The Mercury 07 26 21

New VP of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Yvette Pearson succeeds George Fair in spearheading diversity initiatives

After nearly a decade of service, Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement George Fair will be replaced by a new Vice President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) this fall.

Set for induction on Aug. 23, Yvette Pearson comes from Rice University where she served as Associate Dean of Engineering. While at Rice, Pearson also led several DEI initiatives, including forming a DEI committee, a diversity recognition program and a program focused on equity in faculty hiring. Throughout her 25 years in higher education, spanning from her time at the National Science Foundation

to UTD, Pearson said her focus has been supporting students from traditionally marginalized backgrounds and ensuring equity within faculty and staff interactions. It's this focus that caught the eye of Stephanie Adams, dean of the Jonsson School of Engineering, who was on UTD's DEI VP Search Committee.

Adams said Pearson’s wealth of experience, collaborative leadership style and evaluation and assessment background stood out to the Committee.

As a dean, Adams said she was looking for a partner to tackle diversity issues with faculty recruiting and hiring and students, and she believes Pearson will effectively lead the programmatic

changes needed to address them.

“One of the things that we kept saying in the search process is that we have a great orchestra already here, all the topnotch players and so forth, but we need

a conductor to bring it all to harmony,” Adams said. “I see Yvette as that conductor. She’s got an impeccable reputation in the larger STEM education community as an advocate for DEI, and she knows how important it is for organizations to be inclusive and think [broadly]. I think that's going to set us apart from some other places, the fact that we do have Yvette here to lead our efforts.”

Pearson’s passion for DEI stems from a combination of personal and career experience. As a Black disabled woman, Pearson said she has experienced inequities associated with her identity, and as an engineer, she strives to advance human good, which she believes starts with a di-

LANS ARE BACK!

verse, equitable and inclusive work and school environment.

“It's really interesting that when I'm having conversations with my soon-tobe 75-year-old mother about her experiences in the workplace, there are still [issues] that we see happening today,” Pearson said. “And so, when I'm having this conversation with my daughter who just graduated from high school, when she gets into the workforce, I would like something to be different.”

It is this desire for change, Pearson said, that drove her to pioneer the DEI initiatives at Rice. She began with prioritizing

Comet Cab comeback

Regular campus transportation will be reintroduced alongside developing changes

Following an extended suspension of regular campus transportation, the Parking and Transportation Office is preparing for Comet Cabs to return to full functionality by the end of the upcoming semester.

Assistant Director of UTD Parking and Transportation Elena Galli Grant, one of the administrators in charge of this process, said that the plan currently is to slowly reintroduce Comet Cabs to full operations in the fall.

“Right now, there’s been plans to run all of our major routes on campus for the fall, and we’re going to phase them in,” Grant said. “But we can’t say what that’s going to look like the first day of class.”

She also cited a couple of considerations that accompany the program’s revival, emphasizing the importance of complying with CDC guidelines and ensuring the safety of all parties involved.

“There’s a lot that goes into making these routes and making them safe,” Grant said. “And also, the campus has changed so much in the last year and a half. We have to redo routes, see what works. Back in February 2020, it was

an alarming situation and things were scary because we didn’t even know what products killed COVID. We would use germicides and spray everything down between each route; we had disposable gloves, hand sanitizer, we would deep clean the Comet Cabs every single week.

So, it'll be similar when we come back; the good news now is that at least there's an abundance of supplies. Facilities management on campus has been really good about that.”

Comet Cabs have been employed sparingly during the pandemic for students on campus who require accessibility accommodations. Those services are guaranteed to be available beginning the first day of the fall semester, but incorporation of regular routes may occur more gradually.

“Right now, our plan is to get everything like we did before COVID, it’s just, we can't say for sure until we're in the situation,” Grant said. “I think most likely [we’ll] start bringing [Comet Cabs] back a few at a time, especially the more popular routes, like the ones that are further away. So, that's where we would start if we started phasing in. But,

Sensory overload

Professor creates affordable pollution sensors for DFW area

A UTD professor created low-cost air sensors that track pollutant levels in local communities and detect increases in air pollution in real-time.

Physics professor David Lary aspired to conduct a project that would make a mark on the world. 10 years ago, he established the Multi-Scale Integrated Interactive Intelligent Sensing (MINTS) initiative: a set of innovations and projects designed to detect and protect humans against potential dangers to society. The initiative utilizes machine learning and is compartmentalized into nine different sentinel factors.

“The purpose of developing this system is to keep people out of harm’s way,” Lary said. “The goal is to have preemptive protection and if an issue happens, to have actionable insights as quickly as possible.”

