Posted on Sep 20, 2005

Albany, NY (Sept. 20, 2005) –Union has been picked to finish eighth by both the coaches and media in this year's ECAC Hockey League men's preseason polls. The Dutchmen are alone in the No. 8 spot in the coaches poll with 51 points and tied for eighth in the media poll with Rensselaer at 89 points. Cornell was chosen as the unanimous No. 1 pick in both the coaches and media polls. Both polls were released today as part of the league's annual media day event held at the Pepsi Arena.

Head coach Nate Leaman, who enters his third season at the helm of the Dutchmen hockey program, knows the polls don't mean much in this tightly contested league. “I feel like Cornell is the leader of the pack right now and it will be a fight. The ECAC Hockey League is known for being a tight race every year though and the second half of the season will reveal who the top teams will be. We are just going to take things one game at a time and our potential can put us anywhere in the league.”  

The Big Red received 11 first-place votes and 121 points in the coaches poll. The next four positions were tight, with just eight points separating second through fifth. Dartmouth sits just one point ahead of Harvard to earn second place with 94 points. The Crimson picked up 93 points and was followed by St. Lawrence with 89 and Colgate with 86. Brown wrapped up the top half of the poll with 80 points. Clarkson, who battled the Dutchmen in last season's historical three-game overtime playoff series, was chosen ahead of Union with 64 points. Below Union were Rensselaer with 39, Princeton with 32, Yale with 28, and ECACHL newcomer Quinnipiac with 15.

In the media poll, Cornell garnered all 21 first-place votes, scoring 252 points. Polling was close in the media poll for the next few spots as well. Just 10 points separate second-place Colgate (197) and fourth-place Harvard (187) with Dartmouth settled between the two, at third, with 191 points. St. Lawrence (167) was picked fifth by the media, followed by Brown (159) and Clarkson (134). Princeton (73) was chosen 10th followed by Yale (60) and Quinnipiac (36).

Union opens up the 2005-06 campaign on October 7th against Colorado College at the Ice Breaker Invitational in Colorado Springs. The march toward the ECACHL Championships in Albany begins on the road November 4th against St. Lawrence.  

 

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Posted on Sep 19, 2005

Gordon Gould '41, the laser pioneer who established a professorship to honor the physics professor who sparked his interest in the physics of light, died on Sept. 16. He was 85.

“Just as Gordon Gould made an immeasurable difference in the lives of millions worldwide, he made an important difference for Union College,” said James Underwood, interim president. “The College is indeed fortunate to have been associated with – and supported by – one of science's most brilliant stars.”

Gould, who coined the ubiquitous term “laser” (for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”), fought a three-decade battle to secure patent rights for the invention he began in 1957 as a graduate student at Columbia University.

After a weekend of filling his notebook with ideas to amplify light, he went to an attorney and came away believing – erroneously – that he needed a working model before he could get a patent. He did not submit a patent application until April, 1959 – after two others had filed an application.

Finally, in 1987, the patent office awarded Gould a patent on optically pumped laser amplifiers. “If I had any idea when I started how long it would take to win, I would have quit a long time ago,” he once said. “But throughout the whole fight it always seemed like the light at the end of the tunnel was just around the corner.”

Gould, who as a child idolized Thomas A. Edison and always wanted to be an inventor, was a physics major and member of Sigma Chi fraternity at Union. He did graduate research in optics at Yale, where he taught physics to premed students, and was a doctoral student and research assistant at Columbia. He worked on the Manhattan Project from 1943 to 1945.

Acknowledged as the pioneer of the laser, he was elected to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1991. Union recognized his achievements by awarding him an honorary Doctor of Science degree in 1978 and the Eliphalet Nott Medal in 1995.

In 1995, he established the R. Gordon Gould Professorship of Physics, held by Jay E. Newman, to honor Frank Studer, Gould's former Union professor of physics.

