Ga. Film Academy talks training students for film industry
By Jim Wallace
Over the past few years, Georgia’s film industry has grown rapidly. On Thursday, WALB’s Jim Wallace sat down with Jeffrey Stepakoff, the Executive Director of The Georgia Film Academy. “Jeffrey, thanks for joining us. The question is right now people see the growth of the film industry in Georgia. What are you seeing?” Wallace asked. “I am seeing Georgians working in film in our great state, Jim. It is an exciting time to be working in film, television, and digital media here in Georgia. I am seeing growth. Frankly, I am seeing a future industry here in our state,” said Stepakoff. “And of course, the Georgia Film Academy, it’s part of the University System of Georgia, and really in the past people might not have understood it. But right now those jobs are available. How are your students reacting?”
WALB
Georgia Film Academy coming to Albany State
Video from WALB
Times-Georgian
By Kyle Werner UWG Communications & Marketing
It’s because of families like the Walkers that the heritage of the University of West Georgia passes from generation to generation. Some families bestow jewelry or fine china to future generations. Fred Walker passed down his love for UWG. One of his proudest lifetime accomplishments was being able to provide a college education for his children. …After graduation, Donald’s sister-in-law attended UWG to pursue her master’s degree. Later, her twin daughters enrolled at UWG to earn their degrees in education. Another niece and her husband chose to Go West and earned their nursing degrees, and later Donald’s daughter Danielle earned her biology degree from the university, as well. In total, eight members of the Walker family have called UWG home and earned their degrees over the course of 40 years — all with Fred as their biggest supporter.
Albany Herald
ASU Student Spotlight: Christian Herrera accepted into prestigious summer programs
From staff reports
Christian Andrade Herrera, a Cardenas San Luis Potosi, Mexico, native, is a junior chemistry major at Albany State University with a minor in biology. He has been accepted into two summer programs: the Accelerating Careers in Engineering and Science Program at the University of California, Irvine and the Physics of Life Summer Research Program at Princeton University. He said he plans to use his degree to develop life-saving treatments in the field of biochemistry and medicinal chemistry.
Athens CEO
Collaboration between UGA and Clarke County Schools Helps Graduating Seniors
Charlie Bauder
As a rising ninth grader at Clarke Central High School in 2018, Tiffani Richardson’s goals included going to college and pursuing a career in the medical field. Four years later, Richardson has her diploma and is preparing to enter Howard University in Washington, D.C., this fall. She is one of 36 Clarke County School District students who completed Georgia Possible, a leadership development and college and career readiness program, in April. …In addition to leadership, Georgia Possible prepares students for success in the classroom while also increasing their awareness of the variety of postsecondary options available beyond high school graduation. “UGA is committed to strengthening our local community through partnerships that benefit Athens area students and public schools,” said President Jere W. Morehead. “I am proud of the work the J.W. Fanning Institute, the Clarke County School District and others are doing through Georgia Possible to broaden the skillsets and horizons of promising young individuals.”
WFXG
Medical College of Georgia Foundation matches state funding for physician program
By Jared Eggleston
During the 2022 legislative session, Governor Brian Kemp and the Georgia General Assembly allocated $8.7 million to a program that would cover tuition for medical students who commit to serving an underserved community. The Medical College of Georgia Foundation has matched that, continuing to build on the school’s ‘3+ Primary Care Pathway.’ The pathway is focused on remedying the shortage of physicians being seen not only here in the CSRA but statewide. Ian Mercier, MCG Foundation President and CEO, explains how the program works.
WFMZ
QuickStart Partners with Georgia Southern University, Division of Continuing Education
QuickStart Learning, Inc., the award-winning IT workforce readiness, and career development company, announces a partnership with Georgia Southern University’s Division of Continuing Education to offer online IT bootcamps and certification courses. The bootcamps are offered to prepare students for in-demand fields like cybersecurity, data science, cloud engineering, and AI/ML. The curricula of QuickStart bootcamps are comprehensive and designed to accommodate beginners that are attempting to switch careers and experienced professionals that want to grow their current career in an IT field.
