Thinking with our hands, feet, and other body parts. So what do you do at BU when your brain needs a little rest? Dozens of clubs, concerts, lectures—not to mention the city of Boston itself—all vie for our attention every day, making the R&R choices difficult at times. Origami Club, BU Fatakada, Aural Fixation, Organic Gardening Club, Marching Band—that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Despite these sorts of challenges, students manage to make their extracurricular lives as fulfilling as their academic ones. Keep reading...
Students across campus are getting engaged.
Obviously not in the matrimonial way. In the participatory way. “Students are showing up for stuff,” is how Dean of Students Kenn Elmore expresses it. His office reports that the BU community is more engaged than ever, both on campus and off.
One off-campus example is that more students are applying to participate in Teach for America than ever before. Another example is the group of students who last spring participated in BU’s Alternative Spring Break (ASB), a program that provides students with a unique and memorable week of volunteer service as a different option for spring break. This year saw the number of ASB trips increase to 35, with more than 400 students participating and a waiting list of 100. Moving the process online helped: all the available ASB spots were taken just a few minutes after sign-ups started.
Community service on campus was up this year, too, with more than 106,000 hours logged for tutoring, food delivery, and outreach. Plus, the First-Year Student Outreach Program (FYSOP) had its highest number of participants ever.
Thinking outside the penalty box
Great thoughts don’t just happen in the classroom. There’s the playing field, too. And sometimes it all comes together. This year was no exception for Terrier sports: it was a great year. One of the year’s more amazing stories was men’s basketball, which traveled to the America East finals for the first time since 2003 and had their first 20-win season since 2004.
Men’s hockey made history, too, skating in the shadow of Fenway Park’s Green Monster and beating Boston College 3–2 on a snowy January night. Played in front of 38,472 fans, reportedly the largest crowd ever to witness a college hockey game in the eastern United States, it was the first outdoor game the Terriers have skated in more than 50 years.
On the women’s side, the hockey team won its first-ever Hockey East title and earned its first NCAA tournament berth in the program’s history. The women’s soccer team won the America East Conference tournament for the third consecutive year, earning their seventh league title and advancing to the NCAA Tournament for the fifth straight year and eighth overall.
This year’s proudest Terrier moment came when BU captured the America East Stuart P. Haskell, Jr. Commissioner’s Cup for the fifth consecutive year and eighth time in the last nine years. The Commissioner’s Cup annually recognizes the strongest athletic program in America East as determined by a scoring system that rewards a school for success both during the regular season and championship competition in the conference’s 20 sports.
Terrier athletes did some pretty good thinking off the field, too. In fact, five of Boston University’s athletic programs—men’s cross country, women’s golf, men’s ice hockey, softball, and women’s swimming—achieved a perfect Division I Academic Progress Rate (APR) score of 1,000 for the entire four-year cohort beginning with the 2005–2006 academic year, as announced by the NCAA. The APR provides a real-time look at a team’s academic success each semester by tracking the academic progress of each student-athlete.
Thinking about others
After water and food, what would be the most valuable commodity in the first days after the earthquake in Haiti? College of Arts & Sciences Professor Sucharita Gopal realized it would be maps. So she asked her geography and remote sensing students to come in the Friday afternoon after the quake and spend the long holiday weekend poring over social networking sites, blogs, private satellite data, government agency plans, and open-source mapping sites.
The goal? To compile as much relevant and accurate geographic data as possible about Haiti’s earthquake-scarred landscape so they could produce digital and, more importantly, hard-copy maps of the city. Thanks to a delegation from Haiti that had been visiting BU, more than 100 street maps were in the hands of Port-au-Prince authorities by the following Wednesday. Talk about thinking on your feet.