Gould was the subject of a 2002 biography, Laser: The Inventor, the Nobel Laureate, and the Thirty-Year Patent War by Nick Taylor. The book chronicles Gould's disputed claim to be the true inventor of the laser and the 30-year battle that secured his patent rights.

Gould devoted much of his career to research in optics and, in 1973, was a cofounder of an optical communications company named Optelecom, Inc., where he earned further patents before retiring in 1985. Since then, he advised a gem and precious jewel communications company and six other ventures in which he had invested.

Survivors include his wife, Marilyn Appel and several nieces and nephews.

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Posted on Sep 19, 2005

An exhibit featuring two Union College alumni sculptors; Jack Howard-Potter '97 “Figures” and Chet Urban '93 “Abstractions” will be on display at the Burns Arts Atrium Gallery from Sept. 12 – Oct. 12, 2005. The artists' reception will be Thursday, Oct. 6 from 4-6 p.m.

Though primarily sculptors, Howard-Potter and Urban both consider drawing an important tool in their working process.

­These two artists work in very different styles. Howard-Potter creates over life-size figures in steel rod and sheet. His brightly colored sculptures are caught in dynamic, active poses – pulling a rope, straining on point – and frequently incorporate movement, as figures delicately balanced on steel pivots sway and turn with the motion of passers-by. His drawings echo this interest in radical movement and balanced action.

Urban's sculptures, in contrast, have a kind of meditative stillness about them. They're made of wood, composed of simple forms, carefully crafted but not at all showy. His pieces evoke contemplation rather than action. Some of Urban's drawings reflect this contemplative sensibility, while others are more aggressive in their exploration of jagged forms and sharp delineations between positive and negative space.

The Burns Arts Atrium Gallery is located in the Visual Arts Building at Union College, Schenectady, New York, 12308. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekends. For more information, please contact (518) 388-6714.

 

 

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Posted on Sep 17, 2005

The school year is barely under way, but for many high-school seniors the pressure is already building. They're facing SAT retests in October, early-admission application deadlines in November and, in many families, battles with their parents over the high-stakes business of getting into college. The stress of college applications is now so well-documented that the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology considers it a health risk for teenagers; she's meeting with a group of pediatricians to discuss ways of reducing kids' anxiety. Meanwhile, parents around the country are taking action to calm their kids — and themselves.

Some are banning talk of college from the dinner table, having their kids take campus tours on their own to avoid family fights or adding movie and snack breaks to college-research sessions. They're spending $15,000 or more for college coaches, watching creative-visualization tapes with their children and using high-school guidance counselors as much for therapy as for admissions advice. And still they're nervous.

Take Ham Clark. As head of the Episcopal Academy outside Philadelphia, he has seen plenty of college stress in his students and their parents. Now he's experiencing it himself for the first time as his twins start applying to college. He's trying to walk the line between helpful and hovering. He doesn't want to end up like the mother whose son wouldn't tell her which schools he liked. She even agreed to sign blank checks for application fees. (Her son is now safely ensconced at Swarthmore.)

After three decades spent advising parents, Mr. Clark knows intellectually why he should avoid taking over, but he still feels tempted. By the start of senior year, the twins had already come up with a three-word mantra: “Dad, just chill.”

There are good reasons for students and their parents to be anxious during the jam-packed opening months of senior year. More and more kids are vying for the precious few early-admission spots at the nation's top schools. Last fall, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania all saw jumps in early applications — and none admitted more students early. Harvard, in fact, admitted fewer than usual.

Ellen Broder says her son, Evin, a senior at Roslyn High School in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., hasn't applied anywhere yet, but already they're arguing over whether he is working hard enough on the process. The discussions are really about deeper issues — respect for her, independence for him — but the result is the same: silent dinners, reproachful looks, scolding and recriminations. “I have to remind him that I'm the parent,” Ms. Broder says, “and he still needs to still listen.” The arguments often end with her revoking her son's driving privileges. She may hire a college coach; she figures an outsider's nagging is more palatable than a parent's. She's even wondering whether she should shuffle SAT vocabulary cards in with the regular deck on Evin's poker nights.

