LL Spring05.indd - Lehman College

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • CAMPUS • • • • • • • NEWS • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 2 Lehman's Golden Key Wins Chapter Award Ayanna Timothy, Haydee Acevedo accept the Chapter Award from Professor Di Yerbury, vice chancellor of Macquarie University in Australia. The Lehman chapter of Golden Key International Honor Society has won the prestigious Key Chapter Award, awarded to only one chapter each year. The award honors chapters that excel in communication, publicity, meeting management, chapter activities and leadership, as well as in participation in regional and international programs. Golden Key cited the Lehman chapter's “outstanding teamwork, dedication and collaboration with other student organizations on their campus.” Golden Key has nearly 350 chapters on four continents. Lehman College of The City University of New York is located at 250 Bedford Park Boulevard West, Bronx, NY 10468. Anne Johnson, Vice President for Institutional Advancement; Barbara Smith, Director of Alumni Relations. Lehman Lightning is produced in the Office of Media Relations and Publications. Editor: Marge Rice. Staff: Keisha-Gaye Anderson, Barbara Cardillo, Lisandra Merentis, Yeara Milton, Florian Penev and Phyllis Yip Pulitzer Prize-Winning Alumnus Mitch Weiss '81 Credits Lehman Faculty for Giving Him a Strong Start Mitch Weiss was never that excited about school. He preferred hanging out with friends and checking out the hottest grafitti in the New York City subways. But when he enrolled in Lehman College, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist found the faculty support and academic foundation that he needed to speed him on his way to a successful journalistic career. “I wasn’t a great student in high school,” says Weiss, a writer for the Toledo Blade. “I was more into hanging out than I was into going to school.” Weiss won a Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for his four-part series, “Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths,” which exposed a U.S. government cover-up of Vietnam war crimes committed by the U.S. military group Tiger Force. He always knew that he wanted to be a writer, but it wasn’t until he entered Lehman that he began to seriously nurture that dream. “Lehman gave me a great foundation,” he says. “The thing that really benefited me was the fact that the teachers were accessible and the classes were small. It was a world-class faculty.” After graduating from Lehman in 1981, he went on to earn his master’s in journalism from Northwestern. Like many Lehman students, Weiss worked while going to school to help pay his tuition. He grew up in the Bronx in a working-class family that believed education was very important. He says that the one-on-one attention he received from his Lehman Mitch Weiss '81 professors really helped him to stay on track with his educational goals. “If I didn’t have teachers who were interested in me, maybe I would have fallen through the cracks,” says Weiss, whose brother and sister also graduated from Lehman. He tries to give that same kind of personalized attention to the students he teaches at the University of Toledo. “It seemed that the teachers at Lehman were more interested in connecting with the students. That was really helpful.” Weiss is taking time off to work on a book based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning article. The book, Tiger Force (Little, Brown and Company), is scheduled for release later this year. ◆ The City and the Humanities Program at Lehman will sponsor a lecture by Mitch Weiss and his co-author, Michael Sala, on Thursday, December 1, 2005 at 12:30 pm. All alumni and friends of the College are invited. Details will be posted on the Lehman website (www.lehman.edu) and published in the next issue of Lehman Lightning. Legos ® Aren't Just for Kids Anymore Lehman students are building programming skills by building robots. These robots are only about as smart as a microwave oven, but Lehman Scholars and Honors College students are able to make them do some interesting things. The students are looking at the effects of computers on society, especially how robotics impacts our interaction with the world. Besides traditional coursework, the students design, build and program Lego® Mindstorm Robots to perform various tasks and also create a technical guide to their use. Equipped with only an H8 Hitachi processor, the same type used in microwave ovens, the students program the robots to follow a flashlight, navigate an obstacle course, play catch with another robot, throw balls into baskets and send messages to other robots. “Compared to a regular laptop, the robots aren’t very smart,” says Professor Katherine St. John, who teaches the course. “It’s amazing Professor Katherine St. John (right) watches as Judy Figueroa runs her robot through its paces. how much you can do with so little processing power and speed.” The course also teaches students about geometry, gearing and locomotion. “The most practical thing the students learn is how to program a computer,” says Professor St. John. “These skills will transfer to programming in C, C++, and Java—all commonly used today.” ◆
