Students should play intramurals

ZAID HAQ Mercury Staff

Whether you are a graduating senior or a freshman looking to find your place within the UTD community, it remains important for everyone to possess and embrace a certain level of competitiveness. Intramurals are an excellent way to do that.

With a constantly-growing campus, UTD has countless sources of competitive activities, from hack-a-thons to business presentations. Once found, this competitiveness can potentially translate into greater internship and job opportunities, as well as a network comprised of similarly goal-oriented people capable of harnessing and implementing change. Yet, sports remain an important avenue that students can utilize outside of a classroom environment to become leaders and build confidence in themselves.

Across campus, it is not uncommon to see people playing basketball or tennis near the Activity Center throughout the day. And despite not being a football school, UTD athletics continues to grow and expand into new areas, the latest of which has been esports. But for the remaining majority of students who do not play on a NCAA athletic team, UREC-led intramural sports provides the same competitive environment that allows students have the opportunity to prepare, lead, and perform in recreational activities across multiple areas. With activities ranging from one-night tournaments to extended sport leagues, UREC offers students the chance to form teams and perform individually or collectively in athletic events ranging from basketball to cricket, as well as gaming events such as Overwatch and FIFA. Although intramural sports are standard across most campuses in the nation, a campus as diverse and unique as ours should continue

SEE INTRAMURALS, PAGE 10 the Stream at Dusk” clearly reflects its title, repeatedly using orange, shades of blue and light brown to imbue her story with a comforting, dream-like atmosphere, which adds to the overall theme of the comic being a recollection of someone’s memories.

Jumping off of that, there is a visual style change that happens three times where the author includes actual photos from her life and Idaho-to-California move. The first happens when you open up the book: if you look at the right where the front board is, you’ll see a real picture of a pig eating and baby sheep pasturing on her farm. The second, when Lee’s big move to California finally happens, involves actual photos of the of the trip she took, but with the added detail that she's drawn over the picture where a person would appear with the artistic style she's using for the rest of the comic. Then, for the third and last time it happens again at the end of the comic: the backboard of the book has a closeup picture of a chicken from her farm. It’s a fitting ending, reminding us that this isn’t just some fictional story someone made to cope with a tragic event in their life; instead, it’s an intimate, true story about loss and recovery.

Beyond its visual expressiveness, Lee’s comic is funny in ways you don’t expect. For example, it is riddled with tastefully self-deprecating jokes. A specific scenario that showcases this occurs towards the end of the story, when she and her boyfriend decide to stop speaking to each other. She claims she took this conversation like a champ, but draws herself in the following panels crying while doing daily activities. (She most definitely did not take it like a champ). This calm situational humor combined with the comfort- much fighting, the conflict is constantly escalating, and as police chief he will be responsible for recruiting and training resistance forces. Defusco worries about the psychological toll of facing war in his homeland after so many years spent preventing it abroad.

“He’s just already been through so much, and to watch somebody who dedicated ten years of his life to helping other societies recover from war then have to face a war on his own home turf? It's just tragic,” she said. “But he's proud to be Ukrainian, and he thinks they can beat them back.”

For Chernenko’s family, it’s been one thing after another. A few years ago, they had finally saved up enough money to build their dream home in Zaporizhzhia—then it burned down. They just finished building a second house before the invasion began, but were forced to abandon it when war broke out, driving for 14 hours to escape Russian forces.

ATHENAEUM CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 the focus, [which] we got approval from the board of Regents for last month. We have to go ahead to start the construction.”

The Crow Museum already has a space downtown in the Dallas Arts District, where the museum is open to the public Tuesday through Sunday from 11am to 5pm. Sr. Direc-

STATUE CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 networking and alumni activity after graduation, so there are all kinds of benefits to being a member.”