A particular focus of Lary’s over the last year has been creating a ground survey sentinel system to monitor pollution levels in local communities. For individuals dealing with respiratory issues such as asthma, increased pollutants can trigger attacks on the immune system, causing individuals to need medical attention. And while traditional EPA sensors provide detailed street-level

measurements of pollution in a matter of seconds, Lary said that they’re debilitatingly expensive.

“The EPA sensors provide high quality and expensive observations and as a result, we can’t have one every half a kilometer, which would be optimal in tracking pollutions levels effectively,”

Lary said.

Another issue with EPA sensors is that they only update measurements

hourly, typically on an additional hour’s delay. It would be more efficient for individuals to track pollution levels before going outdoors rather than two hours after.

As a result, Lary created a series of nodes using machine learning to make low-cost pollution sensors. These sensors require low maintenance and last

YVETTE PEARSON | COURTESY

Yvette Pearson served as Associate Dean of Engineering at Rice

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UTDPD Blotter

June 14 • An unaffiliated male was arrested and charged with a Warrant County Felony for theft of property at 12:33 a.m. on campus.

June 18 • A UTD student who took a combination of illicit and prescribed drugs was transported to Methodist Renner by RFD at 11 p.m. for accidental overdose, after calling for medical help.

LANS ARE BACK

BEN NGUYEN MANAGING EDITOR

LANs are back! After a large time spent in quarantine, offline gaming events are returning to a variety of venues around the DFW area. This is in large part due to the relaxed restrictions and availability of a vaccine, leading many venues to begin opening up for larger events. From arcades to stadiums, Founders lobby to the Student Union, here's some events to watch out for.

Every Thursday at the Free Play Arcade Richardson, Freaks holds a Super Smash Brothers Ultimate Bracket where some of the best in the DFW area (including the UTD Smash Team) compete for the top. Entry to the arcade is $12, and if you're not fighting in the bracket, you can take the time to enjoy the arcade, food and beverages.

Easing into intramurals

Recreational sporting experiences return with certain modifications

TYLER BURKHARDT Editor-in-Chief

As Comets return to the reality of in-person schooling, a plethora of other opportunities present themselves – including the potential for in-person sports. In the words of Assistant Director of Competitive Sports Chris Gormley, “We’re back!”

As with just about any post-COVID program, the intramurals will not look identical to their pre-pandemic counterparts. However, Gormley said that his team is making every effort possible to bring the fullest intramural experience to the entire student body; certain adjustments are just necessary to accomplish that goal.

“We’re excited to have people back to playing intramurals, but it’s all going to be a bit modified because this is going to be so many people’s first experience with it,” Gormley said. “We’re trying to do our best to adjust to a lack of experience on the part of our student body.”

While those adjustments may mean that the intramural experience isn’t exactly what upperclassmen had in the past, Gormley said that the intent is to replicate the spirit of past intramural seasons while lowering the barrier to entry for first-time participants.

“Usually upperclassmen kind of bring freshmen along and introduce them to the nuances of how the intramurals work – the modified rules, expectations, and just show them the ropes,” Gormley said. “That’s the culture that we’ve tried to build, but we don’t have that. We have two years of inexperienced classes, and when you look at participation statistics, freshmen and sophomores are our main participants. So, we’re trying to modify events in a way that can bring everybody along and help us build the program back up rather than snapping our fingers and saying, ‘everything is just like it was!’”

Moreover, inexperienced participants aren’t the only challenge that a lost year due to COVID present. Gormley explained that not having sustained interactions with the students last year also blunted their staff recruitment efforts.

“Realistically,” Gormley said, “we don’t have a lot of staff that have really gone through the rigors of running the intramural program…usually, we pull our staff from participants, and there just wasn’t an opportunity to do that last year.”

However, the modifications under consideration won’t change the slated schedule of sports

so much as allow the entire program to gradually ramp up to “normal” operations. For example, instead of immediately kicking the year off with a 7v7 flag football season, UREC is looking at beginning with mini-tournaments with smaller, 4-on-4 teams to help students ease into the format. That way, new Comets can familiarize themselves with the rules and their peers before expanding the sport out to the full-blown schedule by mid-semester. The schedule for fall intramurals will release on the UREC website after the conclusion of the summer session. But, Gormley said that students can anticipate a diverse array of upcoming sports, including flag football, inner tube water polo, doubles tennis, cardboard boat regatta, some selection of esports and cricket. Registration will open shortly before fall classes begin.