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • CAMPUS • • • • • • NEWS • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • New Communications Studio Opens on Campus Live from Lehman...it’s COM 200. This new course, entitled “Broadcast Workshop–Internet, Video and Audio Broadcasting,” is providing students with valuable hands-on training in television, radio and Internet production through a new, state-of-the-art studio in Carman Hall. For their premiere broadcast, students produced two half-hour segments of in-studio discus- Samuel de la Cruz, a junior majoring in Multilingual Journalism, prepares a new program. sion and analysis of the presidential and local elections, which aired on election night to over 250,000 households via Bronxnet. “The election provided the perfect opportunity to launch the project,” says Professor James Carney, who teaches the course. “The importance of the election and the availability of research information for students gave them a great deal of material on which to base a freeflowing discussion.” The discussions covered specific aspects of each race, including the importance of the youth, religious and minority votes as well as gerrymandering of election districts. Students taking COM 200 are trained in radio production and engineering, semi-automated studio TV production and the produc- Professor James Carney (left), College Laboratory Technician Yves Dossous (seated) and some of the students of COM 200. tion of audio and video programming for the Internet. Equipped with Panasonic robotic camera systems similar to those used in the studios of WFAN and MSNBC, the Lehman studio provides strong technical training for students planning careers in broadcasting. “The VT-3 computer switching/mixing/ graphics and editing system represents one of the most recent ‘studio in a box’ concepts,” says Professor Carney. Students can also leave the course with a portfolio of their programs to present to future employers. Professor Carney hopes to eventually place a link on the Lehman website that will connect listeners to the virtual Lehman NetRadio station where they can enjoy live, recorded and archived audio shows created by his students. One more long-term goal for the course is to feed the students' programming to Bronxnet, which in turn can cablecast the shows to over a quarter-million Bronx residences. Another objective is to produce nightly TV news breaks written, gathered and reported by students. “The goal is to have two-minute newsbreak windows on Bronxnet similar to the way CNN Headline News provides local breaks to local cable systems,” says Professor Carney. “This will take a few semesters to complete.” ◆ The Awards Keep Coming for ‘Inside Lehman’ “Inside Lehman” has won a first-place award from the Alliance for Community Media—on top of a bronze Telly Award from last spring. The student-produced video magazine originates from Lehman’s new Department of Journalism, Communication and Theatre. “With 100 entries more than last year’s competition, our group was up against some top-notch cable television programming,” says Professor Lynne Van Voorhis, the program’s executive producer. Last year, the group won in the special-interest programming category for the segment produced during Spring 2003. This time, the Spring 2004 program was honored. “It’s pretty impressive that we won,” says Lou Gonzales, a sophomore and reporter on the program. “We put a lot of time and dedication into making this a quality product.” “I feel that I’ve been working with an allstar team,” says Harvey Bien, another “Inside Lehman” reporter. ◆ Home on the Range One Lehman graduate student recently enjoyed the opportunity to work in the wide open spaces of rural Montana, thanks to the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU). Juandy Paredes, who's studying recreation, wanted to gain some practical experience in her field, so she applied to the HACU internship program and was accepted for an internship with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service. “Employers are looking for experience. I wanted experience in that area and also to see if I would like it,” says Paredes, who admits she was nervous about going out to Montana. “Not only was I there to work but I was able to relax and make friends. It made a girl from the Bronx feel very at home.” Paredes was based at the ranger station in Neihart, Montana, during her two-month internship. She worked in the field, keeping the hiking trails safe for the visiting population and surveying trails to document how long they were and their level of difficulty. She was also trained in the use of ATV’s (all-terrain vehicles) as well as horseback riding. Paredes was the only Lehman student awarded a placement in Montana. HACU covered Paredes’ airfare and paid her a stipend from which housing costs were deducted. ◆ 3
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LL Spring05.indd - Lehman College

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