dailygamecock.com UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2019
CLEMsOn
hate week
ILLUSTRATION BY AIDAN SMITH // THE GAMECOCK
South Carolina and Clemson are set for their annual Palmetto Bowl Saturday. This is the 117th matchup between the schools. The Palmetto Bowl is one of the longest uninterrupted rivalries in the nation.
SEE PAGE 7 for more coverage of the South Carolina-Clemson football rivalry
Hong Kong protests cause evacuation of USC business students MADYN COAKLEY News Writer
Fo u r t h -y e a r i nt e r n at io n a l bu si ne s s a nd op er at ion s a nd supply chain st udent Madison Mueller escaped her universit y in Hong Kong on “a dirt path lined with wooden planks used by maintenance” to get to the airport. Every other way out was blocked by protesters, roadblock s and barricades. She then took a taxi to the airport. “Before the taxi arrived some men offered us beers in glass bottles, and, since we had all had ourselves quite a day, we took them,” Mueller said in an email interview. “Later on we were told that they wanted us to drink them so they could use the bottles to make Molotov cocktails.” The recent escalation of events on the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) campus led to an early evacuation of all USC students participating in the Darla Moore School of Business international business and Chinese enterprise program. First aware of the protests in
COURTESY OF MATT ALBURN
People crowd the streets at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. USC students studying abroad in Hong Kong returned to the U.S. due to unsafe conditions.
June, the Study Abroad Office had been actively monitoring the situation and directing students to avoid the demonstrations. A team of faculty members from this office, Darla Moore and the university’s St udent I nter nat iona l Travel Oversight Committee was formed to develop contingency plans in case of increased unrest and to ensure frequent communication was available.
“We were in touch with students regularly to pass on advice and resources, and to remind them that they could always contact us if they felt uncomfortable or unsafe,” Morgan Inabinet, the assistant director of Global Health, Safety and Securit y, said in an email interview.
SINCE 1908
VOL. 113, NO. 14
Students face advising issues despite expansion CHRISTINE BARTRUFF AND TYLER FEDOR News Writers
Advising has expanded at USC recently, and students still report issues from miscommunication to scheduling conflicts, which leads to the question: Where do we go from here? Advising has expanded, especially the past couple of years. According to statistics from the University Advising Center, 95% of undergraduate students now have an assigned academic adviser, compared with only 30% in 2014. The center has also worked on standardizing procedures university-wide, including implementing adviser training, according to Claire Robinson, the director of the University Advising Center. “It is a five-level tier program, and it focuses on seven competency areas,” Robinson said. “If you’re a new adviser, or a seasoned adviser, these are the seven areas we want you to focus on: So how does advising work at USC, policies and procedures, academic programs and requirements, technology, campus resources, undergraduate students ... and the advising profession at large.” The University Advising Center was created in 2015. According to the latest EAB (formerly the Education Advisory Board) report published in 2018, the four-year graduation rate at USC went from 54.4% in 2014 to 58.1% in 2017. The amount of students who said they were “satisfied” or “extremely satisfied” on the advising survey increased five percentage points since 2014. Even with these changes, students are still facing issues. One of these students is Mollie Solomon, a third-year nursing student. Solomon said she had scheduling issues this semester and last semester. “This semester we didn’t get our schedules until the day that classes started, which makes life super hard to plan with activities and work, and I had to quit my job last semester because I couldn’t tell them a schedule,” Solomon said. “It just wouldn’t have worked out.” Solomon said she also had conflicts between her clinical schedule and her band rehearsals, which she needed to attend to retain her band scholarship. Solomon said she was able to resolve the issue after speaking with her band directors and the nursing department. “It just wasn’t in my situation to be able to stop doing band this year, which also made things really stressful, but it’s all good now,” Solomon said. Wendy Troxel, the director of the National Academic Advising Association Center for Research at Kansas State University, said communication issues are “unfortunately common” at universities of USC’s size. This is intensified when advising centers are restructuring to cover more of their student population, like USC is, Troxel said. Caitlin Ferguson, a fourth-year criminology student, said she has struggled to even get an advising appointment and that an error message pops up when she tries to make one. Some students in one of her criminology classes have experienced the same issue. “They’ve been talking about it for at least a few weeks now. A lot of people are having the same issues I am, [which] is, they just can’t get an appointment,” Ferguson said.
SEE HONG KONG PAGE 4
SEE ADVISING PAGE 3
Rivalry week off to a hot start MATTHEW EDWARDS Sports Editor
Un iver sit y of Sout h Ca rol i na eng i ne er i ng s t udent s f rom t he A merican Societ y of Mechanical Eng i neers a nd t he Soc iet y of Hispanic Professional Engineers are gearing up for another year of the annual Tiger Burn tradition. This year’s Tiger Burn will be held on the evening of Nov. 25 at t h e G r e e n e S t r e e t I nt r a m u r a l Fields. These t wo societ ies have been work ing on t he desig n and const r uct ion for t he t iger si nce October. T he t iger is con st r uc ted i n a warehouse on Catawba Street and requ ires 4 0 hou rs of work f rom t he st udent s. A ccord i ng to t he president of the American Society
of Mechanical Engineers, O’Dhori Prioleau, the students work on the const r uct ion ever y Tuesday a nd Thursday for a month and a half from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Though the society is for mechanical engineers, all engineering students are welcome to participate. Pr ioleau is responsible for coordinating different parts of the event, such as making the schedule for bu i ld i ng t he s t r uc t u re a nd making a list of supplies needed for the construction. “I think it’s cool to be a part of behind the scenes,” Prioleau said. “ It ’s somet h i ng I c a n put on a resume, saying I managed this big project the student body will see.” Prioleau said “trailers move every part” of the tiger from a warehouse on Catawba Street to the location of the Tiger Burn, where they assemble
CAROLINE WILLIAMSON // THE GAMECOCK
Project leader Gabe Carrilho works on spray painting the stripes of the tiger.
the actual tiger on the field. This year, the tiger is roughly 28 to 30 feet and around 10 feet wide. Before construction begins, the tiger design is approved by the fire marshal to ensure safety. “We build it in parts,” Prioleau said. “We have the head, the midbody, t he bot tom a nd t hen t he
paws.” Last year, students used a rope to burn the tiger, but mini-torches might be used this year, Prioleau said. A few students will carry minitorches and all light the tiger at once. SEE TIGER BURN PAGE 9