“Ultimately,” Gormley said, “we’re just excited to have the energy of students back in the building and on the field. We want everybody to come in and see what we’re offering this fall, and our message remains that no matter who you are, we have something for you. Going to UTD is hard – we want to help balance school with something that can keep you happy, healthy and having fun.”

person Overwatch

The Overwatch League (OWL) will be having playoffs in the Esports Stadium in Arlington, just like the Battle for Texas showdown between the Dallas Fuel and Houston Outlaws on July 9th. These LANs can feel like miniature conventions, with a variety of activities, cosplayers, and of course, the live gameplay to follow. The Battle for Texas brought Dallas Fuel fans from all over to the stadium to buy merch, make signs and cheer on the team, but when the OWL playoffs start in September, fans of all sorts of teams will show up to Arlingotn to shout their own team chants and really drive the audience tension.

Two players play some warmup matches in Founder's before the tournament starts.

The Fighting Game Community (FGC) at UTD is also thriving, with in person meetups happening on occasion in spots like the Student Union and in Founder's. Recently, they hosted a Guilty Gear Strive tournament in the lobby of Founder's and generally have drinks to

The crowd roars in anticipation of the first in

League match in over a year.

Dallas Fuel support Seeong-soo "Jecse" Lee takes the stage.

The Super Smash Brothers Ultimate bracket at the Freaks Richardson tournament is underway.

Two competitors fight for a bracket spot on Pokemon Stadium.

have while fighting fellow UTD students.

Study participants undergo SMART training to assess overall brain health

UTD’s Center for BrainHealth (CBH) is conducting a study to help individuals optimize their overall brain performance.

BBS professor and Chief Director of CBH Sandra Chapman has been studying the brain for more than 20 years. During her time in research, she and her team developed a way for people to train their brains using a variety of approaches and strategies. The result is the Strategic Memory Advanced Reasoning Training (SMART), which is exemplified through The BrainHealth Project created in March of 2020.

SMART – which is currently being done virtually – requires research participants to take a medical screening questionnaire and if they qualify, a series of assessments to determine their BrainHealth Index every six months. The BrainHealth Index measures and tracks a participant’s overall brain function in terms of social behavior, comprehension and health.

Margaret Athene Chaplin, administrative assistant of CBH, said the BrainHealth Index measures an individual’s brain performance based on their daily life, well-being and sociality. After getting their BrainHealth Index, participants meet virtually with a BrainHealth coach who explains what their BrainHealth Index means in detail.

“The coaching sessions help participants implement strategies in their daily life to optimize their brain’s performance,” Chaplin said. “If you have any particular hurdle, you can use your coaching session to get guidance on how to deal with that.”

Chaplin said that a participant with long-term brain fog from COVID-19 gained brain clarity by participating in SMART. Also, a participant with an autoimmune disorder said they felt less fatigued and more focused after going through the training.

SMART consists of brief courses, videos, short answers, quizzes and readings. The courses include sections on strategic attention, integrated reasoning, innovation and creative thinking. The training also suggests ways to help your brain form healthy habits when dealing with stress and getting sleep.

“It’s been scientifically proven that if a participant does the work and uses the strategies they develop during their SMART training, it’s proactive in forming healthy behaviors when overcoming challenges and dealing with stress,” Chaplin said.

Matthew Goodykoontz White, a student and previous intern at CBH, said the BrainHealth Index has been beneficial for participants with mental health issues.

“One of the proudest benefits the Center for BrainHealth

Oozeball postponed to spring semester

Students allowed to take one additional credit hour without school authorization

Starting this fall, UTD undergraduates will be allowed to take a maximum of 19 credit hours in a long semester without special permission.

In previous semesters, students who wished to take more than 18 hours had to obtain permission from the Associate Dean of their school. After reviewing the student’s academic record and intended course selections, the school’s administration would determine whether a course load greater than 18 credits was appropriate. The decision to change the maximum to 19 was based on findings of no statistically significant difference between the GPAs of students who took 18 and 19 credit hours in a semester.

Dean of Undergraduate Education

Jessica Murphy said that the University periodically reviews policies in the course catalog to ensure that they are best meeting students’ needs.

“Such review includes research of historical institutional data and research of peer and aspirant

peer institutions,” Murphy said. “Reviewing the course load policy revealed that 19 SCH would be the most beneficial change for students.”

The change first proceeded through the Council of Undergraduate Education, followed by the Committee on Educational Policy and then finally the Academic Senate, where it was approved at a January 2021 meeting.

A related modification to course policy is the addition of an absolute cap on enrollment at 21 hours. Murphy said that this is already in line with general practice, but the new policy puts it in writing.

“The policy review revealed that students would benefit from clearer language about course load,” Murphy said. “Including the 21 SCH in the language helped to clarify this section.” Students wishing to take 20 or 21 credit hours are now required to discuss their plans with their academic adviser and complete a unit maximum waiver form.

