Browsing: Baylor News

Lacking awareness of counseling benefits is causing some international students to look elsewhere for advice in times of high stress.

During the peak of counseling sessions, faculty members are concerned about the additional pressure international students face in adapting to a new environment alone.

While counseling services may be an outlet of support via the Baylor Counseling Center in the McLain Student Life Center, currently there is no program specifically for international students, nor is there a specific counselor designated to receive them, according to Dr. Jim Marsh, Baylor counseling services director.

This semester, Baylor counseling services faced a high demand for counseling with a short-staffed office.

With seven full-time counselors and one full-time psychiatrist, counseling services does not meet the minimum counselor to student ratio according to the International Association of Counseling Services’ standard.

The association encourages each institution, depending on the size, to maintain one full-time equivalent professional staff member to every 1,500 students. Baylor enrolled 15,364 students this semester, so the standard is 10 full-time counselors. Baylor counseling services is short by two.

On a scale of one to ten, how easy is it to spot a Baylor student out in the Waco community? To get the scoop, I interviewed members in the community in the aisles of WalMart. I asked shoppers which signs identified Baylor Bears outside of their natural habitat.

At their last meeting of the semester, student senators engaged in a heated debate about the limits of their own power.

Houston senior Daniel Lin started the debate when his controversial legislation Committee Voting Procedure went to committee. The legislation proposed a restriction on senators’ votes so that senators who had authored a bill would not be able to vote on it in committee. The bill lost in committee by a vote of three for, five against, but won on appeal to the entire senate, thus making it eligible for a pass or fail by senate but it ultimately failed to get the required two-thirds majority in a vote of 17 for, 17 against.

Baylor undergraduates aren’t the only ones getting burned out this season.

Because many pastors become burned out due to overworking and not maintaining personal relationships, George W. Truett Theological Seminary is taking preventative measures to ensure its students leave with the skills and relationships necessary to avoid being burned out in the future.

James Davison Hunter is a distinguished visiting professor in Baylor’s Department of Sociology. He is also a Labrosse-Levinson distinguished professor of religion, culture and social theory at the University of Virginia, Executive Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia and the author of seven books concerning politics, religion, morality and culture.

Grab your passports and prepare for an adventure with the Baylor student government. Destination: Waco, Texas.

Starting next semester, students will once again be able to participate in a program from student government called Passport Waco. Late last semester, former external vice president Angela Oliver began the program with positive reception, but did not have the chance to develop it due to a lack of time.

Baylor University, which is known for its openly Christian beliefs and mission, is also home to many non-Christians.

However, according to the Student Activities website, students that wish to create a prospective religious group must share the ideals of the university – so where do the others go to practice their faith?

College is a time of transition.

Some arrive knowing they’ll go on to jobs in other cities or return to families and hometowns, but others stay.

Some Baylor alumni have found a home in Waco, living in and giving back to the community where they received their higher education.

Along with the sudden rush of winter weather and the accompanying flood of Ugg boots and North Face jackets, Baylor’s annual Christmas on 5th Street celebration will help usher in the holiday season from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m today.

Location affects advertising experience, or so one Baylor professor hopes to prove through his research.

Dr. Kirk Wakefield, professor & holder of the Edwin W. Streetman Professorship in Retail Management at Baylor, conducted a study to examine how fans attending a live event react to sports advertising. Wakefield will take the results, which he is still receiving, from the study and compare them to the national average of fans that watched the event on TV and viewed advertisements during the broadcast. The study was conducted from Nov. 16 -18, during the last NASCAR race of the season, at the Homestead-Miami Speedway in Homestead, Fla.

Mark Carlson, senior creative director of U.S. McDonald’s Marketing, will discuss the ins and outs of marketing at 2:30 p.m. Friday in Bennett Auditorium.

Carlson’s lecture will encompass a summary of McDonald’s advertising from its small beginnings to its current global reach.

“He will talk about the challenges of marketing for the world’s most iconic brand and how that brand has evolved over all these years,” Cynthia Jackson, president of the Waco chapter of the American Advertising Federation, said.

The Baylor Round Table is hosting its annual Christmas luncheon at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday in Armstrong Browning Library.

“It’s been a yearly event for as long as I can remember,” said Carol Schuetz, one of the co-chairs for the Christmas Luncheon committee of the Baylor Round Table.

Students at Baylor are speaking for the dead and, no, they’re not psychics.

Anthropology students at Baylor traveled with Dr. Lori Baker, associate professor of anthropology, to Del Rio over the summer as part of her Reuniting Families program.

The program identifies the bodies of deceased immigrants along the Texas-Mexico border and reunites their remains with their families.

Cultural differences won’t get in the way of celebrating the holidays.

The Baylor University Multicultural Leadership Cabinet will host “Holidays Around the World,” a free event open to all students from 7 to 9 p.m. today in the Bobo Spiritual Life Center.

