DAILY LOBO new mexico
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wednesday
August 24, 2011
The Independent Voice of UNM since 1895
BUS brings children to greener pastures by April Gutierrez agutie10@unm.edu
UNM Biology students spent a week with fourth- and fifth-graders in the South Valley this summer, teaching them that science and conservation can be fun. UNM’s Biology Undergraduate Society hosted the Bilingual Junior Scientist Camp on Aug. 1-5, program coordinator and biology student Martha Jo Vargas said. “The goal for this year’s camp was multi-faceted,” she said. “We wanted the curriculum and our learning outcomes to clearly show the students ways in which they have the power to actually do something about the environmental issues that are confronting our current generation.” The program focused on sustainability because BUS wanted campers to take what they learned back to their communities, Vargas said. Sandia National Labs funded the camp: it was free of charge
for the 42 student campers who attended it, according to a BUS survey. Twenty-two UNM students volunteered at the camp. Vargas said the camp focused on tools for recycling, reusing and reducing the use of natural resources. The biology department demonstrated these principals when it donated pizza for the campers. Dr. Jose Luis CruzCampa, from Sandia National Labs, gave a presentation on solar cells, after which the campers baked cookies in solar ovens made out of the used pizza boxes. “This activity helped drive the point of sustainability and several of its components, including reducing, reusing and recycling,” Vargas said. Campers were given the opportunity to participate in hands-on experiments, such as strawberry DNA extractions and gingerbread cookie genetics. Vargas said on the last day of
Courtesy of Jubette Chour Fourth and fifth graders at the Bilingual Junior Scientist Camp, hosted by UNM’s Biology Undergraduate Society, help plant a tree this summer. Campers studied sustainability and recycling.
camp, campers helped to plant a tree. She said this was the highlight of the entire camp experience. Members of Bernalillo Land Management participated in the tree-planting ceremony, in which
each camper tossed in a handful of dirt. “I told them that their contributions to sustainability were similar to that handful of dirt they threw in,” Vargas said. “It was kind of an
analogy to our whole planet and how we each have a responsibility … that each of our contributions may be minute, but combined are elaborate and enormous and sufficient.”
UNM looks to add honors college
STEPPING STONE
Task force: More talented students to remain in state if UNM has college to suit their needs by Miriam Belin
mbelin08@unm.edu
AP Photo Rebel fighters stomp on the head of a Moammar Gadhafi statue inside his compound in Bab al-Aziziya in Tripoli, Libya, last Tuesday. Hundreds of Libyan rebels stormed Gadhafi’s compound charging wildly as they killed loyalist troops.
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Daily Lobo volume 116
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Boom!
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A task force at UNM put together to keep the state’s brightest students in New Mexico hopes to turn the University Honors Program into a degreegranting college. “It would help the University attract and recruit the best and the brightest students in New Mexico,” said Roger Schluntz, an architecture professor and task force co-chair. Rosalie Otero, the Honors Program director, said the honors college would have its own dean, full-time faculty and connections throughout the University. “We certainly would want collaboration with other departments and other colleges on campus and the honors college, which is supposed to be an enhancing, interdisciplinary academic piece for highachievement students,” she said. In fall 2010, UNM appointed the Honors College Task Force, composed of University faculty, to explore the possibility of turning the program into a college. The task force met every two weeks to study honors colleges at other universities, as well as interview past and current honors students, University staff and oth-
er universities’ deans. The task force concluded that UNM should take steps to establish an honors college. “UNM should establish an honors college that would form an academic community by bringing UNM’s best undergraduate students and finest faculty together, fostering advanced and interdisciplinary study,” the report said. Otero said students will have a “dual system” option, choosing between a dominant or interdisciplinary major. “We’d probably have different tiers of students: those who want to enhance their education and still major in engineering or something else, and … those who want to get a degree that would be interdisciplinary through the Honors College,” she said. Otero said the Honors Program is already set for the transformation into an honors college because of its strong curriculum and full-time tenured faculty. “We have in place a lot of things we’d have to have for a college, so it would be very easy to just say ‘yes, we’re going to go ahead and make you into a college,’” she said. The recommendation is awaiting approval by the Faculty Senate and University president.
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