The new enrollment caps as well as other course load-related policies can be found in the Undergraduate Catalog.

Credit hour limit extended Update: Housing's COVID protocols

UTD will test international students upon arrival, reduces isolation capacity

TYLER BURKHARDT Editor-In-Chief

UTD’s proactive testing and isolation programs will continue this fall, but on a reduced scale, as the University plans to rely on vaccinations to drive down case count.

Associate Vice President of Student Affairs Matt Grief, who oversaw University Housing’s COVID testing and response program last year, said that due to CDC restrictions on international travel, COVID testing will be mandatory upon arrival to campus for all international students. With regards to the isolation program, 10 fully-furnished 1-bedroom University Village apartments are currently set aside as on-campus quarantine residences.

“We were using those as isolation spots last year, in addition to the spots in Canyon Creek Heights North, and we’ve decided to keep those units offline and use them strictly for quarantine and isolation if necessary,” Grief said. “Now, our hope is that students will continue to get vaccinated and we’ll see a decline in caseload level. Even with as many students as we had on campus at the end of last year, we didn’t really see a large number of cases at one time except for early on in the semester when we did all of the testing and nobody had the vaccine.”

The procedure for any student who needs to isolate will be nearidentical to last year: local Comets have the opportunity to quarantine at home, but those who stay on campus will have meals, laundry and waste disposal services provided

to enable total isolation over the allocated time period.

But with only 10 residences available for quarantine, there is a valid concern over what would happen if more than 10 students needed to isolate on campus at a time.

“We’ll have to kind of evaluate that,” Grief said. “Our hope is that more students get vaccinated, and if we do start seeing an increase, unvaccinated students

who get sick might be living with vaccinated folks already and we could leave them in place close to those students and not have to isolate them.”

If any on-campus housing goes unfilled, Grief said that it could be converted into additional isolation housing. However, with the exception of freshman overflow housing, on-campus apartments are currently about 99% booked. Regardless, Grief

said, UTD is not going to merely cross its fingers with regards to student vaccinations.

“There will be a mass campaign for vaccinations in the fall,” Grief said. “The on-site vaccination center with UT Southwestern worked out really well, so we’ll be working to get students easeof-access again to continue that effort so students can keep themselves and each other safe.”

ANNA

PHENGSAKMUEANG

Photo Editor

Opening the doors to La Casita Bakeshop, a gentle aroma of freshly baked delicacies and warm smiles greet visitors as they peruse through the shop. Only open on the weekends, La Casita is run by Marisca Tresco and Alex Henderson in an old plaza located off of Arapaho and Custer.

The bakery's name derives from Tresco's mother's habit of adding "ita" to the end of words to describe them affectionately as cute or petite in Spanish. Tresco and Henderson wanted to create a business that would feel like home to customers while also making an impact on the food scene in Dallas. To keep things fresh, they change their menu weekly. Otherwise, Henderson says, “after a month of eating the same stuff, why would our regulars come back?”

La Casita also regularly collaborates with other local businesses like restaurants or pop-up shops that would like a bread and pastry supply. Their most recent collab was with The Boba Plug, a local boba pop-up, where their menu was based off Asian cuisine such as their spam musubi croissant (a slice of Spam on top of a bed of rice wrapped up in a croissant and topped with a piece of seaweed and sesame seeds). As weird as it sounds, the croissant is such a flavorful, crispy, flaky, buttery pastry that I would love to have it again.

SEE CAFE, PAGE 8

Rewriting the book on religion Student debt mural

As a Muslim growing up in the United States, UTD alumnus Badees Nouiouat often found himself frustrated at the lack of an authentic representation of his faith in children’s books.

At school, the history he was taught was extremely Western-centric, and it was difficult to find literature and media that didn’t vilify Muslim characters. As the oldest of five boys, Nouiouat wanted to change that for his younger brothers. So, when he found himself with extra time over winter break, he started to write, penning a novel that centers on a young Muslim hero and features an overlooked part of history. The result was The Adventures of Nur Al-Din, a 224-page young adult novel that became available on Amazon in June.

Set in the 16th century, the book features Farid, a young boy who comes of age as the Spanish Empire is attempting to take over his land. In a bid to protect his country and family, Farid joins a crew of pirates that are defending the Mediterranean coast. The story is inspired by the contentious history between the Spanish Empire and Algeria and Tunisia. Over the course of his research for the book, Nouiouat discovered that as part of a sixteenth-century attempt to remain Catholic, Spain forcibly removed Muslims who had lived there for hundreds of years. Subsequently, the empire even began trying to colonize the countries to which Muslims had fled.

