Save the dates!
Hit the all-new class cookout on Friday night, followed by Saturday's Alumni Parade, special class events, and more. Food, frolic, and old friends-all weekend long.
Watch your mail and the special announcements section of our website (http://
www.union.edu) for details.
In modest fashion, the College
this fall honored an inventor who had a profound impact on America.
The inventor was George Westinghouse, a native of nearby Central Bridge, whose academic career at Union lasted only three months before a dean told him to stop wasting his and the College's time.
So Westinghouse went back to his father's threshing machine factory, located where the General Electric complex now stands, and began to churn out inventions.
The 150th anniversary of his birth was noted on October 6, when Charles Ruch, volunteer historian for the Westinghouse Museum in Pittsburgh, came to the Nott Memorial. Dressed as Westinghouse, Ruch told his audience about the inventor who received 360 patents and started sixty companies.
The presentation marked the opening of an exhibit in the Nott Memorial about Westinghouse's life and work. The exhibit will run through December.
One of Westinghouse's chief competitors was Thomas Edison, who also made his mark in Schenectady. Westinghouse was a proponent of high-voltage alternating current, while Edison favored direct current and a series of power stations to move electricity.
Westinghouse eventually won, Ruch said, partially by pulling off a series of dramatic
triumphs. In 1886, for example, he provided the light for an entire department store in Buffalo, and in 1893 he provided lighting for the World's Fair in Chicago.
From Dinosaurus magazine to the London School of Economics, the Class of 1995 has taken many paths.
Results from the Career Development Center's annual survey find sixty-four percent of the graduates employed, thirty percent in advanced study, four percent traveling, and two percent unemployed. Ninety-six percent of the class responded to the survey.
The largest area of employment
was sales and marketing (8.2 percent), with education at 6.8 percent. Among those choosing graduate study, 6.1 percent of the class went to medical school. Law and education each had 4.9 percent of the class.
Copies of the survey are available from the Career Development Center.
Read MoreThe College has begun a new program to encourage outstanding scholarship-the Union Scholars Program-and this fall seventeen first-year students accepted an invitation to join.
The program has been designed to provide an enriched intellectual experience during the first two years of college and an international experience or off-campus internship during the junior year.
Students selected for the program will work closely with faculty mentors, explore a wider variety of courses throughout the curriculum, and more easily complete a double major or minor.
Honors freshmen, for example, are participating in a special two-term Freshman Preceptorial that will include such special events as lectures, theater, special exhibits, and dinners with faculty who teach in the various areas explored by preceptorial readings. The seminar is in addition to the normal nine-course schedule for the year.
Next year, each student will select a faculty member to work closely with on a two-term independent study project that will culminate in a major paper.
To be considered for the program, applicants must be in the top five percent of their secondary school class, have combined SAT scores above 1250 or scores above 30 on the ACT exams, or have demonstrated extraordinary talent in an academic or creative area.
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Professors Janet Anderson, Leslie Hull, Charles Scaife, and Thomas Werner of the Chemistry Department participated in a Project Kaleidoscope workshop at Columbia University on “Revitalizing Introductory Chemistry.” The department's four courses for
non-majors were designated a “Program That Works” by Project Kaleidoscope. The four also serve as consultants to other institutions planning changes in their chemistry courses for majors and
non-majors.
James Adrian, assistant professor of chemistry, was a Visiting Pew Scholar at St. Lawrence University, where he gave a talk on “Biomithic Guest Orientation: Are We Going the Right Way?”
Todd Burgman, assistant professor of finance, discussed “Comparing the German and U.S. Corporate Governance Systems: Big Banks and Employee Co-Determination vs. Stockholders and Takeover Threats” at a conference in Washington hosted by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany.
George Gmelch, professor of anthropology, and Sharon Gmelch, director of Women's Studies, contributed “Barbados' Amerindian Past” to a recent issue of Anthropology Today. The Amerindian population of Barbados disappeared shortly after the first European contact in the 1550s.
Peter Heinegg, professor of English, has published a translation of God's Gentle Rebels (Gottes sanfte Rebellen) by Christian Feldman, a collection of short biographies of radical, eccentric, or otherwise noteworthy Catholic saints.
Martha Huggins, the Roger Thayer Stone Professor of Sociology, is the author of two articles based on her Fulbright Foundation research into the murders of Brazilian street youth-“Scapegoating Outsiders: The Murders of Street Youth in Modern Brazil,” published in Policing and Society, and “Exclusion, Civic Invisibility and Impunity as Explanations for Youth Murders in Brazil,” in Childhood. A Global Journal of Child Research.
Amanda Leamon, assistant professor of French, is the author of “Eclipsing the Self: Sexuality and the Color Black in Blaise Cendrars' Prose Fiction” in the journal French Forum.
Rudy Nydegger, associate professor of psychology, was reappointed by the New York State Board of Regents to his third five-year term on the state Board of Psychology. He sits on panels that hear cases involving licensing and disciplinary issues.
Donald Rodbell, assistant professor of geology, received a $34,000 matching grant from the National Science Foundation for instrumentation that will be used in a number of geology courses.
J. Richard Shanebrook, professor of mechanical engineering, Lee Johnson, Jr. '94, and Richard Skoglund '93 are co-authors of “Device for Visualization of Anastamose Flow Pattern” in the French journal, Innovation and Technology in Biology and Medicine.
Robert Sharlet, professor of political science, is the author of “Post-Soviet Constitutionalism: Politics and Constitution-Making in Russia and Ukraine,” which was the lead chapter in a new book titled Russia and Eastern Europe After Communism. He contributed a survey of Russian politics and economics to the Encyclopedia Americana Annual and discussed the Russian presidential election campaign at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
Terry Weiner, professor of sociology and political science, and Felmon Davis, associate professor of philosophy, are the authors of “Sociological Theory and Mental Retardation” in a recent issue of the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy.
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