Hart and Polk, who are members of Tau Beta Pi themselves, showed excitement about The Bent’s sudden arrival. The professors spent the past couple years raising the funds to get the monument, submitting proposals for its approval and waiting through a campus beatification before it could finally be placed

TACO CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 ully this is general enough to be a catch-all for people. Hope -

OVERWATCH

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3 they left spawn? Ok, they’re gone,”” Porter said. “It was fun cause it used to [be] we didn’t really do that, and

SOC CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3

Manual) says two weeks. But the real date is three weeks. And before my event happens, we have to plan what paperwork we have to submit,” Obenza said.

Between stringent timelines, loads of paperwork and the increasing potential for delayed reimbursement, many student organizations are simply opting out of using SOC funds.

While Popa set up a bank account for reimbursement for the Math Club back when he was president, they’ve since shut down the account.

Biomedical engineering senior Laura

HONORLOCK CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3 discussing the effectiveness and necessity of Honorlock, indicating a high level of engagement with the issue.

One of the questions on the survey asked about each feature individually in order to pinpoint users’ feelings about specific aspects of Honorlock. The features that students responded most poorly to

@chairsofutd) and Sleeps (@ utdsleeps)—who review furniture and naptime spots around campus respectively—rely on their own investigations around the University for content generation.

“My inspiration for this account came from exploring campus. seeing the variation in different interior design, I felt like it needed to be documented; and after seeing the [conical] chair in ATEC, I knew I had to document the different chairs around UTD,” Chairs wrote.

Sleeps stepped up- or laid down, rather- to fill what she saw as a gap in Instagram cov -

This year also marked Chernenko’s fourteenth of waiting for a green card. She was scheduled to fly to Eastern Europe in May to obtain it, but the Ukrainian Embassy closed down and informed her family that they would need to find another embassy in Europe to take their case. They spent the weekend after Russia’s initial attack writing letters.

“We probably wrote to 14 or 15 different ones. Romania, the Netherlands, Germany, everywhere, just to see who, what embassy would be willing to take our case,” she said. “A lot of them immediately said no, because they were having such a huge influx of refugees from Ukraine already—which is very much understandable, they are the ones who need immediate processing and help, as opposed to our case, which has just been on hold for a long time.”

Fortunately, Latvia has agreed to take their case; Chernenko is scheduled to fly there in May instead of to Ukraine. Still, she mourns the loss of the trip they had planned.

“I haven't been able to leave the tor Amy Hofland said that space is expected to remain in operation once Phase I is completed, but the majority of the Crow’s collections are not currently on display, due to the limited space afforded in downtown.

“We show about 15% of our collection right now. We love being in the Dallas Arts District … but I think our museum has always been growing beyond its seams: this first in ECS North’s courtyard. Now that The Bent has finally found its home on campus, UTD’s chapter of Tau Beta Pi will be throwing a celebration in its honor.

“It feels wonderful actually, to have The Bent on campus,” Feriha Ahmad said, electrical engineering senior and president of UTD’s chapter of Tau Beta Pi. “Finding it on campus, right in the middle of the ECS complex, lets everybody who walks past it see it. It is really cool to see a physical monument that represents the excel- fully, this is a great place to meet people and kind of form those relationships, which’ll in turn help you do better in school.” then we started trying it and then it started working really well. So we just kept pushing that further and further. So it’s been a lot of fun to make a style that other teams actually

Vargas Ortiz, president of Stop Pretending You Can’t Dance, said that previous officers had warned her about using SOC funds.

“I knew a bank account had existed, but when I adopted the club, I talked to the people before me and they were like, no, don’t go through SOC.

It’s literally the worst. Just go through Venmo. And I was like, okay, easy clap.

So, we have this Excel sheet … it’s literally color coded, itemized,” Ortiz said.

“Whenever someone graduates, all of the money is accounted for, for the next person. And we just use a personal Venmo, ‘cause it’s way easier.”

Former officer and biomedical en- were Honorlock’s webcam and microphone monitoring. Microphone monitoring was the most unpopular feature, with less than 10% of students feeling comfortable with it. erage. “I was just sitting there one day thinking hmm what if there was an account that just rated the best places to sleep on campus,” Sleeps said. “I decided I shall make the sleep rate account. All the other UTD accounts inspired me… as well as sleep.”