“A lot of the history that we’re taught is Western-centric and it really shows one perspective, whereas if you try to find the other perspective, you can find a more balanced medium which is closer to what truly happened in history,” Nouiouat said.

Though Nouiouat started and published The Adventures of Nur Al-Din within a matter of months, the writing process wasn’t without setbacks. With no experience in fiction writing, he learned about plot lines and character development as he wrote. By the end of the break, he had completed a 90-page novella – and then he started over.

“I realized that the quality that I had written in the first few chapters of that

book was miles away from the quality at the end of the book,” Nouiouat said. “My writing improved so much by the end, and I just realized. . . ‘let me take this new skill that I’m starting to build and try something with a different plotline.’”

Deciding that he had overdone the positive messages on his first try, Nouiouat focused on creating a more exciting plot that would captivate his brothers but still teach them good values.

Since publication, he’s gotten a lot of positive feedback from readers, and he could see The Adventures of Nur Al-Din becoming a series in the future, especially since he now has a better understanding of the editing, cover design and self-publishing processes. The project also gave him a better understanding of his style and method as a writer.

“When I was writing, I was kind of just envisioning a story unfold before my eyes and I was just like narrating what had happened,” Nouiouat said. “My eyes would kind of glaze over, just typing away, so that’s why I was able to work in these spurts and get a lot of work done really fast.”

The project wasn’t Nouiouat’s first experience with creating media that represents his faith. As a junior, he founded The Irving Muslim, a digital and print newspaper that focuses on sharing the stories and perspectives of the city’s Muslim community.

“I just found that there was a lack of information, a lack of an outlet where people in my faith community – the

Muslim community of Irving – could just talk about what was happening and share good news, promote events, share good stories and things like that,” Nouiouat said.

He started passing out copies of the paper at his mosque and soon had other people interested in writing for it. Nouiouat said that it was rewarding to be able to give other people in his faith a platform to share their interests and express their voices. After producing the paper for a few months, he was approached by the North Dallas Gazette, a member publication of the Black Press of America that focuses on the North Dallas African American community. Wanting to connect different minority groups in Dallas, they asked Nouiouat to write articles showcasing what the Muslim community was doing in Dallas.

Like his other writing projects, the novel was deeply integrated with Nouiouat’s family and faith community: his father is from Algeria and his mom from Tunisia, and it was their heritage that led him to explore the countries’ histories. While he occasionally doubted himself, the book’s connection to his family and faith gave Nouiouat an edge in his writing.

“Sometimes you don’t even want people to read it...I felt that imposter syndrome for sure,” Nouiouat said. “But I think the fact that it comes from a very deep connection with my family and my faith, I feel like that kind of gives me a superpower because it just fuels me further than I think other things could.”

ATEC senior Erin Bray kneels on the Texas Instruments Plaza pavement, etching a chalk outline of America onto the concrete while grabbing stacks of Maruchan ramen to assemble. They stand there for hours talking to passersby about the 250 packages of chicken, shrimp and beef ramen they’ve dumped onto America to represent the country’s $1.7 trillion in student loan debt.

At the end of April, Bray took to the sidewalk to make their artistic statement on the jarring debt of student loan borrowers in America. Months later, the topic of Bray’s art remains pressing among students, especially as they start to wonder how they will pay for the upcoming fall semester and how the Biden administration will handle debt forgiveness moving forward.

Bray said the unacceptable reality of student loan debt is what compelled them to head over to TI Plaza and lay down their art. When planning to visualize the debt, Bray coordinated the flavors and number of ramen packs –which they said was fitting symbolism for college students – in each state to match the number of loan borrowers and the debt they owed. Each ramen pack represented 169,000 students, and each flavor represented a debt range.

In Texas, Bray laid down 21 packs of

chicken flavored ramen, establishing Texas as having the 33rd highest debt per student ratio and the 2nd highest total student debt in the country.

“In terms of America, we’re not doing bad, [but] if you measure [that] against any other country in the world, it’s horrifying,” Bray said.

Since Bray made their art, the Biden administration enacted the Borrower Defense to Repayment program –initially established in 2016 by the Obama administration – forgiving about $56 million in debt for around 1,800 borrowers. The program, however, has limitations: it’s only applicable towards students who were defrauded by their university and can only forgive direct federal loans. Consequently, the majority of student loan borrowers in America, including UTD’s in-state, out-of-state and international students, aren’t eligible for loan forgiveness.

