Posted on Sep 2, 2008

 

To all of our incoming parents – Welcome to the Union Family! And to our returning parents – Welcome back! I am Karen Dumonet; Chairperson for the Parents Association, my son Sebastian is a senior this year. All parents, who have a student at Union, are automatically a member of the Parents Association. As a member, you will receive our monthly e-newsletter, the College magazine – The Union Magazine, and invitations to Homecoming and Family Weekend as well as to special events on campus and in your area.

            We realize that many parents hope to remain connected to the campus while their student is at college, there are many areas listed below in which you can participate.

·         Welcome Wagon – an opportunity for upper-class parents to welcome incoming parents and answer any questions.

·         New Student/Parent Orientation – staff the Parents Welcome Center on move-in day and be a resource for new parents.

·         Parents Fund – give a gift and invite fellow parents to support the College by participating in the Parents Fund.

·         College Fairs – attend a college fair in your local high school and provide information about Union.

·         Career Services – provide internship and/or job opportunities in your profession.

If you are interested in a more active role, please contact the Parents Office at 518/388-6601 or email Parents_Association@union.edu. Thank you in advance.

 

Here is some helpful information if you have any questions or concerns and are unsure whom to call.

Although most students are not back on campus, it is not too early to start thinking about Homecoming and Family Weekend – October 17-19. This is a weekend packed with activities – academic, athletic, musical and just plain fun! One important event of note is our Parents Open House on Saturday, Oct. 18th. Join fellow parents, deans and other administrators at the Olin Rotunda, who will be available to meet and answer general questions. This is a wonderful opportunity to meet the people who work with your students.

The schedule of events is now available on line. You may register for the weekend on line now as well. Here is the link for the weekend. http://www.union.edu/Alumni/Events/Homecoming//index.php

If you are planning to attend this weekend, we strongly recommend that you make your hotel reservations as soon as possible. Please visit the following link, which is continually updated to show available hotels, to arrange for your accommodations. http://www.union.edu/Alumni/Events/Homecoming//lodging.php

            To our incoming parents – First Year Move in Day is Saturday, September 6th. Please be sure to stop by our information table in the Nott Memorial. This can be a hectic and stressful day – we’re here to lend support, provide maps to Wal-Mart, Target and other area stores for those forgotten items, as well as answer any questions you may have.

            Due to increased postage and printing costs, our Parent Handbook is now only available on our website, http://www.union.edu/Parents/Handbook/ParentsHandbook.pdf This handbook contains a wealth of information for all parents.

            And now on to our campus updates…plus something new this year – we are including Faculty updates as well…

Greek Life

There will be a parent’s orientation on Sunday, September 7 @ 10:00 am.  The purpose of the orientation is to explain Rush/Recruitment to parents; discuss the hazing policy and investigation protocols; and give parents an opportunity to ask questions. The tentative location is Reamer Auditorium.

Health Services

Health Services would like to remind parents to submit all incomplete health forms to our office as soon as possible to avoid their child from registering for winter term. Several reminders have been sent this summer, but if you are in need of assistance, please call our office at 518/388-6120. Our office hours, starting Monday, September 8th are 9:00am – 5:00pm, Monday-Friday. Our fax number is 518/388-6147. We will also have a table in the Nott Memorial on Move-in Day for incoming students.

Student Activities

Student Activities is ready for another exciting and busy year at Union!  We'll kick off the year with Club Expo, a huge festival-like event during which all clubs and organizations set up tables to tell the campus about their groups & to recruit members.  There will be Dueling Pianos, a game show, a mentalist and more!  FREE movies will be shown in the Reamer Campus Center Auditorium every Friday through Monday all term.  A wildlife expert will be visiting campus–and bringing along some of his animals!  Fall club sports will begin practicing and playing.  And that's just September!  There's so much more to come!     

Dining Services

Dining is going GREEN — Dutch Hollow, College Park Hall Kiosk and O3 are offering recycled shopping bags. Discount given each time the bag is used. Coffee refill mugs are back! Discount on hot drinks at all locations! New Compostable Paper products at Dutch Hollow, College Park Hall Kiosk, and O3 ! “Green Garbage Cans” are for these products and will be used in our compost. Union’s own Octopus’s Garden vegetables are featured in our recipes!

