1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 / 12 / 13 / 14 / 15

Back                                Continued

Best Excuse to Play with Dolls. Playing dress-up with Barbie is part of the criteria for some students at Miami-Dade Community College’s Kendall campus. As part of the fashion studies program, students created the attire for South Florida Barbie, an invention of M-DCC professor Carlos Marrero, including designing the patterns, sewing the outfits, adding beads and bows, and even styling her hair. Barbie then appeared in a fashion show to model the students’ works. "Everyone I know in the fashion industry who has ever had an inclination to become a designer has designed clothes for Barbie dolls since they were a kid," Marrero says. "This was a chance to make that dream a reality."

Best Furniture. At St. Leo College, all 350 residence hall rooms come complete with beds, chairs, desks—and state-of-the-art PC computers with internet access. "By this fall, there’s going to be a computer in every dorm room," says Gary Bracken, director of admissions. "They’re just part of the furniture." Bracken says the electronic additions are included in the normal room fees. In addition, Bracken says all incoming honors students already get their own PC computer to use, which after two years, is theirs to keep.

Best Jump Start. Police at the University of West Florida are avoiding arrests – cardiac arrests, that is. UWF police officers can save lives in a shockingly short amount of time now that they are armed with automated external defibrillators. UWF’s is the second university police department in the state, behind USF, to arm patrol units with the life-saving devices, which deliver an electric shock to the heart to reverse cardiac arrest. "Most young people don’t realize cardiac arrest can happen to them," says UWF crime prevention and training officer Alvin Burns. Cardiac arrest can result from electrocution, excessive alcohol or drug intake, or heat exhaustion. Although officers have not had to use the devices yet, this proactive move by the department should warm the hearts of UWF students.

Best New Classroom. At Northwood University, the new "Interactive Classroom" lets students from the Boca Raton campus take the same course—at the same time—as their peers at Northwood’s Michigan and Texas facilities.
     Through the new satellite hook-up, Florida and Texas students can take the same honors business and economics courses, which are only offered on the central Michigan campus, says Jeanne Takeda, director of student development in Florida. The professor and students can talk back and forth and see each other, as cameras follow the teacher around the room.
     Northwood’s SGAs also just started using the technology to network with each other, to find out if they share similar concerns that could be raised with the central administration in Michigan, such as combining Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks and converting to the semester system. "It gets costly for international and out-of-state students to travel back and forth around the holidays," Takeda says. Currently, students get a week off at Thanksgiving and two weeks at Christmas.

Best Record Breaker. University of Miami graduate student Richard Rodriguez had a summer full of ups and downs. Literally. Rodriguez spent more than 1,000 hours on a roller coaster at Blackpool Pleasure Beach in London, securing a place in the Guinness Book of World Records and raising $30,000 for diabetes charities. From last June 18 to August 3, he rode the "Big Dipper" day and night, through all kinds of weather, with only five minutes of non-coaster time for every hour on the ride. "The hardest part was keeping morale up, keeping yourself occupied," he says. The public relations grad student was able to persevere by taking in local daily papers and novels during loading times and the chain lift, eventually beating out a Canadian competitor and improving upon his own record set in 1982.

Best New Building. Imagine walking into a classroom and putting someone’s broken bone back into place or wheeling in a bloody accident patient. At Indian River Community College, students get to simulate these emergencies in the Indian River Community College Health Science Center that opened in January, and at a Dental Clinic that’s open to the public. According to Michelle Abaldo, institutional advancement officer, there is even a laboratory that simulates an emergency room into which student ambulances bring patients. The 75,000-square foot facility, now the largest on IRCC’s Main Campus, features 14 laboratory suites and classrooms, each related to a specific healthcare field.

History Really Stinks. Clear out the archives for this one. In 1968, Florida Institute of Technology researchers won national recognition for an experiment using radioactive Cobalt 60 to treat wastewater to make it safe for drinking. David Woodbridge, a physicist and professor at the school, started experimenting with the substance in the basement of the Crawford Building on campus. Dr. Gordon Patterson, a historian and professor of humanities, says that at the time, the underground facility was the deepest hole ever dug in Brevard County. Woodbridge even appeared in Time, surrounded by bottles of water, downing a glass of his irradiated project. After that, Patterson says, the plan pretty much went "down the pipes." There was little enthusiasm in the community or nation to adopt irradiated sewage water as a source of drinking water, so in the early 70s the experiments stopped. The site later became an ATM machine. Today, all that remains of the potty project is a modest brick pavilion, with a lunch cart and picnic benches nearby.

Back                                Continued

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 / 12 / 13 / 14 / 15

Copyright © 2006 Oxendine Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved