Daily Lobo new mexico
The Independent Student Voice of UNM since 1895
tuesday November 18, 2014 | Vo l u m e 1 1 9 | Is s u e 6 5
UNM declared bicyclefriendly By Jonathan Baca
Aaron Anglin / Daily Lobo / @aaronjanglin
Geetha Yedida works on a fruit sculpture during the international cook-off event at the SUB. The cooking competition was put on by the Global Education Office with teams comprised of international students from Bangladesh, China, the Czech Republic, India, Iran and Japan.
Students share cultures, cuisines By Sayyed Shah
UNM’s international education week started Monday with the second international cook-off. The event, organized by the Global Education Office in collaboration with the Division of Enrollment Management, featured teams from Japan, China, Iran, Bangladesh, India and the Czech Republic participating in the live “Iron Chef”-style competition for superior cuisine. Team Japan won the competition, while the team from Czech Republic placed second and the Iranian team was third. The team from China took the people’s choice award. “One thing that we enjoy about this event is that it is students preparing food from their countries, teaching us about their cultures, and that is what we are all about here: for people to share their cultures,” said Mary Anne Saunders, special assistant to the president, who is responsible for global initiatives on campus. Saunders said organizers hoped the attendees learned a lot about the cuisines of
Estevan Piña, a senior mechanical engineering student, reaches into UNM’s Formula SAE motorsports program 2014 car on Friday. The program has been ranked No. 5 in the country and No. 18 in the world, according to a poll issued by the Formula Student Combustion World Rankings.
Sergio Jiménez Daily Lobo @SXfoto
these six countries and also learned a little bit about their cultures. “One of our major goals is to get our domestic students from New Mexico or around the United States to be interested in expanding their horizons,” she said. “We want to encourage our domestic students to study abroad.” The idea of sharing and having a bilateral relation is very important, she said. “Many New Mexican students would not have the opportunity to study abroad even if sometimes they wanted to because they might have to work or they might have family responsibility,” Saunders said. The Saunders family is interested in cooking and cuisines from around the world, and that helped UNM come up with the idea of international cooking competition, she said. “When I came here (last year), we arranged our first international cook-off,” she said. “We expected just a few students, and there were nearly four hundred, so we knew it was popular.” The international students would be proud that they managed to share their cultures with
our domestic students, she said. “When we first got information about the event, we decided to participate in the competition. We wanted to let international students taste authentic food from India,” said Varun Reddy, a graduate student at the Department of Computer Science. The Indian team cooked Vegetable Biryani, made of rice, potatoes, beans, carrots and Indian spices, he said. “Winning apart, we wanted to let everyone enjoy our national food,” he said. This was an amazing event for students to learn about different cultures and to become aware about diversity on the campus, said Vital Mazor, a history and theatre major. If any students are interested in studying abroad, they should visit Global Education Office, Saunders said. “The Global Education Office will be happy to let them know how they can do that at a lower cost,” she said. Sayyed Shah is the assistant news editor at the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at assistant-news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @mianfawadshah.
UNM is among 100 universities recognized as a Bicycle-Friendly Campus. The University’s bronze-level award, given out by the League of American Bicyclists, was based on evaluations of what the league calls the “Five ‘E’s”: engineering, encouragement, education, enforcement and evaluation and planning. “Bicycles provide a simple solution to many of the complex problems that institutions face, including issues around mobility, space, health and economics,” the league’s website states. As part of the new recognition, UNM will be creating a Bicycle Safety Committee to look for new ways the campus can increase awareness and safety for students who commute to school on bikes, said Noel Ortiz, coordinator of the campus Outdoor and Bicycle Shop, who will sit on the new committee. “The Bicycle Safety Committee is nationwide, and they look at campuses that are incorporating awareness in regard to bicycle use on campus, and that entails both as a means of transportation and safety,” Ortiz said. “Being alert of your surroundings, pathways, bicycle routes — hopefully, a university would take that and incorporate it into the campus.” The committee, which hopes to launch in the spring, will try to encourage UNM to work with city government with regard to reorganizing and restructuring certain pathways that lead to the campus that can be friendlier to bicycles, skateboards and other alternative modes of transportation, Ortiz said. The committee will be receiving support from the League of American Bicycles in the form of free tools and technical assistance,
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Bicycle page 2
Motorsports club ranked in world By Tomas Lujan
One fast-moving club on campus is moving up the national and world leader boards. UNM’s Formula SAE motorsports program has been ranked No. 5 in the country and No. 18 in the world, according to a poll issued by the Formula Student Combustion World Rankings. The competition, put on by SAE International, focuses on engineering and design education. The rank marks a significant improvement from last year’s
standing, in which the program came in at No. 7 in the country and No. 32 overall. This year’s ranking places the UNM program above such institutions as MIT and UC Berkeley. John Russell, director of UNM’s Formula SAE program and Halliburton Professor of Mechanical Engineering, said the ranks are significant because they are based on quantitative points averaged over the last six events, with the most recent weighted more heavily and based on
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