Now available – Dutchman Dollars  This account is accepted at many favorite local restaurants. More information is available at www.DutchmenDollars.com

Is your student celebrating a birthday away from home, a special event or do you just want to send them a treat? Dining services offers cakes, health baskets and flower bouquets.   Simply call 518.388.6050 to place cake gift basket orders. Check out the Dining Service webpage at  www.union.edu/food   A minimum of 24 hours is requested for orders.

News from Hillel

Registration for Union’s winter Taglit-Birthright Israel: Hillel trip will open Sept. 10th at 9am at www.freeisraeltrip.org or at www.hillel.birthrightisrael.com.  Registration will close on October 3rd.  Although we will not know the exact dates for the trip for some time yet, the trip will be designed to fit into our winter break. Taglit-Birthright Israel trips organized by other trip providers usually do not fit our schedule.

We are also busy preparing for the High Holidays on campus.  This year we expect to hold both Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services at Union.  We are working with a thoughtful, creative, knowledgeable rabbinical student from Hebrew College in Boston who will serve as the shaliach tzibor (service leader).  We also intend to offer students 2 Rosh Hashana meals and 2 Yom Kippur meals (before and after).  Please encourage your students to RSVP when they receive the emails regarding the meals.

Homecoming/Family Weekend is scheduled for Oct. 17th-19th.  Hillel is once again planning on hosting Professor Stephen Berk for a lecture on Sunday morning.  A festive brunch will follow the lecture.  Watch your mailboxes for a special mailing and please do your best to get your reservations in on time.  

We look forward to meeting and greeting your students soon.   Margo and Bonnie

Minerva Programs,

Provided by Reed Olsen, ‘09

Amsterdam has a communal bike program… so why not Schenectady?

Free bike programs run by members of the community are popping up all over this country in cities as well as schools. Bikes are perfect for urban environments, you never get stuck in traffic, and they allow the rider to travel swiftly without the use of gasoline. They keep you fit while reducing stress. This fall at Union College there will be the start of a free bike program entitled Free Cycles for U.

Here is how the system works. Ten dollars will award a lucky person with a key, which is capable of opening the locks to any of the 20 cruiser bikes on campus. At this point the user is free to use any bike at any time to ride around campus or explore the city and the bike paths. If the bike encounters a problem it can be brought to the bike shop located in the basement of Richmond. At the end of the year the individual can return the key to receive their deposit back.

This program is the brainchild of the environmental club and has generously been made possible through the Minerva houses and Student Forum. This will be a student volunteer operated endeavor. Anyone interested in bikes is welcome to stop by the shop to help teach or learn. We are all about self –reliance. The purpose of the program is to forge a more vibrant Union community centered around our personal responsibility to our environment and each other.

Catholic Chaplaincy

The Catholic community at Union will welcome back returning students and welcome first-years at its opening barbecue Sun., Sept. 14, prior to the 7:30 p.m. liturgy at the Church of St. John the Evangelist, just across the street from campus.  At the liturgy we'll be celebrating the Mass of the Holy Spirit, invoking God’s Holy Spirit over the College community at the beginning of the new academic year.

Weekday Mass, Thursdays at 1:00 p.m. in the Reamer Campus Center, will begin Sept. 11.

Sat., Sept. 27, we'll head out to the Jesuit Shrine of Our Lady of the Martyrs in Auriesville (in Montgomery County, west of Schenectady) for our fall retreat day, where students can take time out of the busy-ness of the term and join together to discuss, reflect on, and pray about what God is calling them to as Union students and Catholic young adults.

Some Saturday before or after that, we'll go apple picking, a fall-term tradition of the Catholic Student Association.

Looking ahead, we'll again be offering Catholic Mass and brunch during Homecoming & Family Weekend, Sun., Oct. 19, beginning with liturgy at 10:00 a.m. in Memorial Chapel.  The guest speaker at the brunch will be Kathleen Gallagher, director of pro-life activities and director of the Catholic Action Network for the New York State Catholic Conference.  Registration through the College for the brunch is required, as seating is limited.  The cost is $5.00 per person.  Hope to see you there! Tom Boland, Catholic chaplain

Becker Career Center

As we welcome new and returning students to campus, I thought I would share my thoughts on what the Becker Career Center is all about, career planning for students who are in different phases of the career planning process and what parents can do to support their student. Also, I want to make you aware of a new senior orientation program that we will be conducting this year.

In its simplest form, the Becker Career Center is about helping students develop their goal attainment skills so they will be able to secure opportunities for which they are well suited and utilize those skills to manage their careers for a lifetime in a dynamic, diverse and global environment.

This means that securing an internship or job is about setting and achieving a goal. As with any goal worth pursuing, students have to want it, they have to display discipline and perseverance and they have to do the work. The good news is that we can help students focus, determine priorities, and execute efficiently. Furthermore, when we say “secure opportunities for which they are well suited,” we mean opportunities that stir their passion and drive their natural curiosity. We believe that if students pursue their passion, they will perform better and the rewards, both extrinsic and intrinsic, will take care of themselves.

In addition, I think it’s important to share with you some of the other important messages that we regularly share with students. 

1.)      Students don’t just represent themselves, they also represent Union College.

2.)      Students can do anything they want regardless of major.

3.)      If it were easy, everyone would do it.

4.)      We want the students to learn to trust their instincts.

5.)      We want the students to be comfortable with making a decision, and if things don’t work out, to be confident in their ability to utilize their skills to make a change.

6.)      We want students to understand that rejection is a part of the internship/job search process, not to take it personally, and to persevere.

7.)      We want students to understand the importance of internships (i.e., employers prefer to offer full-time jobs to student interns).

8.)      We want students to understand that 30+% of employers visit social networking websites (e.g., MySpace and Facebook) as part of the applicant evaluation process-we tell students not to put anything on the web that they wouldn’t want on the front page of their hometown newspaper.

With respect to the career planning process, whether students have no clue as to what they want to do, know exactly what they want to do, or are somewhere in between, we can help.

From self-assessment to career assessment, to securing practical experience or a full-time job, we have the resources to help. And, of course we can help your student with resume and cover letter building, and interviewing and networking skills development.

We have been asked by parents, how they can support their student. Our response usually includes:

1.)      Support your student’s interest, whatever it may be.

2.)      Remember, college students are developing. They will figure things out. Love them; trust them, listen to them, encourage them to use their strengths. 

3.)      Let your student develop their independence while at Union. The College is an environment that supports learning from mistakes much more so than the working world. If you allow them the opportunity to learn from their mistakes you will help them develop the confidence that will benefit them immensely in their professional lives.

4.)      Buy your student a suit/professional attire for interviewing.

Finally, I want to let you know that this year, for the first time, we will be requiring seniors interested in participating in our on-campus and off-campus recruiting program to attend an orientation session. The orientation sessions are designed to provide students with the right mindset with which to approach the recruiting program and teach some of the tactics necessary to compete effectively. The driving force behind the required orientations is that the employer’s decision to return to a college to recruit students is based largely upon the interactions they have with the students. Thus, the orientation should help current seniors secure opportunities, while at the same time, ensuring future students with increased opportunities.

So, I hope you can see that we are focused on helping your student navigate the career planning process and compete effectively in the marketplace. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Also parents, if you have or know of internship or full-time employment opportunities for students or alumni, we would be happy to post the opportunity for our students or alumni.  You can either call or email Laura Leib at: 518.388.6176, or leibl@union.edu Thank you, Bob Soules – Director

 

Sociology Department

Dr. Ilene M. Kaplan, Joseph Driscoll Professor of Sociology and Marine Policy, and Chair of the Department of Sociology, recently published an article in MARITIME MANAGEMENT AND POLICY, a leading journal in the area of marine studies and policy management. The article focused on a project that examines the value of assessing human dimensions to environmental resource protection. The project began when Professor Kaplan was appointed to a US Congressional task force on ecosystem based management and marine policy. Prof Kaplan also holds a visiting research appointment at the Marine Policy Center of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Philosophy at Union is alive and well:

Fall term, we are bringing in four prestigious outside speakers, including one from Oxford University and one from the University of Chicago. One of these talks will be co-sponsored with the department of classics and another with the department of mathematics. We have arranged our outside speaker's program to maximize student involvement: students study relevant material in advance to prepare them for the talks, they get first crack at asking questions in the discussion period after the talks, and some students are invited to each post-talk dinner with the speaker at the Stockade Inn, which is near campus. In addition, in September we will have a philosophical cafe in the evening on the philosophy of psychopathology. The cafe will be moderated by an outside philosopher who graduated a few years ago from the Univ. of Illinois and is an expert on the topic. We are also in Sept going to have a student faculty mixer. This will be an opportunity for majors and other interested students to meet with each other and with faculty. One of the faculty they may be especially eager to meet in our new visiting assistant professor of philosophy, Mark Wunderlich. Mark did his undergraduate work at Harvard University, where he was awards honors in his major in mathematics. He went then to the University of Arizona, which has a first-rate philosophy program, for his Ph.D., where he wrote a dissertation on epistemology (theory of knowledge). One other newsworthy item: this year's expected graduating class in philosophy–25 majors–is the largest graduating class in philosophy in the history of Union College.