To rein in her own worries, she's planning date nights with her husband and offering her son concrete help: a chart to keep track of different colleges' requirements and a calendar to record application deadlines. As for Evin, he says he'll meet his deadlines in his own way. For now, he says, he's trying to put the occasional family fight in perspective.

Some parents are simply taking themselves out of the college equation. “I'm turning the whole process over to my husband because I'm afraid I'll destroy my relationship with my daughter,” says the MIT admissions dean, Marilee Jones, the mother of a high-school senior. Ms. Jones is afraid she'll push for an application with the hooks admissions deans want instead of a more honest reflection of how her daughter sees herself. Her husband's distance from the subject, she says, will keep him from micromanaging. “I'll want to sweep in and save the day for her,” she says, “but that's exactly the wrong thing to do.”

Parents who remain involved need to find a way to vent. The experts recommend doing it out of earshot of the kids. At the Lovett School, a private high school in Atlanta, a group of parents met last week at a session called College Applications and Letting Go. Janet Franzoni, the psychologist who spoke at that meeting, tells parents to listen to relaxation tapes 10 minutes a day for two weeks. If the tapes don't work, there are always new books, like this winter's “Getting in Without Freaking Out” by Arlene Matthews.

Some parents try the college-infotainment route. Carolyn Lawrence bought about 10 videos from collegiatechoice.com that show campuses, dorm rooms and dining halls. She and her daughter Amanda munch popcorn and soak up the ambiance from the comfort of their living room in Jamul, Calif. “With some of the videos, something would turn her off within the first five minutes,” Ms. Lawrence says of her daughter. “She didn't want a school where girls carried designer pocketbooks.”

Other parents are cutting out the college tour. Last summer, when his classmates were visiting colleges and listening to grim acceptance odds from admissions offices before the start of senior year, Southern California teenager Sean Minor was riding Sea-Doos in the Bahamas. His parents, Rickey and Karen Minor, thought he'd make the best decisions about college if he felt relaxed, so they all flew to the Atlantis hotel instead of touring campuses. “We always went with the attitude that we're going to take it in stride,” says his dad, a music director for “American Idol.” Sean, 18 years old, is in his first year at the University of Southern California, one of eight schools that gave him the nod.

As for Nikki Bollerman, a senior at Ridgefield High School in Connecticut, she has tried to stay calm during the application process. She says relying on her family has been her best stress reliever — that and buying self-sealing envelopes for the recommendations she'll ask her teachers to do. “I went out of my way to be helpful,” she says.

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

What to do when college-application tensions threaten the family peace

THE PROBLEM: You encourage your son to say more about his accomplishments. He says no, that sounds like bragging.

THE EXPERT'S TAKE: Hector Martinez, a college counselor at the private Webb Schools in Claremont, Calif., says the best thing to do is ask a third party who won't be afraid to tell you how much is too much in an application. And, he warns, never contact the college on your child's behalf.

THE PROBLEM: Your daughter has her heart set on Yale and won't apply anywhere else. When you suggest she apply to a safety school, she retorts, “Why are you selling me short?”

THE EXPERT'S TAKE: Some high schools are abandoning phrases such as “safety school” because they are pejorative, but kids probably won't warm up to “a school with a different level of selectivity,” either. David Harman, headmaster at Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn, N.Y., urges students and parents to work with teachers to find the line between a realistic and an almost entirely unattainable goal. When students' expectations are unwise, parents must face up to some tough conversations. Sound advice, Mr. Harman says, “might help ward off some pain on the other end.”

THE PROBLEM: You are so stressed about your son's college deadlines and the possibility that he will be rejected that you are taking it out on him.

THE EXPERT'S TAKE: Talk to other parents. Web sites such as College Confidential and the Princeton Review offer parents-only discussion groups. Dan Lundquist, the dean of admissions at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., suggests that you and your child visit campuses together but take separate tours. That way you can ask all the questions you want without embarrassing or overshadowing your son. (And, should discouraging news come next spring, Mr. Lundquist notes that angry parents who show up in his office waving rejection letters rarely leave with what they want.)  “I want them to write the nicest letters possible.”

