Hawk Talk

Christine here checking in.  Classes at UML start next Wednesday, and I know a lot of our local schools have already started this week. It's hard to believe that summer is over!

As you continue your college search process I wanted to let you know where are counselors will be this fall.  In addition to visiting a number of high schools, we also attend other events from as close as Lowell, MA to as far away as Albany, NY.  All of our counselors love to meet prospective students, so please stop by and introduce yourself. The schedule can be found here.  

Our transfer counselors also visit a number of local community colleges and their schedule can be found here.

I would always recommend taking the time to speak to the college representatives, even if you think you know everything about a school speaking with someone can still be helpful. 

As Ed promised in last week's post, this is Christine checking in with another fun summer event in Lowell. 

Every summer the Lowell Summer Music Series hosts a series of outdoor concerts at Boarding House Park.  I grew up in the area (go Tyngsboro!), so I've been to a number of concerts there over the years.  This summer I have seen Assembly of Dust, and, more recently, Brandi Carlile. 

I first saw Brandi Carlile open up for Ray Lamontagne at the Portsmouth Music Hall a few years ago.  At that time she was pretty much unknown but she did mangage to catch the crowd's attention.  Not that long after, Carlile became kind of famous after having songs featured in multiple Grey's Anatomy episodes and, more recently, a car commerical.  She always puts on a great show and this evening was no exception.

What's great about the Lowell Summer Music Series at Boarding House Park is the seating is general admission.  I headed over during the afternoon and put up a few beach chairs and blankets to save some spots.  People who attend these shows do not mess around, and the front row was already entirely filled! 

Before the show a group of us headed to Hookslide Kelly's for dinner and the first few innings of Jason Bay's first game on the Red Sox.

We then walked to Boarding House Park in time to hear the end of the opening act, and in time for Brandi Carlile to go onstage.  Unfortuantely, I forgot my camera.  However, I would recommend checking out these pictures from someone in the audience.  And just for fun, here is a picture I got from the Boarding House Park website:

Nice place to see a show, isn't it?  Also, for those of you who aren't sure who this artist is, here is a video of her performing what I would say is her most popular song.  I know the video isn't that good, but you'll get the idea. The concert is also up in streaming audio if you want the full experience.  They also have a survey up where you can vote on next year's acts.

Also, because posts without pictures are boring, here's a shot of a rainbow that was outside my house tonight.  It was huge, and actually a double rainbow, which you can't see in the picture.  At least all this rain is good for something!

My next post might be from the road, as we start recruiting soon. Enjoy what's left of the summer!

Christine

Contrary to what some might think, Lowell does not slow down during the summer time.  In fact, if anything, the city picks up.  There are concerts, the folk festival, farmers markets, and baseball, among other things. 

Case in point, speaking of baseball, last Wednesday night I went to a Lowell Spinners game.  Here's me enjoying the game:

I love going to Spinners games.  First of all, if you’re like me and think Red Sox ticket prices are too outrageous to even bother these days, a Spinners game, with single-digit ticket prices, is a bargain.  Throw in the fact that there are no bad seats in the entire ballpark and it’s just a great overall baseball experience.  This is a view from my seat on Wednesday, and the tickets were the cheapest tickets outside of Standing Room:

I’m as big of a Red Sox and Fenway Park fan as you will find, but in terms of value, the two experiences do not compare.  That seat at Fenway is over $100, and probably over $150, assuming you do not get tickets directly from the ticket office, which is next to impossible for regular people.  Strangely, ticket agencies seem to have no problems getting mass quantities of tickets, but that’s an issue not for this blog, and I don’t want to go off on a tangent here.  The main point is that the Spinner seats are cheap, comfortable, and have a great view.  Oh yeah, and none of them are angled towards weird sections of the ballpark like some in Fenway (think CF bleachers and RF Grandstand).  Here's another shot from my seat:

Another great thing about going to see the Spinners is that you’re going to see future major leaguers, which is just fun.  The Spinners are the Single A short-season minor league affiliate of the Boston Red Sox.  They play in the New York-Penn League.  Lowell is usually the first stop for early to mid-round college draft picks, with a few of the very top picks sprinkled in, as well as a few international free agents who are moving up the system from rookie ball.  Every year there are a few very good prospects on the Spinners.  For instance, nine of the current top 40 Red Sox prospects are on the Spinners roster.  There are also five former Spinners currently on the Red Sox (Justin Masterson, Kevin Youkilis, Jacoby Ellsbury, Jonathan Papelbon, and Clay Buchholz).  There would have been six but for the Manny trade, which saw Brandon Moss dealt to the Pirates.  I have seen three of them play for the Spinners in the last few years, and I only go to a few games a year.  That’s pretty cool.  Which one of these guys will make it to the Bigs?  

Also worth noting is that the ballpark is beautiful.  The same firm that designed AT&T Park in San Francisco, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, and PNC Park in Pittsburgh, among others, designed Lelacheur Park.  You can see elements of all of those places in the design.  The ambience is very “Lowell,” complete with a bridge and mills in the backdrop, nestled next to the tree-lined Merrimack River, and with a feeling of the mixture of the old and the new.  I have been to Camden Yards and felt it had the same kind of feeling, like it is simultaneously new but also like it has been there forever. 

Yet another great reason to go is for the always creative promotions.  Successful promotions have included a recent Dropkick Murphys and Mighty Mighty Bosstones concert held at the beginning of the season.  On the night we went, it was Joshua Papelbon Bobblehead night.  Not Jonathan, but Joshua, Jon’s little brother, who pitched for the Spinners a couple of years ago. 

As for the game we saw, it was a good one.  The weather was comfortable, the stadium was packed, as always, and the Spinners took on the Staten Island Yankees.  Technically, I guess you’d call that a rivalry game.  Hunter Strickland, a smooth throwing righty, started for the Spinners and actually had a no-hitter going into the fifth inning.  Offensively, Lowell jumped out to an early lead and never gave it up, eventually winning, 5-2. 

Also in attendance at the game were the students from the College Prep Program.  Click on the link for a description of the program.  Anyway, as we can see from the picture, they seem to have had a great time: 

Here's another pic from the top of our parking garage adjacent to the field:

With this view, does anyone else see the revenue generating potential for the university to do what those folks at Wrigley used to do?  Rooftop tailgating parties?  $10 a head?  I know I'd be interested.  Assuming the Spinners were appropriately compensated, and the proper permits were attained and everything, it could be a homerun.  Or maybe it's just me.  Just an idea.  And I swear that pun was not intended.  I'd be ahsamed of myself if it was.  That’s it for now, folks.  Good times were had by all and I can't wait to go to my next Spinners game. 

In the meatntime, keep your eyes peeled for a post from Christine, who will soon be blogging about another cool thing that happens in Lowell during the summer, the Lowell Summer Music Series.   

Ed

Thanks to The Boston Channel and a heads up from our Communications & Marketing department for this story.

How was that for a long title to a blog post, by the way?  It pretty much sums up the main content, so if you want to just watch the videos and skip my commentary, you can do so here, here, and here.   

Apparently Michael Beaudoin, a 2006 UMass Lowell Sound Recording Technology graduate, has made $60,000 dollars entering and winning a series of online advertising contests.  I often get asked the question, "What do Sound Recording Techonology graduates do?"  Beyond the stock answers, sometimes you find out some cool nuggets.  One is that a 2003 graduate is a high ranking audio engineer at NESN.  Another is that a former graduate is a Grammy winning mastering engineer.  And another is that UMass Lowell SRT grad, Tom McGurk, is a seven time Emmy winner.  But the tale of Michael escaping the cubicle (his words via the article...read the last sentence of the boston channel story) is my new favorite.  Congrats, Michael.  

Ed        

Hi everyone.  Ed checking back in from vacation (I couldn't have picked a better week for vacation with last week's weather) with a hello and a quick update. 