Bray said the Biden administration’s ineffective loan forgiveness policy –and the government’s norm of passing ineffective loan policies – will negatively impact this generation of students’ personal lives, just as they have been in the past. Among the consequences, Bray said loan debt puts a caveat in students’ pursual of the “American Dream” – that is, those in debt likely cannot afford the risk of

The SCC needs to do better

Student Counseling Center lacks staff capacity to assist struggling students

Due to visible understaffing issues, the UTD Student Counseling Center (SCC) is unequipped to address mental health in a personalized manner that acknowledges individual identities and situations.

While stress has been a prevailing problem on many college campuses for years, the pandemic has made it more important now than ever for students struggling with anxiety to have access to reliable counseling. However, the SCC cannot fully achieve the inclusivity it strives for unless it hires more staff that can help a greater number of students in a reliable fashion.

For counseling, it’s important to understand that those seeking services are shaped by their environment and identities. For example, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy was only found to be effective in instances where it could readily incorporate cultural adaptations. The most impactful methods varied between different races and socioeconomic statuses.

In order for the treatment offered to encompass a wide variety of backgrounds and situations, there needs to be a greater number of trained counselors available to help a large student body. Unfortunately, the SCC falls short here, considering that UTD’s student body is nearly 29,000 as of fall 2020, but the SCC only has around 15 staff members (including directors and doctoral interns) offering counseling. The SCC can't be as inclusive as possible with a staff of only 15-20 people to potentially treat thousands of students. The lack of resources here is definitely prevalent, especially when we see that the SCC cannot provide students with more than six therapy sessions during their time at UTD. Worse yet, in some cases students reported being unable to even attend those six sessions with the same counselor.

The UTD Reddit chronicles just how widely variable Comets’ experiences with the SCC have been. Not all feedback is negative, but there is a consensus that counselors are consistently overbooked, making the wait times for appointments outrageous and the guarantees of repeatedly seeing the same counselor minimal at best. And since therapy’s strength lies in a therapist’s ability to respond to a student’s individual environment and situation, any student finding their responses “generic” or “predetermined” has every right to feel underserved.

A strong long-term relationship with a counselor is essential for a client to see tangible results from therapy. If a client has to see a new therapist every time – and only for six short sessions – there’s a low chance of forming a genuine connection with the therapist and feeling understood or comforted.

Surprisingly enough, nearly every university in the state of Texas is understaffed by the standards of the International Association of Counseling Services, which states that college counseling centers should have at least one full-time professional staff member for every 1,000 to 1,500 students.

The SCC must push for more funding and resources to hire more counselors and provide culturally competent counseling. Ultimately, having reliable services that help maintain an environment of stable mental health is critical to ensure that students can perform to the best of their abilities. When it comes to mental health, we can’t afford to make any sacrifices. Allocating resources to bolster campus counseling is absolutely crucial and should be treated as a necessity, not an option.

Too many esports not enough vods

Following collegiate esports is often much more difficult than it should be due to a lack of video footage and coinciding broadcast times with esports leagues around the world.

For nearly all of UTD’s esports, from Overwatch to League of Legends, games are broadcast on a platform, sometimes on UTD esports’ Twitch, and they’re normally broadcast on the weekends. This should be a fine time to watch esports, but since every other major esports league in the world thinks the same thing, professional leagues end up broadcasting around the same time as any collegiate broadcast. Therein lies two issues with trying to watch collegiate esports: there are too many games to be watching at the same time, and there is no easy way to watch collegiate vods (videos on demand) after the fact.

As an example, I’m a big League of Legends fan. Typically, on a weekend during peak League season, there are not only the LPL and LCK (Chinese and Korean regional leagues) in the

early morning from 2-8 a.m., but there’s the LEC (European regional league) starting around 10 a.m. This conveniently ends around the time the LCS (North American regional league) starts at 4 p.m., which then generally runs late until the night. In all that time, there’s no time to watch anything else – unless I decided to watch a bunch of different streams at once, which is not ideal when trying to follow the flow of any game. And that’s not even counting the variety of other esports all trying to broadcast around the same time, from the Overwatch League or Call of Duty League to tournaments for Starcraft 2 or Super Smash Brothers Ultimate. Even UTD’s own esports teams add to the logjam, with the Overwatch Team and the League of Legends Team having conflicting stream times for games during regular season play. While the teams do tend to have a stream up for multiple games at once, these games are difficult to follow since there are generally only two casters per stream. Most casual watchers – even if they play the games they’re watching – won’t have high-

level competitive knowledge about the games being played, making simplicity in the broadcast extremely valuable to the viewing experience.

Esports is one of the easiest sports to have recorded footage of, but for whatever reason, the only collegiate esport with reliable vod footage is Rocket League. College Carball just so happens to upload all the game vods that are streamed on YouTube, but for other esports, it can be unreasonably difficult to find old footage of games.

