Feb. 07, 2022
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what's inside
3
Insights into the hoops
6
Valentine's connections
5
The Comet's Gambit
THE MERCURY | UTDMERCURY.COM
New esports coach hired Drew Boehm previously worked in esports at UTA BEN NGUYEN
Managing Editor
After a stint being student-run following Greg Adler’s departure, the UTD esports team has hired on a new head coach for the program. Drew Boehm is the newly hired head coach of the UTD esports team. A TCU alumni, Boehm was originally interested in law enforcement before a crop of collegiate esports jobs rose up and he applied for a few of them. After heading a private program in Kansas for a year and then spending a few years as UT Arlington’s assistant director of esports, Boehm said he was attracted by the success of the program and the school in the field. “It’s been awesome seeing the success and seeing how well every- Drew Boehm thing has gone, and I’m really passionate about this kind of stuff,” Boehm said. “It was just a culmination of a lot of factors, but the program and the school, [I] definitely love it.” Besides being interviewed by the university, Boehm was interviewed by a panel of some of the current student leads on the team, including ITS senior and main Overwatch tank Luey Salinas. One of the things that stood out to Salinas about Boehm was an alignment between Boehm’s and the program’s goals. Boehm himself said that satisfaction and enjoyment alongside academic success was part
COMETS IN THE SNOW
→ SEE COACH, PAGE 3
ANNA PHENGSAKMUEANG | PHOTO EDITOR
Poet speaks to UTD
Oh ResNet, ResNet, where art thou today?
Spoken word phenom enthralls Comets with poems about mental health, self-care
First day internet outages were caused by off-campus failure
MANYA BONDADA Mercury Staff
MARGARET MOORE
In an honest, vulnerable and captivating virtual performance, Sabrina Benaim, one of the most viewed spoken word poets of all time, shared her poetry and heart with the UTD community at a virtual poetry slam hosted by SUAAB. On Feb. 3, 34-year-old Benaim from Toronto shared poems about love, depression and everything in-between, warming the audience during the winter storm with her relatable and touching stories. As a poet and performer, she aims to break down the stigma surrounding mental health by sharing her own experiences. Especially during the pandemic when people are faced with isolation, her poetry acts as a source of comfort for many. With almost ten million views online, Benaim’s most well-known poem is “Explaining My Depression to My Mother,” through which the poet expresses (unsurprisingly) her frustration of not being able to explain her depression to her mother. The UTD community was able to watch Benaim perform this iconic poem virtually, which also served as a gateway for her to speak about her thoughts on mental health. “When ‘Explaining My Depression to My Mother’ first went viral, and then because of the attention I garnered from that poem, I got so many DMs at the beginning that were like ‘you should try Jesus! You should try working out more! You should try eating this, like, this will fix you!’” said Benaim. “We don’t necessarily put the stigma [for mental health] beside unsolicited advice, but truly, you know there’s a stigma around [mental health] when you tell somebody that you have depression and their first reaction is to try and fix you.” Her conversation on mental health continued through her poem, “The Lone-
On the first day of online classes for the spring 2022 semester, countless Teams calls dropped midstream as Apogee’s MyResNet wifi disconnected throughout Canyon Creek, University Village and the Residence Halls. Students were left scrambling to get back to class, as the outage took several hours to resolve. As a Peer Advisor in Residence Hall North, criminology senior Carol Lehavan fielded calls from frantic first-years looking to get reconnected, sending them to the Hall’s lobby and other areas that retained CometNet access during the outage. “The January outage was inconvenient, considering it was the first day of classes,” Lehavan said. “I know a lot of people exhausted hotspots or went to other buildings on campus just to do their classes, which kind of defeats the purpose of having virtual classes that you do from your room.” Connection was restored around 8:11 p.m. that night after a nine hour outage. Matthew Grief, associate vice president for Student Affairs and director of Housing Operations, said that the issue was due to an off-campus equipment malfunction. “I want to stress that it was not something on campus that was causing the problem. There's an off-campus internet provider—or fiber provider company—called Zayo,” Grief said. Apogee uses Zayo Group’s fiber optic cables to communicate data quickly and securely to UTD. When their equipment malfunctioned, it took out residential Wi-Fi connections on campus, with no clear timeline for when they would be restored. To ensure
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SABRINA BENAIM | COURTESY
Sabrina Benaim became famous when her performance of "Explaining My Depression to My Mother" went viral on YouTube. She continues to share her profoundly human poetry in order to destigmatize and bring exposure to mental health issues.
liest Sweet Potato,” where Benaim explained how she went to the grocery store as a way to cope with loneliness; being in an open space surrounded by strangers strangely made her feel slightly better. Through personal anecdotes such as this one, Benaim genuinely engaged with the audience by sharing poems that struck a chord within every viewer. “Talking about your own mental illness with other people -- that’s an experience I’ve had within my own family,” said Bronwen Olson, a freshman physics major. “I know how hard it is to get other people to understand what’s going on in your head and how important it is to be able to communicate about things like mental health and how that’s all part of recovery. For me, that’s one of the most profound things that Sabrina Benaim
shared.” Beyond just reading her poems, Benaim’s emotional delivery brought her works to life, so much so that her performance felt like a conversation between two friends. From reading poems about using cleaning as a coping mechanism to distract herself to sharing her stories about unrequited love, her performance described the profoundly human emotions that everyone faces at some point but often aren’t sure how to express. “It felt like, [Benaim] almost knew me in a way, even though we don’t actually know each other,” said Kyle Mizumoto, a mechanical engineering junior. Benaim is an excellent representation of how poetry and creative writing can help
SEE POET, PAGE 3
students could resume classes in the meantime, Grief reached out to UTD’s Office of Information Technology, which worked with Apogee to create a “temporary internet solution” as described in a Housing email to residents that evening. “They were able to do the cross connect that evening through a little bit of magic, and they also were able to allow that connection to continue until Zayo restored their network,” Grief said. UTD transitioned back to Zayo’s fiber connection with only a five-minute break in service just after midnight on Jan. 25. OIT is leaving this failsafe in place to be used for similar situations in the future—at least until a more permanent fix is complete. “Both of us left that configuration in place after this last incident. So, it will be a relatively quick cut over, but still requires manual intervention. Our engineers must coordinate that activity with their engineers,” said Brian Dourty, associate vice president and chief technology officer at OIT. “Having a second circuit to campus for Apogee,
SEE RESNET, PAGE 3
DANIELLE BELL | MERCURY STAFF