For those of you who are on the housing and admissions waitlists, you can expect a letter to arrive in the next couple of weeks detailing what your options will or will not be going forward.  Please wait for these letters and then call the appropriate offices after you have received them.  We recognize this can be a stressful situation and are trying to make this as self-explanatory and transparent as possible, so hopefully the letters will accomplish that.  We also recognize that you might have more questions after you receive the letter.  Again, please wait until after you have received those letters to get in touch with the appropriate offices if you have more questions.    

Also, Fox 25 News here in Boston did a story about our Baseball Research Center that is a pretty comprehensive overview of what they do.  Well, comprehensive as far as news stories go anyway.  If you're interested in watching the video, you can do so here. 

Have a good day everyone. 

Ed

Looks nice, doesn't it?  It's a picture from a Rye Beach Webcam that I have saved on my computer.  I go to this beach frequently and I have no idea how only one lucky guy could be at that beach during that time of year at noon.  It's kind of mindblowing.  I posted it because I hope I can be that lucky next week.  I'm going on vacation for the first time in a while and I can't wait to unplug.  I'm not bringing a laptop and I won't intentionally think about work once.  I'll be back in a week and a half so the blog will most likely be on hiatus until then. 

Have a good day everyone. 

Ed

Brevity, at times, is not my strong suit.  Even though one of my most vivid memories from college English, and specifically writing classes, is of one professor who simply wrote, “Clear and Concise,” in red pen in the margins next to like five out of six paragraphs of any paper, I still hate cutting stuff out sometimes.  That got me thinking of college, writing, and how I had no blog post ideas because it’s mid summer and there is not much going on admissions-wise on campus right now.  That’s where this post came from.  This will not be very clear and concise, almost by design, and it doesn’t really have anything to do with admissions as much as it does about my own personal writing habits, so be forewarned.  Here goes.    

One weird thing about having this blog, and not really having any kind of definitive assignment, deadline, youthful angst (I turn 31 on Saturday), or other writing fuel, is that that I don't have much to say sometimes.  I guess this could be perfect for a blog because I can just cut and paste a link, throw some comments on there, and hopefully be informative when I do it.  After all, most people are skimming via a feedburner or blog reader anyway, so what’s the difference?  I’m not sure that’s enough, though, and I’m not sure that’s what I want this blog to be.  Yeah, it’s about UMass Lowell admissions, and making the admissions process here more transparent, but it also has to have some personality.  I’m not sure it would work very well any other way.  So today I’m sitting here trying to think of a blog post and nothing’s coming, so I just decided to free write about writing.

A memory I have from college is of one of my favorite English professors demanding from us students that we promise him that we won't become one of those people who just stops reading and/or stops challenging themselves to think once they get into the real world.  This was not just some challenge thrown out there casually.  This was a passionate plea with us.  He was begging us not to be one of “those people.”  His British accent and slight stench of the previous night’s wine and cigarettes only added to his passion.  He was/is a character for sure.  He was the best professor I had in college, and it had nothing to do with the actual course content, but the demands he made of us to think, and then think harder.  Mostly because of that, I genuinely agreed to the promise.   

I have made a real effort to be true to that promise, to actually engage myself in some kind of thoughtful activity for the remainder of my life.  I'm not convinced I've done as good of a job as I can do, but hopefully renewing that promise to myself can change that.  It may also have the added benefit of helping me to think of something to write about.  Let me explain.

As the late nineties gave way to the millenium I could just bang out some writing for a class, for a journal assignment, or for myself just for fun, or just out of that previously mentioned angst that I no longer have.  Because I was an English major I was writing all the time for class, and subsequently writing frequently on my own.  I think those two things are pretty closely linked.  I thought I would be doing that for the rest of my life.  Nowadays, though, I don't seem to be able – or inclined – to do that much any more.  I don’t write very often for work outside of this blog, and when I do it is usually a letter or an e-mail to some general audience.  In other words, there is really limited creativity.  I also don’t write on my own outside of papers for classes I might be taking.  Maybe I’m older and more comfortable, not dealing with the same unknowns, or a daunting future, and I’m simply less emotional or expressive.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’m just getting boring.  Hopefully I'm not just getting lazy and becoming one of those people who just ingest popular culture to the detriment of original thought, like the ones I promised that professor I wouldn’t become.  That leads me to my next few thoughts.

