My Not so Quiet Opinions on the News

Category: COMM 208 (Page 3 of 3)

Scavenger Hunt

The two objects I had to get were a conversation about the weather, and a piece of gum that isn’t pink.

To get the gum, I went to the admissions office and spoke with Char Jorgensen. I told her what I was doing and she was excited to help out.

She had cinnamon Ice Breakers Ice Cubes. I asked her why cinnamon? She enthusiastically said, “I love cinnamon. Every gum I get is cinnamon. Except for the gum in my car, that’s Juicy Fruit and bubble gum for my grand kids.”

For the conversation about the weather, I headed to the Olsen Student Center. There I talked with the new chaplain, Andy Nelson. He was excited that I’d include him in the assignment, and was more than happy to help out.

We both agreed that we didn’t really care about the current weather. “It’s warmer, almost humid,” he said. He likes a cooler climate, and was kind of disappointed that September has stayed as warm as it has. He continued with, “I just really like jean and sweatshirt weather.”

In the end, the search wasn’t all that hard, and didn’t take all that long. In fact, the thing that took the most time was talking with Char and Andy. This was a good thing, because it helped me get what I needed for the assignment, and let me meet with someone I didn’t really know.

College Suicide: The Mental Health Help Problem

Suicide, in many opinions is something that shouldn’t be done, because it hurts more than just the one person who makes that decision. It hurts their loved ones and their friends. But most of all, it hurts the world. If that person hadn’t committed suicide, what could they have done? Maybe one person could’ve found the cure for cancer, and another could’ve brought world peace.

Since they’re no longer here, that won’t happen—at least not for a while. But suicide is a very broad topic, especially when you look at the ages at which people make the decision to end it all. So, to narrow that topic down, here are some articles and statistics about suicide in college age students.

In the article titled “Suicide Wave Grips Columbia” the authors Shawn Cohen and Laura Italiano talk about the seven suicides that involved seven Columbia students.

Starting on January 18, 2016, and ending on December 18, 2016, seven students made the decision to end their lives.

In January Daniel, Yi-Chia, Ezekiel all decided to take their lives in a matter of a five day stretch. In September it was Uriel—a navy corpsman. In October Taylor chose to end his life. In November Nicole made the same decision, and in December Mounia also made the decision.

According to information gathered from multiple sources by collegedegreesearch.net in 2015, an average of 6% of undergraduate, and 4% of graduate students in a four year college had seriously thought about attempting suicide in the past year. Nearly half of both those groups didn’t tell anyone.

There were 7.5 suicides per 100 thousand students in the U.S. in 2015, which added up to 1,100 students taking their lives that year. One in twelve had actually written out a suicide plan, and 1.5 out of 100 students actually attempted to commit suicide.

Twelve people aged fifteen to twenty-four committed suicide in one day, which rounded out to one person dying every two hours.

The emotional health of college freshmen had declined to its lowest extent in 25 years, going from 64% saying their emotional health being above average in 1985, to 51% saying their emotional health was above average in 2015.

Campus stress producers were found to correlate with competitiveness, acceptance rate, tuition, campus crime, and the economy.

In the article “College Mental Health Crisis: Focus on Suicide” written by Steve Schlozman and Eliza Abdu-Glass, and contributed to by Gene Beresin—a professor of psychology at Harvard—the good, the bad, and the ugly of mental health services on college campuses is discussed.

The good? There are more opportunities for developmental growth, and colleges are actively recognizing the immense variety of ways that their students are coming of age. There are many offerings for people to explore who they are and what values they hold dear.

The bad? Drop-out rates, more powerful distractions from the online world, and greater academic and social expectations for students are on the rise. The ever-growing financial challenges for students and parents are also on the rise, and the decreased certainty of finding a job makes things more difficult as well. This all adds emotional stress to the students, and adds to the pressures of the outside world that they are feeling.

The ugly? As was said above, colleges have made great improvements, but are still largely ill-equipped to help students with psychological health that needs this great of an amount of help.

Some statistics that Schlozman, Abdu-Glass, and Beresin provided are;

  1. There are more than 1,000 suicides on college campuses each year, which adds up to 2-3 deaths every day.
  2. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students.
  3. More than half of college students have suicidal thoughts, and one in ten seriously consider attempting suicide.
  4. 80-90% of college students who committed suicide were not receiving help from the counseling centers at their college.

Following this, they asked what can be done to improve the situation? They came up with these 6 things colleges can do to help;

  1. Establish new educational platforms about depression and suicide.
  2. Increase access to mental health services.
  3. Support community forums
  4. Foster peer counseling.
  5. Decrease the stigma of mental illness.
  6. Promote means for increasing student wellbeing.

With colleges being unique, they need to tailor these things to their circumstances. If they do, the benefits are immense. If colleges act, they can literally save lives.

3 Live and 1 Dies in Boating Accident

Four students from Armstrong Aeronautical University were involved in a boating accident, after their ship sprung a leak.

Randy Cohen, Christy Wapniarski, Daniel Perrin, and Tammy Ennis were sailing in a 16-foot catamaran, when at about 5 pm the boat sprung a leak and later capsized.

The four hung on to one of the boats pontoons through the night, as none had a life vest on.

When morning came they decided to swim for shore, which was four miles away.

Cohen was about twenty feet in front of Wapniarski, when he heard her call out for help, saying that a shark had attacked her. Cohen called to Ennis for help, but she yelled back, “Randy, don’t go back there, you’ll get eaten too.”

By the time Cohen had swam back to Wapniarski, she was unconscious, and he could see no sign of a shark.

He put his arms around her shoulders and started swimming back to shore.

Perrin, who had been swimming behind the other three, caught up with Cohen and checked Wapniarski’s pulse. He told Cohen she was dead, but Cohen refused to leave her behind.

He swam for another 10-15 minutes, before he became to exhausted to carry her any longer.

Six hours later the students made it back to shore.

Cohen was admitted to Halifax Hospital in Daytona Beach, Florida, with injuries from being stung by dozens of Portuguese Man-of-Wars.

This information is from Cohen, who was interviewed at the hospital.

42 Dead and 16 Injured in Plane Crash

A United Airlines plane with 61 people on board crashed in a residential district south of Chicago while approaching The Windy City’s Second City Airport on Friday afternoon.

42 bodies were found, one being identified as Representative George W. Collins, D-Ill., who was on his way back from Washington to “organize a children’s Christmas party.

16 people, including the three flight attendants were admitted to Holy Cross Hospital with injuries.

An eyewitness was quoted as saying, “I saw the plane coming lower and lower. I couldn’t believe it. I thought surely it would go back up into the air. But it kept coming down. I knew it would never make it to the airport. I was scared.”

One of the survivors, Marvin Anderson, 43, of Omaha, said, “The last words the pilot said to us were, ‘We are at 4,000 feet and everything is going well.’ I knew something was wrong a few seconds later because he began to rev the engines.”

Curtis Vokamer, deputy fire marshall, said his crew found most of the 55 passengers dead in the debris of the Boeing 737. He was quoted as saying, “If Hell has an address, this is the place.”

First Paper: Rough Draft

Suicide can have several meanings, it just depends on how you look at it. For some it’s a senseless and selfish act that takes loved ones away from their families. For others it’s seen as something that has taken a loved one. And for others still, it’s a way to end the pain, or to leave behind the loneliness that’s drowning them. The dictionary definition is, “the intentional taking of one’s own life.” But suicide is a very broad topic, especially when you look at the ages at which people make the decision to end it all. So, to narrow that topic down, I’m going to talk about suicide in college age students.

Suicide, in my opinion is something that shouldn’t be done, because it hurts more than just the one person who makes that decision. It hurts their loved ones and their friends. But most of all, it hurts the world. If that person hadn’t committed suicide, what could they have done? Maybe one person could’ve found the cure for cancer, and another could’ve brought world peace. Since they’re no longer here, that won’t happen—at least not for a while.

According to http://www.collegedegreesearch.net/student-suicides/ in 2015, an average of 6% of undergraduate, and 4% of graduate students in a four year college had seriously thought about attempting suicide in the past year. Nearly half of both those groups didn’t tell anyone.

