Thursday, November 30, 2023
Cyclone Cowboys look to stir up the competition Mak Vandruff OSU News A team of Oklahoma State University students is showcasing its engineering prowess in the 2024 Collegiate Wind Competition. The Cyclone Cowboys — in only their second year — are aiming to win this time around. The competition will be from May 5-9, 2024, at the American Clean Power Association’s CLEANPOWER Conference & Exhibition in Minneapolis. The competition aims to help college students prepare for jobs in the renewable energy workforce. The team will create a hypothetical wind farm based on the competition’s region, which in this case is the Great Lakes. They will also create a working wind turbine, which will be tested against different conditions in the competition, which includes community outreach. The wind farm, turbine design, turbine testing and outreach will all be tested at the competition. If the Cyclone Cowboys win first overall, they will win $10,000 and a trophy. Nate Lannan, an assistant profesCourtesy of OSU News sor of practice in OSU’s School of Elec- The members of the Cyclone Cowboys club team. trical and Computer Engineering, is the “It was a really good showing,” ground up, and all these other schools club’s advisor. Lannan said the competi- rowing down to the top 13. The Cyclone Cowboys placed 11 out of 32 last year, Lannan said. “I’m so proud of the stuhave been doing this for around ten tion happens in phases, where around 30 which Lannan said was outstanding. dents because we were starting from the years. ” groups start out competing before narSee Cyclone on 5
Putting on a happy face Exploring the science behind surface acting Courtesy of OSU News
Payton Little OSU turned on its orange holiday lights during the annual Fanfare of Lights event on Tuesday.
Light it up
OSU turns on annual holiday lights Hayden Alexander Staff Reporter
‘Twas the countdown before the Fanfare of Lights, and not creature was stirring, not even BB. The students gathered around, their anticipation filling the air. Children danced around the Library Lawn without a care. The countdown began five, four, three, two, one, and a bright orange glow bathed Edmon Low, spreading across the campus in a blaze of holiday cheer. The Fanfare of Lights
is Oklahoma State’s annual holiday event, where the university turns on all the holiday lights at once. This year, the Student Union Activities Board and the Off-Campus Student Association put on the event together. Senior Jake Williams, the president of OCSA, said he was excited to see a large turnout of on-and off-campus students. “My favorite part of the night is seeing the turnout,” Williams said. “There’s been so many people here, and I’m so happy to see the event come together.” SUAB and OCSA put on the event, but they were not the only organizations
to make an appearance. The Student Government Association brought good tidings and charity to the event. President Ashley Peterson and Vice President Hilary Albrecht spoke to the awaiting crowd about SGA’s holiday philanthropy. SGA is hosting a winter coat drive and organizing an Angel Tree for kids around Stillwater. “We were invited to speak and through this event were helping to raise awareness and donations,” Peterson said. “I’m glad to see so many people here, not just OSU students, but people in the Stillwater community come out.” See Lights on 6
When the server at your favorite restaurant stops by to take your order, what are they really thinking? Did they receive some great news earlier in the day that made their smile genuine? Or has it been one of those days where everything that could go wrong has gone wrong, and they are hiding their discontentment behind a forced smile? Often, it’s hard to tell because every employee on some level fakes their observable facial or bodily displays at the workplace. Known as surface acting, everyone engages daily in what is one of the most common types of emotional labor. Many decades of research have shown that surface acting is detrimental to employees. Often, the discontent spills over from work to home, where it can lead to insomnia, fatigue and even marital issues. “Most jobs have some element of this, and we know already from years and years of research that it can take a large toll on people over time if they don’t have the coping mechanisms,” said Dr. Anna Lennard, associate professor in the Department of Management for Oklahoma State University’s Spears School of Business. “The literature has largely argued that people go home, recharge and come back the next day and do it all over again. Employers haven’t taken it upon themselves to think, ‘What are the ways we can help employees?’ Or, ‘What are ways that people can recover?’ Or, ‘If they do recover, do they get over it? What happens when they leave work?’” Lennard and co-authors Dr. Amy Bartels (College of Business, University of Nebraska-Lincoln), Dr. Brent Scott (Eli Broad College of Business, Michigan State University) and Dr. Suzanne Peterson (Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University) tackled that subject in their recently published article,
“Stopping Surface-Acting Spillover: A Transactional Theory of Stress Perspective” in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Studies show various instances where surface acting at work can lead to harmful outcomes at home, Lennard said. One example is when employees are surface acting at work, it can lead to inauthenticity at home, which is detrimental to both employees and their spouses. “What we ended up finding is that when you need emotional labor at work, you leave feeling very depleted,” Lennard said. “So, you’re fatigued, you’re emotionally exhausted and that carries over to your interactions with your family at home. So, you don’t stop surface acting when you get home. “That’s one of the main problems we looked at, and that’s really sad. What can be done for people to pull themselves out of this? It’s not fun just to think about ways that this is really terrible for people. It would be great if we could come up with some actual interventions that would help people.” Lennard said the researchers focused on two different points of interaction. The first focus was on what employees can do at work to manage the depletion that comes from surface acting, which involves reframing the surface acting of the employee. There are good and bad stressors that all employees deal with daily: 1, hindrance stressors and 2, challenge stressors. An example of a hindrance stressor is when an employee feels overloaded at work and has trouble completing their work assignment. It interrupts their work goals and interferes with their work growth. Challenge stressors are opportunities for growth in the job (such as being asked to give a speech, performing well and growing in that area). Although it is subjective, the employee decides which challenges can be beneficial. See Acting on 8