Also back in college, I read something by Andre Dubus (the original Andre Dubus who was a famous American writer and professor at the now defunct Bradford College in Haverhill, not the UMass Lowell English professor, who is also famous, and who also wrote The House of Sand and Fog.  That is Andre Dubus III, the son of the Andre Dubus I am talking about…follow?) discussing the writing process.  I'm paraphrasing, but he said something like this: Good (and the most therapeutic) writing is like a rain cloud where all of your thoughts and emotions gather up in a cloud in your head and burst onto the paper.  In other words, good writing – or at least writing that feels good to write, and usually elicits the most actual emotion – is like mental rain on paper.  In a writing workshop my senior year we frequently talked about Dubus’ “rain cloud.”  I love that analogy. 

Another time I read something similar in an interview with guitarist and singer, Carlos Santana (by the way, if you only know Santana from his unbelievably overplayed duet thing with Rob Thomas, immediately click on that link.  It links to a YouTube clip of Santana doing 'Soul Sacrifice' at Woodstock.  At one time Santana was exceptionally cool.), where he describes another analogy.  Santana describes good improvisational music coming from somewhere else, with the musician acting merely as the conduit.  The key is opening up to it.  He said that the experience is akin to water rushing through a musician, who, when in the moment, is like a hose watering the audience with the music.  The band phish used to make frequent references to “the hose.”

Before you think I’ve ingested hallucinogenic drugs or something, let me just say that I acknowledge that the Santana image may be a bit overstated and melodramatic.  I get that point of view.  However, I actually think he nails the feeling, and I do think that is almost exactly what Dubus was talking about too.  It has to be.  The two analogies are so close, and they are both such brilliant artists that they have to have been talking about the same thing.  Don’t they?  And if two guys who are as brilliant as those two artists are/were saying it, there has to be something to it, right?   

The reason I bring that up is that I feel like I haven't had a real "hose" or “rain cloud” moment in a long time.  It could be the confines of this blog are such that it restricts expression, but that should not be the case, and that honestly feels like an excuse.  Of course, as writing instructor after writing instructor will tell you, the difference between those who make money writing and those who are just merely good/lazy writers is that the ones who make money make themselves write, and write a lot, and then re-write a few times.  In thinking about that, we should not confuse what Dubus and Santana were saying.  It is not exclusively about the hose.  You can't always wait around for those rain cloud moments where dramatic and meaningful words cascade onto paper like guinness suds down a pint glass.  Sometimes, like life, it’s just about the work.  And sometimes maybe you have to write about the fact that you can't think of anything to write about, put in the work, and hope that if you stay dedicated that you will eventually have something meaningful to say beyond, "I have nothing to say," which is basically what I'm trying to avoid saying in this post. 

My point is that without the work, without the sitting down and making yourself do it, you won't have any hose or cloud moments.   

Where this all fits into an admissions blog I have no idea.  I just wanted to get some stuff on paper just for the sake of doing it.  Just trying to keep thinking, you know, because I promised. 

Have a good day everyone. 

Ed

We get these e-mails every once in a while called eNews.  They update the campus community on what is going on around UMass Lowell.  This could be anything from faculty getting some kind of research grant to UML in the news to inaugurations, and things like that.  If you actually take the time to read them (which you should if your job, like mine, is to keep current with these types of things so you can talk to prospective students about them) they are often filled with some pretty good stuff.  Yesterday we got one that had a couple of stories that I thought were blog-worthy, so here goes. 

When I first came to UMass Lowell in 2003, I remember being totally surprised that we had something called the Baseball Research Center, or, as it is commonly referred to around campus, "the bat lab."  What is the bat lab, a/k/a, Baseball Research Center?  It is a lab founded by Dr. James Sherwood of UML's Mechanical Engineering Department partially through a grant from Major League Baseball and partially from Rawlings back in 1998.  Here's a pic of Dr. Sherwood:

Remember those times, the late nineties?  Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were hitting all of those home runs and people were talking about the balls being juiced.  This was before we knew that it was actually the players who were juiced. 

