Best of Florida Schools 2002
Web-Only Categories

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Best Athletic Supporter
Looking for a web site to would meet all your needs? At Florida State University, the Seminole Success web site, the brain-child of Associate Athletic Director Pam Overton and former Coordinator of Student Services Bill Shirk, gives student-athletes a one-stop site for many of their needs. The creators hoped to create the student-athletes at FSU a communication hub to serve the entire athletic program.  "We wanted student athletes to be able to accomplish many things from a single site, " Overton says. "They can check their grades, look into financial aid, check movies, read their hometown newspaper, hook into the university library, get furniture, e-mail all of their advisors, even get a pizza from our site." Coaches even use the site as a tool for recruiting. The web site gets so much use, about 500 hits per day, that Overton says student-athletes take it for granted. "They assume all schools have it," she says. SRR

Visit Seminole Success at www.fsu.edu/~success.

Most Famous History
At one Florida college, the student union once was a rip-roaring nightclub where Al Jolson performed and Babe Ruth gambled in the 1920s. “Club Morroco” was part of the swanky Temple Terrace Golf and Country Club and was THE place to go for nightlife in the Tampa area. Quite a wild history for Florida College, a small Christian college.

Now students go there after chapel to get their mail, gather for socials, and eat at The Pouch, a snack bar named after the pelican, Florida College’s one-time mascot. Students still affectionately and alternately refer to The Student Center as "Club Morocco" and "The Synagogue."

When the hotel went belly up during The Great Depression, it became the property of the city of Temple Terrace. Later in the 1930s, the city sold the hotel to the Florida Bible Institute, where Billy Graham was trained. In 1946, Florida College bought the property, says Ralph Walker, director of public relations. WHOJ

Contact Walker at walkerr@mails.flcoll.edu or visit www.flcoll.edu.

Best Dream Catchers
When 50 young Sudanese boys fled from their war-torn villages and made their way to the New Port Richey area, Pasco-Hernando Community College helped them realize what had seemed like an unattainable dream. Teresa Foster, a local sponsor of “The Lost Boys of Sudan,” arranged for the youths to register in PHCC’s Adult GED Program. “They had given up hope of getting an education until we learned about the college’s free on-line program,” Foster says. “Part of the problem our guys were having in getting an education was transportation. PHCC’s program offers the GED prep on-line where we can access it at home or at church. My guys are excited about the opportunity to attend.” TB

Contact Al James, dean of student services, at (727) 816-3612.

Best Island Getaway
“No one, no cry” at the sixth annual Caribbean Fest held last summer in Jacksonville Beach. In fact, everybody be jamming at this popular citywide event featuring food, crafts, children’s attractions, a steel band, and entertainers including The Campus of Choice Dancers from Florida Community College at Jacksonville-North. The performers stirred up the crowd with Caribbean dances and costumes complete with colorful head wraps and sarongs. In addition to enjoying traditional fare such as jerk chicken and blackened seafood, festival-goers could shop the marketplace for island goodies such as hammocks and imported Jamaican beer. TB

Contact B.J. Hausman at bhausman@fccj.org.

Best Close Encounter
Now, Okaloosa-Walton Community College students can get up-close-and-personal with their favorite stars. Thanks to a new $750,000 observatory complete with a retractable dome, astronomy students can gaze at celestial bodies using an 18-foot Centurion 18 telescope equipped with a digital camera that has 5,000 times the sensitivity of the human eye. The facility also has four classrooms featuring a “smart board” for instructors to use as both a projection screen for computer images and a drawing board. Professors and students can write on the board with their fingers, and their marks will show up clearly on the screen as if they’d been written with chalk. “We’ve had nothing comparable to this,” biology instructor Ross Hamilton told the Northwest Florida Daily News. “We had an 11-inch telescope that we’d put in the parking lot, but you couldn’t record anything with it.” The building is kept dark at night and is surrounded by trees to prevent it from being penetrated by artificial lighting that might distort the camera’s digital images. TB

Visit OWCC at www.owcc.edu

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