Daily Lobo new mexico
The Independent Student Voice of UNM since 1895
tuesday November 11, 2014 | Vo l u m e 1 1 9 | Is s u e 6 0
New Mexico graduates struggle with loan debt By Sayyed Shah
New Mexico colleges have the highest number of student loan defaults in the nation, according to the U.S. Department of Education. The recently published Cohort Default Rate shows New Mexico’s student loan default rate was the
highest in the country at 20.8 percent in the financial year 2011, whereas the national average percentage was 13.7, according to the press release. Nationally, the default rates went down by a percentage point in the last year, according to the press release.
UNM’s default rate was at 13 percent — up from 8.6 percent in that last report. Western New Mexico University had the highest default rate at 28.3 percent, up nearly 10 points, and the default rates at New Mexico State University and New Mexico Highlands University also increased.
There were more students borrowing more money, and the unemployment rate was very high when these students went into repayment, said Terry Babbitt, associate vice president of enrollment management at UNM. “There is no question that the weak economy hurt this cohort.
Also, branch campuses are counted in the numbers and the default rates are typically much higher than four-year institutions,” he said. According to the press release, the default rates were calculated
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Loans page 2
Club commemorates fall of Berlin Wall By David Lynch
“Freedom is for everyone.” “No more walls, no more wars.” “Forbidden.” These phrases and others were scrawled in German and English on a replica of the Berlin Wall erected by the UNM German Club on Monday in front of the Humanities building. The replica commemorated Sunday’s 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a Cold War relic that divided East and West Germany. “We wanted to remind people about the wall and what it was all about,” said Dave Simone, a graduate student studying philosophy and one of the event’s organizers. “People are still oppressed in the world today by symbolic representations. The wall was a physical representation.” From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., students were able to interact with the wall, using paint to write and draw on it as they pleased. They were treated to hot chocolate and cider, courtesy of the German Club, as well as pamphlets with information about the Berlin Wall. German Club members educated visiting students about the wall and various individuals who tried to climb it. One such person was Peter Fechter, who was shot and bled out in the no-man’s land in the center of the wall, after both the East and West sides refused to help, Simone said. Just two hours into Monday’s event the wall was covered with peace signs, hearts and anti-war sentiments reminiscent of the graffiti that covered the real Berlin Wall for 28 years. German Club President Nate Webb, a junior German major, said the wall’s fall was a global victory, but the biggest victory belonged to Germany. “For America, it meant the end of the Cold War,” Webb said. “For Germans, it was like removing an infected splinter that had been there since World War II.” Lynne Tucker, a sophomore bioengineering major, said she built the 5-foot-wide, 6-foot-tall Berlin
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(top) UNM biomedical engineering sophomore Lynne Tucker, left German senior Nate Webb, center and political science junior Torin Hovander, right, destroy a cardboard replica of the Berlin Wall outside the Humanities Building on Monday afternoon. Sunday, Nov. 9 was 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s dismantling. (left) UNM mechanical engineering dual enrollment student Daniel Davis paints the phrase “Der Dude Sayt Freihat” on the cardboard replica on Monday morning. The phrase translates to “The dude says freedom.” Davis is a member of the UNM German Club.
William Aranda Daily Lobo / @_WilliamAranda
Berlin page 3
Professor studies perils of mixing medications By Lauren Topper
Start with your daily allergy medicine. Then throw in something stronger for cold and flu season. Add a helping of painkillers for that splitting headache or your lingering sports injury. Finally, finish with a morning caffeine jolt.
Each of these things by itself may be harmless enough, but together they could be a recipe for disaster. While we know disturbingly little about the specifics of drug interactions, UNM professor and Chief of the Translational Informatics Division Dr. Tudor Oprea and his team are developing
a system that may help inform patients and physicians about the potentially dangerous effects of mixing drugs. Oprea works in a field known as “cheminformatics,” which involves taking available data and assembling and examining them to find useful knowledge that can be used
to solve a problem in a chemical field. For example, cheminformatics is often used in drug discovery, an application that Oprea has worked on for many years. The idea behind this platform is that interactions between drug molecules and their targets, the proteins, could be modeled much
like a social network, said Gergely Zahoranszky-Kohalmi, a Ph.D. student working in Oprea’s lab. “If something goes wrong we need to fix the broken communication link between the players, and using small-molecule drugs is one way to do so,” he said.
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Medication page 2