Well, at the time, Major League  Baseball was looking for an independent lab to study engineering and science relative to baseball.  To make a long story short, Dr. Sherwood won the grant, and here we are ten years later. 

Now Dr. Sherwood is frequently quoted in newspapers surrounding things like the latest maple vs. ash bat controversy, the lab has been featured on the National Geographic Channel's "The Science of Summer," and featured on PBS, among other places.  The Baseball Research Center also tests and certifies bats and balls that are used in high school, college, and MLB baseball. 

Last but certainly not least - in fact, this was the real impetus for this post - is the fact that the Museum of Science is doing an exhibit show from now through September 1 which features our lab, or at least research from our lab.  Here's the link for more specific info.  I think I'll check it out. 

For more details and a more thorough explanation of the museum of science story, check  out this link.  

The reason I chose to blog about that is to point out that as a senior undergraduate Mechanical Engineering student, you could have the opportunity to get in the lab and do some actual research or maybe even do your capstone project there.  Even as a first year student you can work in the bat lab.  It's a cool application of learning, essentially, and I think that is the most important point to be made about all of this.     

Speaking of cool applications of learning, our Formula SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) Racing Team, picture here:

recently entered a Formula racing car into a national competition in Virginia and finished in the top half of more than 40 entries, 21 out of 44 to be exact.  That's pretty good when you consider that this was their first entry since 1996. 

On the road I am often asked if we have automotive engineering, to which I reply, "no, but..."  I explain that we do have Mechanical Engineering and we do have clubs where you can get that automotive outlet and then maybe go to grad school for auto engineering somewhere.  People hate hearing, "no, but..." almost as much as they hate hearing, "yeah, but."  So that is usually met with an understandably skeptical raised eyebrow, but it's also true, so I'm okay with that.  Anyway, again, the racing team above is another good example of applied learning that is actually pretty cool.  For more on that story, you can check it out here.     

Lastly, we (like every other school in the country) are always looking for Women In Science & Engineering.  WISE is a group on campus dedicated partly to that mission in addition to their larger goal of influencing young women to pursue careers in science, nathematics, and engineering in general.  They recently held a career day where Helen Greiner, co-founder of iRobot spoke.  Some 400 girls were on campus for the event, which is a great outreach opportunity for the university because it is mutually beneficial for the university and the community in general.  Here is a picture from that event:

  For more pictures of the event, you can check out the university photo gallery here:

http://www.uml.edu/gallery

That's it for now.  I hope everyone has a great weekend.     

This past weekend, I was honored to be the keynote speaker at the Lowell African Festival. Lowell has a rich diverse heritage that I am proud to be apart of and I love a good summer festival – the people, the entertainment, the food! Even more so, I welcome the opportunity to speak about my passion for equity in education and the need for awareness in our communities. When Bowa Tucker (Umass Lowell, Gear Up) informed me the festival theme was - “Empowerment Through Participation”, the words of Nelson Mandela, one of the greatest educators of our time, came to mind:  

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

Truer words have never been spoken. It is our job, as members of the African Diaspora to become empowered through education and civic responsibility. The issues facing this community are not unique to each of us, but rather represent the issues facing our global world. Healthcare, the state of the economy, educating our children, combating global warming, crime, poverty, ignorance and racism - effect us individually and plague us internationally. Organizations such as the African Cultural Association work to unify our commonalities with events such as the African Festival, and in doing so empower each of us individually and collectively to change the course of our world. We must educate ourselves and our youth about the issues facing our global economy. My charge to youth today is be empowered through participation - be involved in your community- know the state of world affairs –make educated choices -make participation a priority. As we become empowered through unity, participation, and education – we become examples to educate the world.

I want to thank my festival crew - Esther Tetteh, Lucy Wafo, Delphine MenkwohAcha,  and Jerreh Saidybah. I have so much love and respect for each of you and truly appreciate your commitment to educating students on our diverse UML culture! These UML students are great assets to our Admission Office and who truly embody – Empowerment Through Participation!

For more information on the African Festival visit: http://www.africanfestivallowell.org/.

- Shy