“My takeaway is that a lot of people don’t like Honorlock’s more invasive features,” the creator said.

However, students’ responses to other features- such as student ID verification to confirm test takers’ identities- were much more neutral.

Mutual inspiration is a common theme. Many accounts named Bruh Moments as their spiritual predecessor—even their newer inverse currently on hiatus, Yuh Moments (@utdyuhmoments)- but some find joy in the smaller accounts, too.

Green “particularly enjoyed” Chairs; Yuh Moments (@utdyuhmoments) and Trees (@ treesofutd) pointed to Bunnies

U.S. since we came here—it was just a part of, you know, being a refugee here—and I was so excited…my mom and I had talked about being able to visit the hospital while I was born and the school where she grew up and all of these places that meant a lot to her and to us as a family that I don't remember. And I know that those places don't, a lot of them just don't exist anymore, or they'll just never be the same way again. That is…devastating to think about.”

Defusco has witnessed similar stories over ten years of working with displaced persons. Oftentimes, there’s a separate psychological trauma associated with the lack of closure that people fleeing conflict often face when leaving home unexpectedly.

“Imagine if you had to walk right now to Mexico with nothing,” she said. “You think: ‘I'll be able to go back.’ And then you find out your house has gone. Your family's dead. Everything's gone.”

In other migrants, there’s often an active choice to leave. Whether it’s for economic opportunity, political phase will allow us to really fulfill the dream of the Crow family,” Hofland said. “We want to create a museum that is relevant and meaningful to students and to the communities around UT Dallas, that [is] celebrating the Asian community and really lifting the voices of Asian artists. So, I think that this is the really the completed version…we like to think of it as one museum in two locations.” lence in engineering at UTD regardless of Tau Beta Pi membership, and then on top of that there’s that extra special, ‘this is for our organization on campus and everything that we’ve done.’ It feels like a monument to all the engineers.”

The Bent itself is a watch key in the shape of trestle bent, resembling a parallelogram. A trestle is the part of a beam that supports and bears the weight of the structures above it. Similarly, Tau Beta Pi’s Bent represents an engineer’s responsibility to recognize.” With the release of Overwatch 2, the game will be reduced from a 6v6 to a 5v5 game, with the tank role reduced to a single player on the gineering senior Thien Nguyen said UTDuelists shut down their original bank account with Wells Fargo and switched to Venmo because, unable to pool for a minimum account balance, they were forced to pay monthly fees to Wells Fargo just to keep access to SOC funds.

Hawkins hopes for his new Taco Bell Club echo Saenz’s –but he said he stresses that Taco Bell itself isn’t the point.

“A lot of people, we just want to run our clubs. You know, we decide to make our clubs official with SOC because we want to have fun with the clubs, and [instead] we have to jump through all of these hoops and hurdles and meet every single month just to keep our club running,” Nguyen said. “Despite SOC

More than half of student respondents reported having no concerns about this feature.

“I think that shows that Honorlock can be good if it cuts back on the invasiveness,” he said.

A lesser-known concern about Honorlock that the creator tried to raise awareness of through his survey was the software’s use of “honeypot” websites to catch cheaters. These websites are designed to

(@utd_bunnies).

That interconnectedness between accounts gave their answers a sense of communitysomething that many felt arose from the University’s student culture as a whole. Trees theorized that the plethora of accounts is tied to the “misfit” nature of its student body and agreed with Green on the newness of UTD’s campus culture, with a lack of solid ground that lends itself to many different interpretations.

“Our undergraduate student body has only existed for less than 50 years, with freshmen only being here for about 30 years,” Trees said. “Even then, the university didn't grow much until the mid-2000s, so it stability or various other reasons, the émigrés make that intentional “mental switch” to a new situation, away from their previous life. Those forced to flee from their homes, however, often don’t get to make that shift, enforcing a kind of psychological displacement as well as physical.