Marietta Daily Journal
Four Kennesaw State students awarded scholarships from U.S. Department of Energy
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy awarded four KSU students scholarships through its University Nuclear Leadership Program for the upcoming school year. The program aims to invest in the next generation of nuclear scientists and engineers, and the following students, all in the Southern Polytechnic College of Engineering and Engineering Technology, represent KSU as award winners: Simon Bratescu, Kofi Owusu, Evan Pudlo and Anthony Schanie.
Albany Herald
Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College students receive Young Botanist Awards
From staff reports
Caroline Shaw and Sharon Spiess from Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College were two of 25 college students from across America who recently received Young Botanist Awards from the Botanical Society of America. Shaw, a biology major from Nashville, and Spiess, a biology major from Douglasville, were nominated for the prestigious honor by Ben Gahagen, an assistant professor of biology at ABAC. The purpose of the Young Botanist Award is to offer individual recognition to outstanding graduating seniors in the plant sciences and to encourage their participation in the Botanical Society of America.
WGAU Radio
UGA Science Fair yields patent assistance for teen inventors
“The patent is a continuation of the goals of that class”
By Roy Parry, UGA Today
A trio of Atlanta high school students left this spring’s 74th annual Georgia Science and Engineering Fair, which is operated by the University of Georgia, with more than accolades and ribbons—they won a team of lawyers to help shepherd their invention through the patent process, which can take three to five years to complete. Their invention, the Active Model Rocket Descent Controller, began as the students’ focus for “Problems in Engineering,” a course at the Atlanta Classical Academy. Students in the class were instructed to come up with a problem and create a solution, said Matthew Braun, a rising senior at the private high school. “The patent is a continuation of the goals of that class,” said Braun, whose teammates included fellow rising seniors Elizabeth Richter and Elizabeth Stinespring. The students’ work earned them the Georgia Intellectual Property Alliance Young Inventor’s Award.
Times-Georgian
UWG’s Dean Yates speaks at Golden K
Dean Brad Yates UWG was the guest speaker at the Carrollton Golden K on June 8. He is the dean of the Mass Communications Department at the university and he spoke on the offerings of students in the school of communications, film and media. They offer two bachelor degrees and also a master degree in digital and video communication.
KPVI
UGA selects new cohort of Georgia agriculture and forestry leaders
By Jordan Powers Special to the Herald
From fruit producers to financial professionals, the newest cohort of the Advancing Georgia’s Leaders in Agriculture and Forestry program was chosen from a broad field of applicants to the innovative, 18-month leadership development program. The 2022-24 cohort of 25 participants was selected from more than 90 nominations, 60 applications and 40 interviews for the AGL program, which is offered by the Office of Learning and Organizational Development in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Georgia.
Precision Vaccinations
$3.8 Million Awarded to Create Innovative RSV Vaccines
The UC Santa Cruz university announced that Rebecca DuBois, an Associate Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at the Baskin School of Engineering, was awarded the prestigious and highly competitive National Institutes of Health Research Project Grant of $3.8 million to fund her approach to developing an RSV vaccine. The five-year, $3.8 million grant will be shared with DuBois’s collaborator Ralph Tripp at the University of Georgia and will build on both researchers’ years of work studying RSV. Their overall aim is to validate their RSV vaccine in pre-clinical trials
Savannah Morning News
Tybee prepares for long-term solutions to climate change, erosion, storms
Marisa Mecke
Thousands of beachgoers visit Tybee Island each year to take in the scenic views of Georgia’s barrier islands. What they may not notice is the environmental engineering and planning all around them aimed at protecting Tybee Island from storms and a rising sea level. …In November 2019, the City of Tybee Island and the University of Georgia Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant received a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grant to assess flood risks and potential adaptation solutions for the island’s low-lying marsh shoreline. Since then, those groups and local stakeholders have been shoring up protections on the island. Jill Gamble, coastal resilience specialist and public service faculty with the University of Georgia Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant, has been working as a part of this coalition to prepare Tybee for the impacts of climate change. …This past nourishment, though, Tybee had a new partner in the project: Georgia Southern University. “We’re working with Georgia Southern University, which is doing a two-year monitoring of the vegetation,” Robertson said.