Modern Languages and Literature

The Department of Modern Languages and Literatures is thrilled to be able to start the new academic year with some new courses and with a new faculty member.  Prof. Stacey Triplette is joining us as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish, with specializations in Early Modern Spanish literature and culture, and she joins our already dynamic and talented faculty that includes our six degree-granting programs in Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish.  We're also very happy to be able to offer a full year in Arabic, having introduced that language to our curriculum just last year; it joins our already strong language sequence in Hebrew.  Again this year, we will be able to welcome six Language Assistants to assist in all of our degree-granting programs.  These Assistants, advanced students from China, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and Chile, help with language tables, film nights, cultural events, and some instruction.    We are particularly honored to be the recipients of prestigious awards from the Fulbright program in support of the language assistants from China and Russia.  

Computer Science Department

It is well known within the computer science community that very few students enter college planning to pursue the study of computer science. Yet those of us in the field know that a majority of students would benefit, regardless of their ultimate major, from significant exposure to computing and computer science. Furthermore, we should be able to pull increasing numbers of students into the CS major or minor if they have initial exposure to the field in a context that seems relevant and useful.

To this end, at Union College we have embarked on a curricular change that has the goal of providing exposure to computer science for a majority of students at the College. Rather than offering a single traditional introductory CS course, we now offer five courses which provide exposure to the fundamentals of computer science. The courses all cover a common set of CS topics and skills, but each has a distinct theme. The themes are geared toward distinct groups of students, giving them the opportunity to "try out" computer science. The course themes are computational science (geared toward science and social science students who are likely to encounter large data sets), robotics (engineering students and others interested in robotics gravitate to this course), artificial intelligence (required of neuroscience students, but open to others), media computation (based on a successful course pioneered at Georgia Tech, targeted toward humanities students), and game development (a hot topic for many prospective CS majors). As we have started to introduce these courses we have seen modest improvement in overall CS enrollments.

Concurrent with the changes in the introductory level, we have also added a number of intermediate level electives that require only an introductory course as a prerequisite. At the moment these courses include "Web Programming", "The Computer Science of Computer Games", and "Natural Language Processing". This set of courses allows students to try out a second CS course before they take CS2 and commit to the minor or major. We have also added a significant number of new upper level electives, greatly enriching our CS major and making it current. The new courses include Parallel Computing, Artificial Intelligence, User Interfaces, Robotics, Introduction to Bioinformatics, and Compiler Construction.

At present, half of our CS majors are carrying out interdepartmental majors with other programs, combining CS with Visual Art, Music, Philosophy, Psychology, Math, Economics, and Biology. The department is committed to working with students and faculty across the campus on ways to combine computation with other disciplines in order to solve exciting problems that exist at the intersections of fields.

And last but certainly not least…

Parents Fund – Vivian Falco, Chair

As Chair of the Parent Fund, I would like to welcome the Class of 2012. For many of you, this is an exciting new chapter in your student’s academic career.  For parents of returning students, I hope your summer was wonderful and your students are excited about coming back to Union’s beautiful campus. 

What is the Parent Fund? Briefly, the Parent Fund provides critical monies that are integral to life at Union. As part of the Union Fund, the Parent Fund helps to enrich the lives of the many students here today. A gift to Union College through the Parent Fund is a gesture above and beyond tuition. It demonstrates a commitment to the superior education your student is receiving at Union College. Last year, over 1,800 parents financially supported the College through the Parent Fund!  This year, our goal is over 2000. I hope the College can count on you. In October, please look for mailing on how to donate to the Parent Fund.

There are many opportunities to be involved in a meaningful way both on and off campus, through Parent Fund volunteering. If you are interested in volunteering, please visit http://www.union.edu/Parents/ParentFund.php or contact the Union College Parent Fund Manager, Elizabeth Epstein at 518-388-6142 or by email epsteine@union.edu

            I look forward to sharing Homecoming and Family Weekend with you on October 17-19, 2008. Best Regards, Vivian Falco, Peter ’09, Parents Fund Chairperson

 

           In closing, I look forward to another exciting year as the Parents Association Chairperson. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me at Parents_Association@union.edu. 

                                                            Take care,

                                                            Karen Dumonet, Vanessa ’07 and Sebastian ‘09