Hiking a mountain can be a tough obstacle for some, but it is also a way to relieve any stress one may have or even just to clear one’s mind. For Nancy Regan, who works in Health Services on the Gardner campus at Mount Wachusett Community College, this is a way of life. She hikes nearly every weekend and does it year round.
“I love it. For me, it is exhilarating. I consider it a lot of soul-searching that you can do when you’re out in nature and I think it’s great for anyone,” said Regan, who is currently in her third year as the advisor of the MWCC Hiking Club.read more
By Liam Scanlon | Observer Contributor
Aliza Miller
Most students at Mount Wachusett Community College may know Aliza Miller as their math professor. She teaches a wide range of levels of math classes. She is a Project ACCCESS (Advancing Community College Careers: Education, Scholarship, and Services) Fellow with the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges (AMATYC). She posts a Math Problem of the Week on the whiteboard outside her office.
Aside from her work with the math department at The Mount, she is also the Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at The Mount, has traveled all around the world, and is an artist. Miller has lived in New York, Kaohsiung (in Taiwan), Montreal, Vermont, and here in Massachusetts.
Miller taught English in Kaohsiung through HESS International Educational Group. She came into the country without knowing how to speak Chinese. It was a ‘huge culture shock’ she recalls.
She had to learn to drive a 90cc scooter aggressively through crowded streets. She eventually had to learn some traditional Chinese characters. There were vastly different landscapes within 50 miles of each other. Karaoke was a big deal. After a week of training, she was teaching.
She taught students from the kindergarten level to junior high level. She has kept in touch with some of her former students through social media. One of her students, whose English name is Vivian, is now an aspiring dancer living in London.
What she misses most from Taiwan is the food. It isn’t the karaoke or having to drive aggressively on a 90cc scooter in crowded streets, but the ‘fresh,’ ‘legit,’ food available at almost any hour. She could get fresh food at a night market on her way home from teaching late night classes.
Miller has decorated her current home with artwork featuring origami and geometry. She has a flock of origami cranes following the path of a huge Pythagorean Spiral on one of her walls and a flock traveling along a sine curve on another. She does Bonsai Origami. Her office also has some origami artwork.
Like most professors here at the Mount, Miller is more than what meets the eye in her classes.
The Humanities Project at MWCC is in its third year with events that can be attended throughout the year.
The project started in 2014, and is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to enhance humanities programs at MWCC. The grant is up to $500,000, which is matched 50 cents on every dollar raised.
According to the pamphlets scattered around the building every year, Henry David Thoreau was chosen because he considered himself a scientist and a poet. Last year’s theme was Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, but it didn’t just focus on the book. It also focused on the science of the monster and even psychology. This year’s theme is Imagining Work that shows how artists, writers, and photographers viewed work in the 19th century.
The project’s co-chairs are Professor Michelle Valois, Professor Lorie Donahue, and Professor Susan Blake. The administrator is Dean Laurie Occhipinti. Donahue and Blake referred to Valois as their “fearless leader.”
Every school year, they work hard to come up with a theme that is going to be relevant in other classes, not just humanities and English, but science and maybe even history. The theme is decided by surveys students, faculty, staff, and even the community can take part in. The chosen theme comes with events throughout the semester that students, faculty, and the community can attend, either at MWCC or local libraries.
To raise money for the project, a fundraiser is hosted at Wachusett Mountain where contributors hike the mountain, which raises about $6,000 a year. This will be their third year for this fundraiser to take place. The project has also gotten $240,000 in anonymous donations. The money spent each year has been approximately $8,000.
Professor Blake also wanted to give credit and thanks to the LaChance Library for their help in providing “theme-related materials, creating research guides, and promoting events.”
The Adult College Experience Club is looking to reach out to Mount Wachusett Community College’s non-traditional student population. While this club started out as a program within the college, it has expanded into a means for seasoned non-traditional students to mentor incoming non-traditional students.
This club is for measure of helping to ease the anxiety of these students while entering into the college experience. Co-Advisors to the club are Melissa Sargent and Sarah Dorsey. While they hope that students will find the club fun and engaging, their overall goal is to be available to help.
They hope to be able to host workshops relevant to this population of students. These workshops would be offered at no cost to the students. Some topics that may be covered include: how to balance life and school, juggling methods for study when you have children, resume writing, etc. Additional topics would be decided by the members of club as to represent what is they feel is necessary to their experience and challenges undertaking college.
Since a great deal of non-traditional students have an inflexible and sometimes challenging schedule, the ACE Club has additional options to the standard club meetings. “Life happens,” explains Melissa Sargent, which they began looking into these alternate meeting options. The Club is going to launch a virtual meeting tool to its members.
“This variation in club meetings will allow students from not only the Gardner campus to participate, but the Leominster, Devens, and Web students as well,” Melissa Sargent explained. Not only will the meetings allow for students who have a web camera and microphone to actively participate, the meetings will be recorded so that students who could not watch at the scheduled time, can view at their own availability. The club will encourage its members to participate in the discussion via Facebook as well.