Keeping up with the conflict, her family and immigration situation on top of her regular course load has been stressful for Chernenko.

“I just–I don’t know how to explain how long 14 years of waiting is, and also how much I was worried about my grandparents. The first two or three days, all I was doing was on the news. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t eat,” she said. “I failed at least one exam for sure…I got an extension on a project, and I appreciate that.” their field and the organization’s willingness to support engineers in their endeavors. The Greek letters from the organization’s year of founding, motto and values are inscribed on the Bent’s base.

Fellow students have been helpful, especially through campus organizations. She credits the friends she has made through UTD Nebula, a software development club, as a vital support system, but places the emphasis on those struggling in Ukraine.

With the additional space afforded by the Phase I location, Hofland said that the museum would regularly display about 80% collection, in accordance with conservation bestpractices. But the additional space would also open up the opportunity for visiting collections, with an eye towards creating a hub for appreciating Asian art that isn’t located on one of the coasts.

“Excellence in engineering comes with a strong responsibility to your industry, to yourself, to your peers, to the world that you’re creating things for and the hard work and integrity that goes into that,” Ahmad said.

Tau Beta Pi’s Bent also plays an important role during the orga-

“Taco Bell just happens to be a popular congregating spot-on campus,” Saenz said. “So, it was perfect to help foster a social team. Porter will be graduating and finishing his time as a tank player in a world of two tanks at the same time, but is ready for the new game to come. being helpful at times, I feel like that the number of times they’ve been a detriment are significantly more and it's honestly been a pain.”

The SOC monthly meeting is a point of complaint for more than just Nguyen. While intended to update organization officers with pertinent information to relay back to club members, Nguyen said he and others wished that the meetings were simply an email. Former Pokémon League President and computer science grad J.T. Landry said that they tuned out as they attended through the years and added that the annual risk management training felt par- trap students who copy and paste test questions directly into a search engine, hoping to find solutions online. Masquerading as innocuous search results, they record who visits them and for how long. Privacy concerns are raised by the fact that they also record clicks from devices that are not using the Honorlock extension and try to match them up with a student who is currently taking an exam to provide evidence of makes sense that always-online internet culture would become the predominant culture on campus!”

It’s not all sunshine, however. Trees criticized Bruh’s focus on negative interactions with the university, for instance, and many pages have been abandoned over the years. Yuh Moments apologized for their lack of new posts, admitting that they were struggling to “find the ‘yuh’” lately. Still, a significant portion of these accounts are going strong, lasting through lockdown and pushing forward into the future- Bruh has even begun using their platform to fundraise for human rights causes, emphasizing social justice and “[passing] the kindness

“I think I'll bounce back, but we'll see. It's okay. The most important thing is, you know, just getting through it. Even if I fail a class, I can always take it later,” Chernenko said. “The people who really need help right now are in Ukraine, are at the borders. There's people who don't have medicine, who don't have insulin right now. What's the most important right now is spreading that information.”

Many organizations are accepting online donations, from ActionAidU-

“Bringing in contemporary artists, bringing in collections that are outside the scope of the Crow [collection], that’s essential, because we say we're building the Asian art museum of Dallas in these incremental steps,” she said. “We’re looking at some of the national collections of India and thinking of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, [to see] what is in storage that we might create an in- nization’s inductions. Students of a certain academic caliber are sent an invitation into the honor society. During the ceremony, inductees are given a smaller version of The Bent that is roughcast and needs to be polished, which symbolizes putting in the work to achieve your goals, exemplifying Tau Beta Pi’s fondness of hard work.

Pol said the monument is not yet complete; The Bent still requires a plaque that describes what it is and its relation to Tau Beta Pi. Ahmad and organization. This could as well have been the Halal Shack Club or the Chic-Fil-a Club if lots of people flocked there, you know.