There were 7.5 suicides per 100 thousand students in the U.S. in 2015, which added up to 1,100 students taking their lives that year. One in twelve have actually written out a suicide plan, and 1.5 out of 100 students have actually attempted to commit suicide.

Twelve people aged fifteen to twenty-four committed suicide in one day, which rounds out to one person dying every two hours.

The emotional health of college freshmen had declined to its lowest extent in 25 years, going from 64% saying their emotional health being above average in 1985, to 51% saying their emotional health was above average in 2015. Campus stress producers were found to correlate with competitiveness, acceptance rate, tuition, campus crime, and the economy.

Bad Dog! Gas Truck Rolls Over on Outskirts of Town

A Texaco truck hauling gasoline overturned and flooded sewer lines on 48th Street and Correctionville Road. Fire Chief Charles Hochandel said, “The firemen followed catastrophe and hazmat procedure set up beforehand for just such an occurence.”

Four families were evacuated because of the gas in the sewer lines, and cars were rerouted through side streets, as there was also fuel on the streets and in ditches.

The situation remained serious for two hours until the gasoline was washed away, and flushed out of the lines.

Charter School Woes

This news article comes from the New York Times Education Issue. The headline is, “Michigan Gambled on Charter Schools. Its Children Lost.”

The part that should catch your attention was the little paragraph that was used as a summary of what the article talked about.

It goes, “Free-market boosters, including Betsy DeVos, promised that a radical expansion of charter schools would fix the stark inequalities in the state’s education system. The results in the classrooms are far more complicated.”

This should catch your attention because it shows that while some people have good intentions, they aren’t always very helpful.

This article has a good lead, as it uses a small amount of information from the article to talk about what is going on. This also lets you know what’s basically going on in the story, without having to read the entire article.

Other than the lead, this story does leave something to be desired. Instead of going right into talking about the charter school problems that the state has, it talks about the history of a young woman who grew up in Highland Park, and started teaching there this last year.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/magazine/michigan-gambled-on-charter-schools-its-children-lost.html

 

Live Action Trailer for Destiny 2 Arrives Today

Today Destiny 2’s live action trailer hit the world with something that the game’s followers couldn’t believe was so good. This live action trailer was directed by the director of Kong: Skull Island.

Despite being for a fictional first-person-shooter set in outer space, and having Sabotage by the Beastie Boys set as the theme song, the new trailer takes a beautifully comical tone with the destruction of all Earth, now including the last safe place on Earth–The Last City. The City is taken by a “psycho rhino named Ghaul,” and the Gaurdians, inhabitants of The Last City, are the only ones that can fight back against him. (LeFebvre)

In the video we see the new faction of the Cabal–a monstrous race that conquers entire worlds just for being in their way–take the last safe stronghold from the inhabitants of Earth. The Gaurdians must now rise up, without their powers, to take back the city from these fiends.

Where were you when the Traveler fell?

So “Grab some big guns,”  and “Do it for the puppies!” The game will come out later next week on Wednesday, September 6 for Play Station 4 and Xbox One. Release for PC use is set for Tuesday, October 24. (LeFebvre)

LeFebvre, R. (2017, August 31). We wish ‘Destiny 2’ looked as good as this live action trailer. Retrieved August 31, 2017, from https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/31/destiny-2-live-action-trailer-looks-amazing

Introducing: Nat the Freshman

Nat is a freshman in the COMM 208 class taught by Ross Fuglsang. She is from Colorado, so she’s a decent amount of time away from home, but that’s exactly what she wanted. Nat hasn’t decided on a major yet, but is thinking about something to do with graphic design or writing. Her interest in writing comes from the three slam poetry competitions she’s been in. She does not likes sports, and holds a personal grudge against the Superbowl, as it sometimes falls on her birthday.

Nat has worked as a barista in her aunt’s cafe for about a year. She has also moved around a lot as a kid. She said she’s been to about twenty different schools since second grade. She likes cats a lot, and prefers them over dogs. She has family in Colorado and Wyoming, and lived in California for two of her years as a middle school student. Her family has had a few run ins with celebrities. Her great uncle dated Elvira, while her great grandfather performed with Elvis Presley on the Louisiana Hay Ride a radio show that was popular towards the beginning of Elvis’s career.

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