 

 

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Posted on Sep 17, 2005

Ashleigh Schaublin plops onto a desk chair. She shows Gordon Single the list.

The critical list. It sets the tone for the entire school year.

“There are a million things that aren't on here that I think we need to talk about. I added them all at the bottom,” Schaublin says, stabbing four inches of handwritten notes with her pen.

Soon, the 60 freshmen residents of West College Hall's fourth floor will crowd into the hallway for their first meeting with resident advisers Schaublin and Single.

And this is where the two Union College juniors will lay out a list of dorm rules, including all of Schaublin's amendments, for Union's newest batch of freshmen.

“If they puke from alcohol, they will go to Ellis (Hospital),” Schaublin says, her normally sweet-and-bubbly tone hardening. “We can be their friends. It's their choice to make us the bad guy.”

No breaking the ceiling tiles, she reads from her list. The whole floor will be charged with the repairs.

“If you don't talk about ceiling tiles being broken, it won't happen,” Single says.

Mentioning problems only gives the freshmen ideas.

“Hall sports. There aren't any hall sports, period.”

“Don't even mention it, and it won't happen,” Single says. “I keep telling you.”

For a $4,500 stipend, Schaublin and Single have the awesome responsibility of shepherding kids through the transition from childhood to adulthood, from reliance to independence, and from bad decisions to better ones.

They meet freshmen who haven't figured out that they're on their own who ask when the curfew is.

And they meet freshmen who charge toward freedom, wanting to know immediately if the fraternity parties check IDs.

The two RAs put away their lists and yawn. They've been going nonstop since that morning, when parents and freshmen crowded the dorms, bearing empty laundry baskets, computers, and tense grins on move-in day.

Facing complaints

The second time Schaublin called a repairman about an electrical problem in one of the rooms, she used her cellphone in front of the student's frantic mother. The mother was sure her daughter's bedspread would be consumed by flames that very evening if the problem wasn't corrected immediately.

Schaublin wanted to show she was on top of it.

Fellow RA Josh Petri, a sophomore who supervises the third floor with RA Sandy Mandell, fielded a mother's complaint about the color of the carpet.

The trash bins swelled with boxes — from fans, printers, water filters — as parents buzzed around the cramped rooms their sons or daughters would share with a stranger and made sure their kids were settled in.

Schaublin already refereed a disagreement between a mother and her daughter's roommate over the furniture arrangement.

She covered all this in RA training. Parents may seem a little unreasonable, but they're under a lot of stress and sometimes the only way to deal with empty nests is to nitpick every last twig.

The RAs offer sympathetic smiles.

Soon, they'll be sending the parents home.

That starts with Steve Leavitt, the college's dean of students, at the welcome ceremony that afternoon. The second he mentions goodbyes, mothers dab at their eyes with tissues. Fathers shift uncomfortably in their chairs.

The parents pour onto the lawn where their sons and daughters wiggle out of long embraces.

There are declarations.

“Dad and I encourage you, we continue to encourage you, to be independent as you grow.”

And with heavy sighs and a tearful walk back to the parking lot, where just that morning they unloaded their children's belongings but packed away childhoods, the parents are gone.

Playing the role

The RAs trained before the start of school for nearly every scenario.

Role-playing exercises made them more comfortable with the most difficult part of their job, enforcer of dorm rules.

Suicide prevention, sexual assault, drug and alcohol overdoses, loud parties, domestic violence, roommate squabbles.

Thirty-five RAs look after Union's residence halls. Some of them, like Schaublin, Single, Petri and Mandell, are responsible for the school's coed freshmen dorms, which this year welcomed a class of 580 students.

They hold socials, educational workshops and activities that make the students feel like they have a home at Union.

Last year, residents shared snacks with Schaublin while they watched episodes of “The OC.”

