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THURSDAY
feb. 13, 2020 high 35°, low 9°
t h e i n de p e n de n t s t u de n t n e w s pa p e r of s y r a c u s e , n e w yor k |
dailyorange.com
P • Mobile matchmakers
N • Raising standards
Dating apps Tinder and Bumble reached out to SU students to become ambassadors to promote the companies. They weighed in on their experiences. Page 7
The Graduate Student Organization is working with Syracuse University’s Graduate School to improve wages for student employees. Page 3
S • In control
After an erratic freshman season she called a ‘roller coaster,’ SU women’s basketball forward Emily Engstler has improved her attitude, and it shows. Page 12
Bridging the gap
on campus
Student protesters meet with trustees By Maggie Hicks asst. news editor
(FROM LEFT TO RIGHT) RASHMI GANGAMMA, MARIA TADDEO, SHAELISE TOR AND TRACEY REICHERT SCHIMPFF are SU professors and community members helping to provide mental health services. sarah lee asst. photo editor
SU collaborates with local organizations to expand mental health services for refugees By Richard J Chang asst. digital editor
R
ashmi Gangamma is working to expand what it means to provide therapy to refugee families in central New York. Gangamma, an associate professor, oversees Syracuse University’s Marriage and Family Therapy department. The Ph.D. program is offering greater clinical services to better communicate with local refugee families, focusing on the effects displacement can have on mental health. “In Syracuse, there are a lot of programs that provide resources, but what I found there is a lot of strength in building collaborative efforts rather than each person doing their own thing,” Gangamma said.
About 10,000 refugees settled in Onondaga County between 2007 and 2017. A 2018 study of mental health disorders in refugees found “a substantial lack of data,” on the full extent of psychiatric disorders within these communities, but stated there is an “urgent need” for intervention services. Students in the Ph.D. program provide therapy to Syracuse residents for a year. The original intent of SU’s program was to make mental health resources available to refugees, but it has since evolved to focus on training students and interpreters to provide effective treatment, Gangamma said. The department realized in fall 2019 that there was a need for interpreters who had medical training in addition to an understanding of the spoken languages
see refugees page 4
Black student-led movement #NotAgainSU met with members of Syracuse University’s Board of Trustees on Wednesday night to discuss the movement’s demands and solutions. The Board of Trustees Special Committee on University Climate, Diversity and Inclusion is meeting with students, faculty and staff this week, SU announced Tuesday. The committee is reviewing SU’s diversity and inclusion policies following a series of hate crimes and biasrelated incidents. The meeting was one of about 18 meetings the trustees will hold this week with over 20 different groups of students, said Jeffrey Scruggs, cochair of the special committee, after the meeting.
We are trying to make sure that this is a welcoming place to all students and visitors Jeffery Scruggs committee co-chair
At least 26 racist, anti-Semitic and bias-related incidents have occurred at or near SU since Nov. 7. #NotAgainSU presented Chancellor Kent Syverud with 19 demands in response to the incidents. Syverud signed 16 as written and revised the remaining three, including a demand for a biannual forum between students and the board. see #notagainsu page 4
on campus
iSchool enters partnership with Microsoft, city of Syracuse By Maggie Hicks asst. news editor
Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies is working with the city of Syracuse and Microsoft to more effectively analyze data about the city. Student volunteers involved in the partnership, which is one of four in the U.S., work with the city to gather data about its municipal departments, said Arthur Thomas, associate dean for academic affairs at the iSchool. “The city has essentially engaged
us as a form of employees who can assist them in the information technologies that they are trying to put into place,” Thomas said. The iSchool’s partnership with the tech giant and the city is part of Mayor Ben Walsh’s Syracuse Surge, a $200 million initiative to further economic growth in the city through technological development. The city government sends data from different departments, including fire, public works, police, parking and finance to the iSchool, where teams of students organize it into
visual dashboards using Microsoft’s Power BI software. The dashboards represent the data in charts that show trends throughout the area, said Aditi Argrawal, an iSchool graduate student and one of the project managers for the Microsoft initiative. “People can look at our dashboards, and within seconds they will know what’s going right, what’s going wrong, what’s happening, what’s not happening, where they have to put more resources and how they can improve their operations,”
Argrawal said. Much of the city’s data is recorded in Excel spreadsheets that don’t visibly display any relationships or trends, she said. The ultimate goal of the initiative is to upload all of the dashboards into a Microsoft Cloud that city employees and Syracuse students can access and analyze, Argrawal said. “The city has a lot of data to make sense of,” said Sam Edelstein, Syracuse’s chief data officer. “As we enter a world where even more data comes through censors and other meth-
ods, we knew that we needed help to make sense of the information that was coming in.” The Microsoft Cloud will allow the city government to better service the community, Edelstein said. The data will give officials a sense of challenges and opportunities present in the city, and will support projects and initiatives to address those areas, he said. One of the projects the city plans to use the dashboards for is creating interconnected streetlights that see microsoft page 6