freshmen class in the fall and an additional four women won positions in this past election cycle. Michelle Tansey ’16, an incoming senator for the Class of 2016, noted that although not as many women run for SA positions, women can be successful. According to Tansey, a total of 38 people ran in last year’s SA elections, including 11 women. Of the 38 people who ran, 26 won positions and nine of those winners were women. Secretary of Outreach and incoming SA Vice President Kendall Lorenzen ’15 said she sees societal influences as part of the reason why some women are deterred from running for SA positions. Lorenzen “Our culture, I think, creates a lot of females as seeing themselves as supporting characters and not necessarily as people that are going out and making positive changes in the community … which is something we really need to change,” Lorenzen said. President of the Class of 2015 Brianna Buch ’15 said she sees the overall image of politics as being a possible source of dissuasion for everyone — not just women — considering running for student government positions. “It is pretty intimidating to run for a position,” Buch said. “The fact that sometimes politics tends to have this stereotype of being kind of [dog eat] dog and really aggressive. And I think that kind of mentality can keep a lot of people away.” Sometimes, efforts encouraging women to run for SA leadership positions occur on a personal level with current female SA officers talking to other women on campus about pursuing positions. Sen. Emily Thomas ’17 said her RA, Lorenzen, encouraged her to run. Thomas said Lorenzen made her aware of the lack of female
See CREATIVE page 3
See WOMEN page 4
BY MEREDITH RAMEY // FLAT HAT EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
of English Chelsey Johnson furthered the official establishment of the creative writing minor. According to Hart, Schoenberger was the first tenured creative writing professor at the College, previously serving as a writer-in-residence, and remains the only full-time tenured creative writing professor. Johnson is on tenure track in the creative writing department. “We had been considering it for a number of years because we already had a full roster of creative courses to offer at beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels,” Schoenberger said in an email. “As many of our peer colleges offer creative writing minors and even majors, we thought it was time to turn a collection of welldesigned and popular courses into an official program and allow students to minor in creative writing.” Students and faculty alike highlight the benefits of defining creative writing as a distinctive department outside the English department. “At first, it can seem like an unnecessary break from the English department. … [But,] you [can] have an English major that came out of here that studied Victorian English literature and then you can have one that wrote poetry,” Morgan Hensley ’14 said. “So I think it’s a necessary and a good divide that can come out of the department.” Hensley, an English major, was the first student at the College to declare a creative writing minor. He declared soon after the minor was announced last summer.
Women advance in SA
ACADEMICS
Student Affairs Research fellows seek out summer donations most promising
Charles Center receives two $25,000 anonymous gifts to match individual fellowship funding
Ranked in top 30 offices in US BY ELEANOR LAMB FLAT HAT ASSOC. NEWS EDITOR
The College of William and Mary has been ranked one of the top 30 places in the nation to work in student affairs. The Division of Student Affairs was recognized by the Center for Inclusion, Diversity, and Academic Success as part of a study conducted by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education magazine. The study considered the number of staff members and compensation of staff, as well as cultural factors like quality of workplace environment, leave policies and staff Ambler development opportunities. “I was delighted because diversity has been such a core See AFFAIRS page 3
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BY CLAIRE GILLESPIE FLAT HAT ASSOC. NEWS EDITOR
With three weeks left to donate to the honors fellowship fund, honors fellows at the College of William and Mary are hoping that donors will contribute the final amounts to fund each of their $6,000 summer research projects. The fellowship website, set up like a micro-financed kickstarter, relies on individual donations to fund each student’s project. This year, the Charles Center received two $25,000 gifts from anonymous donors to match the amount of money people donate. Director of the Charles Center Joel Schwartz said these gifts were depleted in a matter of hours. “In this case, the dollar-for-
dollar match goes to the specific student that you’ve chosen at the specific amount that you’ve given,” Schwartz said. “We’ve learned from experience that it really does motivate these microfinancing donors.” Last year the Charles Center hosted 60 honors fellows and fully funded 42. This year, 66 honors fellows seek donations.Seven projects have been fully funded. “[The money] means a lot,” H o n o r s Fellow Jacob Lisi ’15 said. “It allows me to pretty much stay here this summer. … Schwartz It just makes
influence social phobia in children. “In psych studies like the one we’re doing, it’s really expensive to recruit because you have to offer monetary incentive to everybody,” Parr said. “In this particular study, we offer $10 to every child who participates. Multiply that by the 200 kids we have so far, that’s a lot of money. And we’re planning to recruit as many as possible.” The Charles Center has the internal money to fully fund six projects. They will use this money to top off students’ projects at the end of the donation period. “Funding is a very important thing when you get beyond undergraduate education,” Lisi See HONORS page 4
Inside VARIETY
Inside OPINIONS
Do college rankings really matter?
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life a lot easier and allows me to focus on my research rather than try to find an extra job beyond the 9 to 5 that research entails over the summer.” Lisi is researching the carbon-to-oxygen ratio in the functionalized grapheme used in oil pipes. Lisi researches the carbon to oxygen ratio in the functionalized grapheme used in oil pipes. Besides funding living expenses and the cost of not working another job, Honors Fellow Naomi Parr ’15 said the money would fund her project that examines maternal responses to children’s negative emotions. Parr’s research will investigate how mothers’ emotional responses can
While they’re important for the researching prospective student, rankings do not define a college experience.page 4
Hacking, the Tribe way
In the first-ever hackathon, teams from different colleges came up with ways to innovate the computing world. page 7