Gwinnett Daily Post
Georgia Gwinnett College softball finishes with No. 17 national ranking
From Staff Reports
The Georgia Gwinnett College softball program had another successful season with the 2022 team finishing the spring season with a No. 17 national ranking in the final NAIA Top 25 poll, conducted by a nationwide panel of coaches. The Grizzlies had a 36-20 record, won the inaugural Continental Athletic Conference championship tournament, and hosted a NAIA Opening Round for the sixth consecutive postseason.
WRDW
Augusta parks offer football clinic, swimming this summer
By Staff
The Augusta Parks and Recreation Department has some summer recreation opportunities lined up for students out of school.
Football clinic
The city is partnering with Adrian Peterson, director of student athlete development at Georgia Southern University and former pro football running back, to offer a free football clinic at the May Park Community Center. The clinic will consist of one-hour lessons focusing on strength, conditioning, speed, and agility, and will be held from 5-6 p.m. June 13-16. Peterson, an alumnus of Georgia Southern University, played eight seasons for the Chicago Bears in the National Football League, followed by playing in the United Football League for the Virginia Destroyers.
Swimming
The city has opened local swimming pools and the splash pad for the summer.
11Alive
UGA alumn testifies during House Jan. 6 committee hearing
Caroline Edwards was on the frontlines during the insurrection.
Author: Gabriella Nunez, Associated Press
A Georgia Bulldog testified Thursday night in front of the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection and former president Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. U.S. Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards was sworn in shortly after the panel recessed to offer her firsthand accounts of what happened in Washington D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021. Edwards is an Atlanta native and a cum laude graduate of the University of Georgia.
Higher Education News:
Inside Higher Ed
Ed Department: Use ARP Funding to Address Teaching Shortage
By Meghan Brink
Miguel Cardona, U.S. education secretary, on Thursday outlined a strategy to address the national teaching shortage that rose as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. He has recommended improvements to teacher-preparation programs, support for specialty teaching areas and assistance to help teachers pay off student loan debt. The department released a fact sheet that demonstrated how colleges and universities can use American Rescue Plan funding to make investments in the teaching workforce to help combat the teaching shortage. Actions include increasing wages, expanding loan forgiveness or scholarship programs for the teaching field, increasing state and institutional partnerships, and early teaching mentorship programs.
Journal of Blacks in Higher Education
The Devastating Effects of the Pandemic on Black Enrollments in Higher Education
A new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center finds that enrollments of undergraduate and graduate students, fell a further 4.1 percent or 685,000 students in spring 2022 compared to spring 2021. This follows a 3.5 percent drop last spring, for a total two-year decline of 7.4 percent or nearly 1.3 million students since spring 2020. The report has data by race and ethnicity only for first-year students. This spring there were 4.2 percent more first-year students than a year ago when the pandemic had its most significant impact. Overall first-year enrollments are very close to what they were before the pandemic began. But for Blacks, first-year enrollments are down 6 percent this spring compared to a year ago.
Higher Ed Dive
20 research institutions form alliance to double Hispanic doctoral enrollment
Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, Senior Reporter
Dive Brief:
Twenty top-ranked U.S. research universities that enroll high shares of Hispanic students have created a coalition to help double enrollment of Hispanic doctoral students at their institutions, they announced Thursday. The Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities is composed of prominent institutions such as Arizona State University, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The group also aims to boost the number of Hispanic faculty members at the universities by 20%. It intends to reach this target — and the bolstered doctorate numbers — by 2030.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
He Wanted to Go Away to College. The Pull to Stay at Home Was Strong.
By Eric Hoover
Angel Diaz figured he would keep living at home after high school. It was an easy enough path to take, one that would please his mother. Sure, Diaz had wondered what it would be like to go away to college and live in a dorm. The possibility felt both exciting and frightening. But for a long time, it seemed like a long shot. At the start of his senior year last fall, he believed he would end up enrolling at a community college not far from home. …Ambition flickered within Diaz, the oldest of two boys who hoped to become the first in his family to graduate from college, a hope his parents encouraged. …Diaz had always assumed it would be much cheaper for him to stay home and attend Montgomery College, but in his case it turned out not to be true. “Once I got the news that we would get a lot of financial aid, me and my mom got pretty emotional,” he says. “We didn’t have to pay for much for me to go to a good school.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Season of Our Professorial Discontent
The pandemic irrevocably changed the student-teacher relationship — and not for the better.