The RAs take notice of quiet residents and try to get them involved. They befriend the potentially rowdy ones, so at the very least they cooperate when problems arise.

They take turns pulling duty shifts, where they make rounds throughout the building several times a night and check fire extinguishers, but more importantly make sure the dorms remain safe and peaceful.

“Take care of my daughter” or “take care of my son” some parents said to the RAs as they departed the campus.

But really, the RA's role is to encourage their kids to take care of themselves.

Enforcing rules

“We smell weed, not only do you guys get written up for it, you'll have a nice little meeting with the dean, and will probably go into some sort of drug program,” Mandell says, matter-of-factly, as she and Petri lead the meeting of their third-floor residents.

She's direct and less bubbly than Schaublin, who has decorated her bulletin board with hearts and her residents' doors with Minnie Mouse name tags.

But the message on Mandell's door is as inviting: Welcome to the dormitory. See her for help.

Two years ago, Mandell was the freshman who told her parents to go home. She wanted to leave her hometown in Florida behind and strike out on her own.

“You guys are all smart. You know how to be adults,” Mandell tells her residents now. “Learn common sense.”

On the floor above, Schaublin and Single are trying to conduct their meeting despite frequent interruptions from a resident who started his party early and is visibly and obnoxiously drunk.

Some of the female residents come up to Schaublin afterward and say they're uncomfortable with that guy, who's already tried to stop by each one of their rooms.

She says she'll have Single handle it.

Little fazes her. In a couple weeks, she knows the homesickness will set in as the newness of college fades.

And she knows that “break-up season” starts at the end of the month and runs through October, where she can hear all the “Please, baby, understand' spoken into cellphones through the thin wall separating her room from the lounge.

Warnings

“The only thing that truly keeps me up at night is worrying about the possibility of losing a student,” Leavitt says to the group of freshmen growing restless during the evening meeting for all West College residents.

“By far, the most likely way we would lose a student would not be from a holdup but from an overdose of some drug, most likely alcohol or a suicide. Those are what happens most often at colleges. I want people to have a good time. I think it's an important time to express your individuality and develop, but be sensible.”

A freshman asks what the punishment is for having a beer in their room.

Leavitt explains the incident would be handled by an assistant director for residence life. The student would likely get a warning for a first-time offense.

And they'd be required to do some kind of educational activity, like making a bulletin board about the dangers of alcohol, writing a paper reflecting on what they did, or working through an alcohol-education computer program.

The incidents are handled through the campus system, not through the local police.

After campus safety reminds the students to keep their doors locked at all times and to respect the safety officers, the freshmen are herded off to a speaker who talks about responsible drinking.

Then, they're back at the dorms by 11, where Schaublin and Single lay out a spread of ice-cream treats and encourage the residents to mingle.

Party time

The staff tries to keep the students busy with orientation activities as late as possible. It forces freshmen who want to party to get a late start.

One woman, in hot pink sandals that match the camisole she's paired with her fitted jeans, paces the hall talking on her cellphone about where they're going to meet to party that night.

Older male students are led through the halls by freshmen women.

Within the hour, about two-thirds of the dorm empties out. And those freshmen won't start filtering back until around 2 a.m., when women with fading makeup melt down the hallway wall, saying they “don't feel that drunk.” And booming voices and giggles are heard outside the entrance to the building.

Those who stay behind set up their Internet connections so they can Instant Message or e-mail people back home, or they get together to watch movies.

Some meet Schaublin in the lounge, where she has supplied plastic pastel vases and paints so the women could make housewarming decorations.

“I wish we could fast-forward to the winter, where I know who my good friends are,” one of the freshmen says.

They decorate the dollar store-buys with hearts and squiggles, the words “Union College” and “Class of …”

“Do I put '05 or '09?” a student asks, dabbing at the dripping paint on her vase.

“Put '09,” another freshmen answers. ” '05 is high school. You're not in high school anymore.”

 

 

 

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