INSIDE
Team Miley impresses at Sing Song
Dallas gets low marks for health
PAGE 2
Response to LGBT petition
PAGE 4
Continuing the countdown
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monday
april 14, 2014
MONday High 70, Low 37 TUEsday High 63, Low 41
VOLUME 99 ISSUE 80 FIRST COPY FREE, ADDITIONAL COPIES 50 CENTS
Students lead in TEDxSMU
International
Meredith Carey Contributing Writer mbcarey@smu.edu
When TEDxSMU presented Inside SMU last week to celebrate creative thought of campus leaders, professors and alumni weren’t alone on the stage. Students presented TED talks of their own, highlighting their innovation and originality. Chris Carillo, Mariah Cowley, Brittany Harrington and Arnaud Zimmern presented on everything from water and Maslow’s Hierarchy, bassoons in pop music, origami and digital humanities. And how did they get this opportunity? “As much as we complain about receiving too much SMU email garbage, this was one of those mass-invitations you’re actually happy to receive. The application process, which was linked to in the email, was simple and the rest was just a long wait,” said Zimmern, a senior studying French, English and mathematics. Dean and Lyle professor of engineering innovation, Marc Christensen, said that the ideas the students presented in these applications belonged on the TED stage, which is known for its inspirational thinking. “When you think about it the current students far outnumber everyone else on campus and they are in a mode of grabbling with ideas every day. It should be no surprise that some of the best ideas around area going to
Courtesy of AP
Armed pro-Russian activists pose for a photo after they occupied the police station in the eastern Ukraine town of Slovyansk.
Ukraine to launch anti-terror operation ASSOCIATED PRESS
CLAIRE KELLEY / The Daily Campus
Engineering major Mariah Cowley explains her Giant Origami interactive art project.
come from them,” Christensen said. “The TEDx format has the ability to inspire people to think bigger on how they can impact the world, but the students we had on stage were already there — that is why they were chosen to speak.” Harrington, a Performer’s Diploma graduate student, said that her experience on stage speaking about her involvement in thinking outside the box with the bassoon was completely different from her past times on stage. “Typically when I am in front of people, I am playing my
instrument so to do a talk was a new and exciting endeavor,” Harrington said. “My talk was about the ways that my quartet has made the bassoon relevant to pop music...My hope is that people will look at what we have done and bring some creativity to their projects and lives.” Zimmern was not only impacted by his time on stage, saying his experience was “in one word: exhilarating,” but also as an audience member listening to his fellow students. “I discovered a new favorite actually at the TEDxSMU
event: it was Mariah Cowley’s,” Zimmern said. “Her talk [spoke] on the value of merging what one does with what one loves for the sake of those we love the most. “[She showed us] that our projects, giant or small, can always be recycled and repurposed to bring greater joy and greater peace to those around us. It was, in the finest sense, a moving talk,” Zimmern said. When given a stage for “Ideas Worth Sharing,” TED’s motto, student leaders like Zimmern, Harrington, Cowley and Carrillo surely stepped up to the task.
CAREERS
Jumping from intern to employee Dacota Taylor Contributing Writer dtaylor@smu.edu Many SMU students are in the final stages of interviewing and, hopefully, selecting and committing to a summer internship. After a semester — and for some, even longer — of applications, phone interviews, let downs and final decisions, plenty of students may ask themselves, “Does interning really pay off ?” For many students, it certainly does. Some students get internships that end up leading to jobs with their companies. Some go from internship to internship within the
same company until they’re hired. According to Southern Methodist University’s Kim Austin, the executive director for Cox’s Career Management Centers, it’s not uncommon to see interns hired directly into the company they were with. “Companies like to hire from within, and if they’ve helped train an intern to work the way they prefer, it’s sometimes easier to just hire the intern upon graduation rather than look elsewhere,” she said. Students normally hunt down an internship their junior and senior years, start working for a company for free, learn a few job skills and then end up finding a job with the same company or a similar company
after they graduate. The Dallas Morning News’ Julie Fancher interned with the newspaper for a year, starting in 2012, while studying journalism at SMU. “To be able to start my career at such a well-known, well-regarded place was almost like an opportunity I couldn’t give up,” Fancher said. The biggest change between her intern title and her employee title is she now can enjoy benefits, something companies can avoid giving workers if they’re just interns. “There was always a chance that it wasn’t going to work out and that I was going to have to go somewhere else,” she said. Austin explained the chances of getting a job are better as a
graduating senior than as someone who interned post-graduation and then started looking for work. “Multiple internships with the same company is fine,” Austin said. “If they keep asking you back, that’s a good sign.” “If it’s a company you want to be with, definitely get an internship there,” Fancher said. “And if they extend your time there, [that’s ideal]. Do everything you can whenever you can.” That’s what happened to Carol Shih with D Magazine. Although Shih interned four times, two while in school and two after graduating from Duke
INTERNSHIP page 3
WORLD
US looking into Syria toxic gas reports ASSOCIATED PRESS The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said Sunday that reports of a poison gas attack in a rural village north of Damascus were so far “unsubstantiated,” adding that the United States was trying to establish what really happened before it considers a response. Both sides in Syria’s civil war blamed each other for the alleged attack that reportedly injured scores of people Friday amid an ongoing international effort to rid the country of chemical weapons. The details of what happened in Kfar Zeita, an opposition-held village in Hama province some 200 kilometers (125 miles) north of Damascus, remain murky. Online videos posted by rebel activists showed pale-faced men, women and children gasping for
Courtesy of AP
This image provided by Shams News Network, a loosely organized antiAssad group and is consistent with independent AP reporting, shows a child crying as he sits on a bed with others, in Kfar Zeita, Syria.