By Paul Musgrave
Exams, ceremonies, and move-out traffic jams — the last few weeks of the academic spring semester usually pass like a blur. This year, they passed like a kidney stone. I’m no stranger to feeling exhausted by the time students cross the stage, but usually my tiredness is leavened with the sense of a job well done. Feeling vocationally at sea instead is new to me. This spring was my first semester back in person in three years, following a fellowship leave, parental leave, and pandemic-induced fully online teaching. I was looking forward to a normal semester. It’s not that teaching online was all bad. There was something exhilarating about the adrenaline-fueled race to convert my courses to online for the fall of 2020. Since I had to redo everything anyway, I took the opportunity to update my lectures. Goodbye, old readings; hello, new, urgent topics like the politics of supply chains. It was even exciting to learn how to edit videos, at least the first few-dozen times. It turns out that my surge of adrenaline to tackle those jobs was probably part of a broader process of coping with disaster. As a team of researchers argue in the journal Psychological Reports, such feelings reflected the “honeymoon phase” of responding to a disaster, during which shared trauma promotes bonding and even optimism. The next phase, unfortunately, is disillusionment: anger, resentment, exhaustion from stress, and the recognition of insufficient support.
Inside Higher Ed
Preventing Gun Violence on Campus
Alarmed by mass shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo, colleges are working to protect their campuses with threat assessment teams, active shooter drills and partnerships with law enforcement.
By Maria Carrasco
Recent mass shootings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., and a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., have prompted new calls for higher education institutions to step up efforts to prevent gun violence on campus. During a webinar Tuesday hosted by United Educators, an insurance company with 1,600 K-12 and higher education members, education leaders received guidance on how to make their institutions safer. Marisa Randazzo, executive director of threat management at Ontic, a protective intelligence software company, said assessing behavioral threats on campus can help thwart mass shootings.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Congress Will Consider Student-Loan Deferrals for Victims of Sexual Violence
By Brianna Hatch
A bill introduced in Congress on Wednesday would grant students who experience sexual violence federal loan deferments while they are on temporary leave from college for treatment. Under the Student Loan Deferment for Sexual Violence Survivors Act, HR 7980, students would be eligible for up to three years of federal loan deferrals — broken into six-to-12-month chunks — after reporting an incident of sexual violence to their campus Title IX coordinator. Most federal student loans come with a six-month grace period that kicks in after graduation or when students take a semester off. But under the current system, even if students need more time to recover from an incident of violence, they must start repaying their loans when those six months expire.
The Washington Post
As Title IX turns 50, students continue to protest sex discrimination
Activism on college campuses has always guided this landmark legislation.
Image without a caption
Perspective by Anna K. Danziger Halperin
Fifty years ago this month, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 passed. These 37 short words, modeled after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, fundamentally reshaped American society by prohibiting sex discrimination in education. The law has never been static in its 50-year history, with each presidential administration interpreting its implementation differently. Today, two pressing Title IX debates await guidance from the Biden administration, regarding transgender students participating in sports and campus policies on sexual assault. …The exhibit underscores how students, often working with advocacy organizations, have relied on Title IX to push their colleges and universities toward greater gender equity across a range of issues, including in sports and sexual abuse cases. Today’s student activism in these two areas reveals the persistence of problems from the past; it also shows how new activists are pushing universities to go even further and rethink how policies should change and whom Title IX can protect.
Inside Higher Ed
‘Piedmont Is in for Some Very Tough Times’
Piedmont University provost Daniel Silber resigned abruptly this week to protest proposed budget cuts and faculty layoffs, which he called “morally wrong.”
By Liam Knox
Piedmont University provost Daniel Silber resigned abruptly on Tuesday in protest of proposed budget cuts and faculty layoffs, which the Board of Trustees was set to vote on this week. In a highly critical email to colleagues announcing his departure, Silber wrote that the proposed budget cuts—which would be the second round this year—were “morally wrong” and that the budget process “failed to be properly inclusive.” He also argued that notifying faculty that they were being let go after the end of the academic year didn’t give them enough time to find new employment for next semester. “I refuse to be a party to terminations that are carried out in such an unethical manner,” wrote Silber, who also served as senior vice president for academic affairs. “Now that this draconian measure is being implemented, I have no moral choice but to leave the institution.”