Houston sophomore Margaret Odunze, the vice president of programming for the Multicultural Leadership Cabinet and the co-chair of the event, said it was created this year with the holidays in mind.

“We wanted to do something for Christmas, but not like Christmas on Fifth,” she said.

Baylor and “Beauty and the Beast” have a history, but not in the way many have heard.

A 1979 Baylor alum, Jim Hillin, who was the Computer Generated Imagery Supervisor of the 1991 animated feature, helped design the famous ballroom scene of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast.”

“I was looking for a new gig,” he said. “I got a call from Disney, from producer Don Hahn.”

Students at Baylor have all walked by the Sadie Jo Black Gardens located on Founders Mall and noticed vibrant plants and flowers that add a hint of aesthetic beauty amid the hustle and bustle of undergraduates scrambling to class.

With the university’s newest award, it seems there are others who have taken note as well.

The Professional Grounds Management Society awarded the University the 2012 Green Star Award last month.

This year marks the third year modern foreign language students at Baylor will practice for and perform in a concert during Baylor’s annual Christmas on Fifth Street event.

Students studying various foreign languages, including Italian, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, German, Japanese, French, Arabic and Chinese, will sing carols in their language of study from 6 to 7 p.m. Thursday in the Bill Daniel Student Center Bowl.

He’s the greatest philosopher in the world, according to some.

Dr. Charles Taylor, professor of philosophy at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, will speak at 7:30 p.m. today in the Meditation Room in the Armstrong Browning Library as part of the Roy B. Albaugh Lecture series sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa.

Dr. Suzy Weems, professor and chair in the department of Family and Consumer Sciences, sits down with the Lariat to talk Thanksgiving feasting.

Q: What are the healthiest food options for Thanksgiving?

As a student, the weeks leading up to final exams can be a rather uneasy time. Between studying, balancing club activities and scrambling to register for next semester’s classes, the life of an undergraduate student is stressful to say the least.

Monday’s Wind Ensemble concert will help prepare the ensemble for its upcoming tour as well as feature a new faculty member, Dr. Jun Qian, on clarinet.

The concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. Monday in Jones Concert Hall in the Glennis McCrary Music Building. Dr. Eric Wilson, director of bands, said he’s excited about the concert.

He said he enjoys going through a breadth of repertoire over the course of the semester, which ensures both students and audiences will experience a diversity of wind music.

Baylor’s fall marketing and professional selling career fair featured roughly 30 companies Wednesday, in the Blume Conference Center in the Hankamer School of Business.
The event, sponsored by Automatic Data Processing (ADP), gave students the opportunity to network with corporate representatives from around the country looking to fill job and internship positions in marketing and sales. Students gained exposure to top companies, including 11 in the Fortune 500 and two in the Fortune 100.

Baylor students may have the chance to do their sic ’ems in luxury next fall.

At Thursday evening’s Student Senate meeting, senators passed a proposal to create a student level of the Baylor Bear Foundation. The current Bear Foundation is an organization of Baylor alumni who make contributions to Baylor Athletics and in return receive several benefits.

In honor of National Adoption Awareness Month, McLennan County will host an adoption day at 1 p.m. today at the Baylor Law School for 20 children who will be officially adopted into their families. November is National Adoption Awareness Month.
The event is meant to celebrate the adoption of 20 children in McLennan County and raise awareness about the need to adopt children in foster care.

Bible translating has become a family activity for a Baylor Arabic professor, his brother and mother.

Dr. Abdul-Massih Saadi, lecturer in Arabic in the modern foreign languages department, has recently completed the translation and publication of the New Testament into colloquial Arabic and modern standard Arabic.

This is the first time a piece of literature has been translated into colloquial Arabic.

Be a hero.

Save a life by something as simple as writing a letter.

That’s the goal of the Up’ til Dawn finale event that will take place from 7 p.m. to midnight Friday in Russell Gymnasium.

The event is hosted by the Baylor chapter of Up’ til Dawn, a national organization that raises money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Pat Flavin is an assistant professor of political science at Baylor who earned his Ph.D. in political science from Notre Dame. He sat down with the Lariat to give his insight into the results of the election and his predictions for the next four years.

Registration time at Baylor can be a frantic rush to find CRN numbers, work out a schedule and email professors in order to be placed in a closed-class section.

The stress and worry for students that they won’t get the classes they need can cause them to engage in practices to beat the system – like holding classes.

Students who hold classes register for classes they don’t intend to take to create a space in the class for friends with later registration dates.

Even Bruiser gets to register early.

More than 6,245 undergraduate students are eligible to register before their classification’s normal registration date as members of early registration priority groups.

That number is close to half of the 12,918 total undergraduate students enrolled at Baylor for the 2012-2013 academic year.