breath at what appeared to be a field hospital. They suggested an affliction by some kind of poison — and yet another clouded incident where both sides blame each other in a conflict
that activists say has killed more than 150,000 people with no end in sight. “We are trying to run this down,” said Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United
Nations, during an appearance Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “So far it’s unsubstantiated, but we’ve shown, I think, in the past that we will do everything in our power to establish what has happened and then consider possible steps in response,” she said. In the Syrian capital, Syrian President Bashar Assad said the conflict in Syria was shifting in the government’s favor. “This is a turning point in the crisis, both militarily in terms of the army’s continuous achievements in the war against terror or socially in terms of national reconciliation and growing awareness of the true aims of the attack on the country,” state-run Syrian television quoted Assad as saying. He spoke to a group of students and teachers
SYRIA page 3
Ukraine is launching a “large-scale anti-terrorist operation” to resist attacks by armed pro-Russian forces, Ukraine’s President Oleksandr Turchynov said on Sunday in a televised address. The authorities in Kiev will use the army in order to prevent Russian troops from moving in as they did in Crimea, Turchynov said as he pledged amnesty to anyone laying down arms by Monday morning. “The Security Council has made a decision to begin a largescale anti-terrorist operation with participation of army forces,” he said. “We’re not going to allow Russia to repeat the Crimean scenario in Ukraine’s east.” Ukrainian special forces exchanged gunfire with a proRussia militia in an eastern city Sunday morning, with at least one security officer killed and five others wounded. It was the first reported gunbattle in eastern Ukraine, where armed pro-Russia men have seized a number of government buildings in recent days. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov has described such attacks as “Russian aggression.” He said in a Facebook post Sunday that special forces of up to 12,000 people will be drawn from volunteers in their local areas in a bid to resist attacks from pro-Russian forces. Russia’s Foreign Ministry was quick to dismiss Turchynov’s decree as “criminal” and accused Ukrainian officials of using radical neo-Nazi forces.
Turchynov said a Security Service captain was killed and two colonels wounded in a gunbattle outside Slovyansk, where the police station and the Security Service office were seized a day earlier. An Associated Press reporter found a bullet-ridden SUV on the side of the road and a pool of blood on the passenger seat where the gunbattle was supposed to have taken place. Vladimir Kolodchenko, a lawmaker from the area who witnessed the attack, said a car with four gunmen pulled up on the road in a wooden area outside Slovyansk and opened fire on Ukrainian soldiers who were standing beside their vehicles. Both attackers and the Ukrainian servicemen left soon after the shooting. Unrest has spread to several municipalities in eastern Ukraine, including the major industrial city of Donetsk, which has a large Russianspeaking population. Donetsk was also the support base for Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president ousted in February following months of protests in Kiev, the capital, that were ignited by his decision to back away from closer relations with the European Union and turn toward Russia. Ethnic Russians in Ukraine’s east widely fear that the new proWestern Ukrainian government will suppress them. The regional administration in Donetsk issued a statement, confirming one dead and saying
UKRAINE page 3
Campus
Studio to be named for Belo chair Pederson Courtney Cox Contributing Writer cecox@smu.edu Last summer was filled with renovations in the journalism school. Renovations that, in a few weeks, will be dedicated to the Belo Foundation Endowed Distinguished Chair in Journalism Pederson. Lucy Scott, broadcast journalist in residence, believes this ceremony will give credit where it’s due. “Naming the studio after our chair, Tony Pederson, acknowledges the work that he’s done in advancing and building the journalism division. Raising the money to upgrade the server and the control room and to a great degree, the studio,” Scott said. The dedication will take place April 23 in the journalism wing of the Umphrey Lee Center at 4 p.m. The broadcast studio is due to be named the “Pederson
Broadcast Studio.” The funds for the donation were given by a family, which wishes to remain anonymous. The family told Pederson last year that they approached the dean of Meadows and wished to name the studio in his honor. “I was stunned, and still am, but at the same time very deeply honored that they would do it so we’re going to have a dedication ceremony in a couple weeks and it’s going to be great fun,” Pederson said. The journalism students are getting to work with equipment that even some small-market news stations don’t have. Rebekah Tate, who aspires to become a producer, appreciates having access to this equipment. “The new broadcast studio gives us really great experience in the newsroom. It’s helping prepare us for the internships and jobs we’re trying to get,” Tate said.