One of the biggest collegiate League of Legends LAN tournaments in recent memory – the Gateway Legends Invitational – was streamed live on Twitch with an amazing broadcast team. However, the only way to watch any of the games is to find the Twitch vods and guess where in the five-toseven-hour video the game you’re trying to watch happens.

No collegiate esports team should have this issue because esports are much more easily recorded than any regular sport. Having a vod of a soccer game requires a camera and hours spent going to watch the game in person, so at a bare minimum, fans

should be able to download a small replay file for a League of Legends game and even make fan content and montages. This holds true for any modern competitive game, including all that UTD currently plays. But this idea is something that’s been around before, dating back to the preservation of Doom speedruns or continuing to this day with Warcraft 3 replays.

If an official match of any esport is streamed, it should be available after the fact. Yet a variety of collegiate teams and other tournament or match streamers will let Twitch vods disappear into the void. This tends to be a fairly common practice when streaming collegiate games, meaning a lot of game footage is simply lost to time.

So please – if you’re somebody that streams collegiate esports, take the time to upload the vod to YouTube or make a centralized replay archive for fans to watch games from the players’ perspectives. Whichever way it happens, collegiate esports organizers should make it easier to be a fan of collegiate teams.

AISHNI SHRIVASTAVA Mercury Staff

BEN NGUYEN Managing Editor

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ALESANDRA BELL| GRAPHICS EDITOR

you know, our first priority for sure is to have the accessible common cab service because those are people that they need it. After that, we'll start phasing in the ones that are high rider-

ship routes. I'm hoping, you know, by the end of the fall semester we're back up, but we just can't say for sure right now.”

Grant said that they are currently testing new routes to see what works, especially with the construction of the pedestrian walkway on Rutford Avenue.

Comet Cabs used to run through this road, but vehicles are no longer allowed to pass through starting this fall, causing the Transportation Office to have to change route maps.

make some changes,” Grant said. “It's going to be a work in progress for sure. As everyone knows, this has just been such a volatile year, we're kind of just rolling with the punches and getting what we can done and trying to get everything back to a new normal.”

university-wide representation in Rice’s DEI committee and implementing moments of inclusivity into faculty and student meetings. This progressed into her equity project, where she and groups of researchers from two other institutions used

“We have finished creating nearly 100 of these sensors which

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to new participants is that the BrainHealth Index has proven to be 60% more effective in

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Upon my visit this time though, I was given a small trip around the world through the various pastries and sandwiches that I tried.

One of the pastries that La Casita places on their menu each week is the cruffin. A cruffin is a muffin that is made of croissant dough – which helps to give the cruffin its flaky layered appearance – and was created in Australia. These cruffins come in various flavors, but the one I happened to try was their Reese's Cruffin. The exterior resembled a churro with visible layers of flakey dough encasing a hidden whipped peanut butter cream in

a data-driven approach to address bias issues in faculty search committees. At the core of these initiatives, the theme of inequity realization leading to tangible change rings prominent, a theme Pearson plans to continue to prioritize at UTD.

“Really looking across the board, I’ll focus not only on diversity and inclusion on campus, but the things that I consider to

we are planning on deploying all across DFW,” Lary said.

The low-cost sensors track levels of PM2.5 – small pollutant particles up to the size of 2.5 microns – that can cause respiratory-related health problems. The PM2.5 particles are detected by a laser beam which scatters when it

treating depression than therapy and medication combined,” White said.

Currently, CBH is working towards an in-person version of the BrainHealth Project which

the center. It was topped with a chocolate glaze and Reese's peanut butter chips. The slightly salted peanut butter cream balanced the sweetness of the chocolate glaze, and the varying textures of the cruffin gave a different experience with each bite.

Then, I tried the orange almond bear claw, a sweet pastry with a similar flakey texture to a croissant but shaped like a claw with a sugar glaze topped with thinly sliced almonds originating from Denmark. The claw had a flaky texture with a subtle buttery taste and an orange jam filling inside. The glaze helped add a contrasting flavor to the buttery taste of the pastry itself, while the almond slices added

be the building blocks,” Pearson said. “And that's what we call JEDI: so justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. If we’ve got justice on the bottom, equity just above that and inclusion above that, then we'd be able to really build up to having diversity that we can then sustain. If you take any one of those blocks away, the others will fall over, so we’re going to have to take a systemic approach

hits pollutant particles. The scattered light is then used to detect how many particles are present in the air sample. Air quality measurements from these low-cost nodes are posted on SharedAirDFW.com, and the sensors are already creating results.