“I will really miss there being tank duos, … always been a lot of camaraderie there between the tank line and you have to work together really well. So you spend a lot of time ticularly outdated.

“I got tired of the meetings because I had been going to meetings forever and like, alright, I know what’s coming up now, I hear this one at least once a semester,” Landry said. “The risk management training … it’s the same PowerPoint from almost a decade ago at this point. With outdated memes. It has a philoso-raptor in it.”

The general consensus amongst students is that while SOC is there to help, overly bureaucratic policies combined with the staffing shortage handicap the office’s ability to assist organizations and deterring them from walking through their academic dishonesty.

65% of survey respondents were not initially aware of Honorlock’s honeypot websites, and only a tiny fraction could actually identify them when shown screenshots.

Knowing about the honeypots made more than a quarter of survey respondents reconsider their support of their universities’ continued use of Honorlock.

Overall, the results of their survey forward” in their interview.

“Accounts like Bruh Moments give students a common point of conversation for things that happen at UTD and provide a way to stay connected… Being able to say “bruh” and laugh about something on the Bruh Moments platform enriches students’ community experience and reminds everyone to stay positive,” Bruh said. “We believe positivity goes a long way, and we hope our impact is one that makes Comets smile.”

After all, while spin-off Instagrams are a silly part of student life, they can bring some much-needed levity to a stressful time. Sleeps and Bruh Moments are glad to bring smiles

SA to UNICEF, as well as the International Rescue Committee, which focuses on refugee assistance.

“This is the moment. If you're going to do stuff, go be active,” Defusco said. “Petition your senators and your congressmen to take action. Go volunteer; go fundraise. Because you're going to look back and get to say, ‘I contributed to supporting one of the most important, if not the most important event that happened in the early 21st century’…you only have this one time. You can’t go back.” ternational partnership with to bring objects here on a yearly rotation.” While the expanded Crow Museum has potential to become an internationally-recognized “epicenter” for Asian art, the project also entails several components designed to cater directly to Comets. Benson said that Phase II, while further out, is equally important to the goal of better integrating the arts into UTD. the organization’s other officers have been working on the specific wording that will be used for the plaque.

“The UTD chapter of Tau Beta Pi has only been around for two years because UTD as a whole is a very young university, so I think that a lot of people don’t really recognize the name of the organization at first or if they get an email invitation it gets brushed under the rug,” Ahmad said. “I think having the [The Bent] on campus highlights who we are and gives us more recognition.”

And we might move past Taco Bell. Who knows? Whatever helps us get to know each other and have fun.” playing together and getting use to each other, but that aspect’s gonna be gone,” Porter said. “So that’s a little sad that that’ll be gone, but we’ll see what new experiences arrive.” office doors on the second floor of the SU. Alumni and AIGA founding member Gina Rattanakone said that the sentiment is that clubs would just have to manage if they slipped through the cracks.

“At times we just managed on our own. That's what we were doing and I'm pretty sure that's what other clubs did too,” Rattanakone said. “SOC does have resources, but we cannot rely on them most of the time, and sometimes getting a hold of that support is more of a tedious effort. SOC is like a parental figure with too many kids. There’s limited resources and we’re all fighting for attention.” make the creator skeptical about Honorlock’s role in a post-pandemic world.

“Honestly, outside of schools that will continue to provide an online option, I don't think [Honorlock] has much of a role going forward,” he said. “I think students are more comfortable with one real human watching over them instead of HAL-9000 and random people you don't know and can't see.” to students’ faces. Green enjoys the engagement with others on campus. Sunsets is happy with the impact that submissionsbased accounts can have on the student body.

“I really value other students sending me their photos as I believe it helps build a strong student community centered around displaying the natural beauties of UTD’s campus,” Sunsets said.

Perhaps there’s hope for the pages on pause, too, even in the midst of global crisis.

“Reflecting on everything that students have gone through, I think I may start posting again,” Trees said. “I may as well play my part in making UTD a meme paradise.”