“If an individual car drives by

will include participants from ages 18 to 40 and an fMRI before and after the study. Potential participants can sign up to participate on the CBH website.

“For our next version of this

a nice crunch. The harmonious balance between the contrasting elements of taste and texture combined to create the scrumptious experience of the orange almond bear claw. Visually, the most breathtaking pastry was their smoked chocolate honey caramel tart that stood out as a simple, yet elegant piece of art. Encased in a thin cocoa brown shell, a small bed of caramel hid underneath a thick and rich creamy chocolate ganache topped with three golden pieces of honeycomb candy. The crispiness of the tart blended in with the smooth texture of the bittersweet chocolate ganache, and the hidden caramel helped to enhance the sweet taste of the chocolate.

to be able to accomplish it.”

To accomplish JEDI, Pearson plans to work with the Galerstein Gender Center, the Multicultural Center, academic units, schools and academic departments to identify systematic barriers on campus and evaluate how they affect various classroom, research and university operations. Additionally, Pearson plans to expand upon DEI training such as the

one of the sensors, you will see a transient spike in pollution levels temporarily, “Lary said. “When we start averaging over long periods, we miss so much of the individual effects of pollution which can be rather important.”

In addition, Lary said the effects of pollutions are local. Small

study, the data found will enable researchers to draw more conclusions about how this kind of brain training can promote growth in brain function,” said Chaplin.

Other than pastries, they have an assortment of eight savory sandwiches, three of which I have tried. My favorite of the three has been the spicy chicken sandwich which replaces sandwich buns with thick waffles. The fluffiness of the waffles made for a perfect replacement for buns, and they helped to soothe the flavor of the spicy Chex fried chicken that is made using Chex mix in the batter, giving it a satisfying crunchy texture. Although I am not a fan of pickles, they did help add a bit more of a twist in flavors to the sandwich. In terms of texture, the waffles were like soft cushions that your teeth could sink into, only to discover a

between students.

“It’s creating a climate where everybody can thrive, where everybody is treated fairly, where everybody is respected for who they are,” Pearson said. “And the

activities performed daily can increase pollution level exposure, unknowingly harming a neighbor. Lary provided an example of how if a car engine is left idling and someone were to walk towards the car, they would be unwittingly exposed to a large dose of pollutants.

With this study, Chapman is hoping to have a more complete understanding of the human brain and wants to facilitate further research in brain optimization.

crunchy center when they encountered the chicken.

The second sandwich on my list was their Cubano sandwich, which consisted of a toasted baguette encasing Mojo marinated pork, ham, mustard, swiss cheese and pickles. This sandwich is the tastiest sandwich on their menu that I have tried so far and has one of the most balanced flavor palettes. Each ingredient smothered the tastebuds all at once, enticing one to bite into it over and over to relive the experience. There is even a hint of a smoky scent on the pork pieces that really invigorates the senses, creating an immersive experience with every bite.

I had the Shrimp Po Boy for

ultimate thing is that it's really tributes to the climate and culture, so everybody needs to have some agency – have some ownership in this. That’s going to come with building relationships, building trust and then building value. That diversity has to do with the representation that we all want to see – that we're representative of what society looks like: everyone.”

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“Dr. Chapman is optimistic about the potential for people to recover from conditions and injuries that we’ve historically had trouble recovering from,” Chaplin said.

the last sandwich, which was less toasty and crispy than the other sandwiches but still just as satisfying. It consisted of a lightly toasted baguette and jumbo fried shrimp on a thin layer of lettuce covered with slices of tomato and a special sauce, making the sandwich extremely juicy. The shrimp had the same crispiness as the fried chicken but with a thinner layer of batter.

entrepreneurship and starting families, both of which are costly.

“I think this is one of the areas where America is just refusing to learn from other countries,” Bray said. “There's lots of areas where we kind of have this idea of American ex -

ceptionalism and our system must be best. But in a lot of European nations, student loan debt, especially in the late tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, isn't a thing because they just offer free college. Obviously, that does come with caveats – they limit who can get into college more so than we do here, and their colleges don't have as many amenities

as we do in America. But I think in terms of not burdening people with student loan debt for the rest of their life, they are definitely acceptable sacrifices.”

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While getting rid of the ramen packs will take time and change on the part of the Biden administration, Bray said they hope their art will spark conversation on student loan debt

“If [student loan debt] is something that speaks to you, and you specifically want to make a difference there, you should get informed,” Bray said. “Learn more about it and find ways to get involved in lobbying efforts. Even if it’s on a small scale, our efforts might just yield a little bit of change.”

Bray's map of the student debt in the United States, pictured in full.