With “National Non-traditional Students Week” coming up, November 7th – 11th, the ACE Club is recruiting new members as they currently do not have their Officer positions filled. There first meeting will be held in the North Café at the Gardner campus on November 17th at 5pm. This meeting will be launching the new technology for a virtual meeting. Sargent encourages students who are available to come to campus for the meeting to do so, as it will not be solely a virtual experience.
Everyone knows what the United States thinks of the upcoming election, but other countries have opinions about the election too.
Giada Lancellotti, 21, from Ostigliano, Salerno, Italy, is worried about who the next president will be. She said, “I know that who we elect in Italy does not really affect other countries, but you are going to elect the president of one of the biggest world powers.”
Lancellotti has never been to the United States, but she understands the rights and how important it is to vote. She knows three languages: English, French, German, and some self-taught Spanish. She is starting University in Pescara, Italy to become a translator in London, England to translate books.
Lancellotti doesn’t like either presidential candidate, saying Trump “is a stupid, racist, xenophobic ‘being’ who shouldn’t be able to speak” and Clint to a “freak,” even though she does think Clinton would be the better choice, saying Trump running the United States “sounds like a joke.”
James Corcoran, 26, from Carlow, Ireland, thinks the election is a “highly important matter,” saying he doesn’t find either candidate appealing. He said President Obama may be hard to live up to because of what he’s done for the United States and its allies.
Corcoran travelled to Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2006. While he was there, he went to an American school for a day and from what he saw we actually do have cliques. When he was in school he studied television, film, and journalism.
He does think Clinton is the better candidate, saying, “Hillary has the capacity and potential to run the country the way in which it should be.” Corcoran believes Clinton could provide a stable economy for the United States. Corcoran also said Trump’s public image wasn’t welcoming, compassionate, or empathic enough.
Tasmin Poole, 18, from Caldecott, South Wales, said “If I were an American citizen, I would vote Clinton and pray that she has the ability to listen to the people because I truly believe Trump will not.” She thinks “Clinton is the lesser of two evils,” which seems to be a common thought.
Poole has been to Orlando, New York, and New Jersey in the past ten years. She said while in New York, Trump was starting to get covered by the media. She is also doing a degree in Modern history.
Poole said if Trump won, “America would lose any respect from the Middle East, Mexico, and South America, along with strong, female led countries.”
What It’s Like to Come Back to School After 4 ½ Years
By Eden Shaveet | Observer Contributor
During the spring of my 7th grade year, I decided that I did not want to go to school anymore.
A seemingly tactless and unrealistic decision, I know, but I hoped it would make me happy after years of struggling with what seemed to be an unexplainable, perpetual sadness that worsened with each year I ignored it. After nearly a decade of jumping from school to school and transforming myself to fit each new social environment I was placed into, I grew tired of my “new girl” status and wanted space from everyone and everything I had once so desperately tried to become.read more
“Comics on a Mission”, a night of stand-up comedy to support veteran students at MWCC, will be hitting the stage on Saturday, October 29th, at The Theater At The Mount.
The event, with all proceeds going to supporting veterans on campus, will be hosted by Brockton native Comedian Will Smalley, and headlined by Boston Comedy vet and legend Tony V, who will be joined by a number of fellow Bay State comics including Andrew Mayer (son of MWCC Director of Veteran Services, Bob Mayer), Kate Procyshyn, and MWCC student Brian Dickens, who a lot of you may know, even if he is taking a semester off from classes here at the Mount. Dickens, a greenhorn when it comes to bringing his unique brand of stand-up to the stage, has always found himself comfortable in the spotlight, and for him, this opportunity, which was granted to him as an award at a stand-up contest in the spring, is no laughing matter.read more
“Adulting (v): to do grown up things and hold responsibilities such as, a 9-5 job, a mortgage/rent, a car payment, or anything else that makes one think of grown-ups.” This is how Urban Dictionary defines the phrase that has blown up among millennials, especially on social media. Saying things like, “I scheduled a doctor’s appointment AND paid my credit card bill today, I hate adulting,” is intended to be completely harmless, and even used as a funny anecdote to relate to other millennials. But let us get something straight; adulting is a terrible trend. It makes the entire generation look not only immature, but also unwilling to participate in the responsibilities that come with growing up. So how did this happen? Were we just born a bunch of lazy degenerates who expect the world on a silver platter? No. This is the result of not being pushed towards responsibilities at a younger age, and not being given the proper education to prepare us for adulthood.
According to a report by The Pew Research Center, 32% of people ages 18 to 34 still live at home. To put that into perspective, during the 1960s that number was at 20%. Now to add to this most millennials who still live at home do not really have to help contribute to household expenses such as groceries, bills, etc. This does not teach us how to take care of our own finances, homes, or what we need in a home. Like most baby boomers say, we are a coddled generation, but not in the way they assume. We are coddled in the sense that we have gone so far in life without knowing what it is like to have a mortgage, or how to do our taxes, or how to even cook basic meals for dinner. How could this have been prevented? Well our parents had something that our generation is lacking. The proper education.
Back when most of our parents were in high school, there were many elective classes that revolved around life after school. Classes like Financial Literacy, and Home Economics classes were immensely popular. These classes are what taught the next generation how to do things that the current generation lacks knowledge on. Since then schools have shifted to be much more focused on college preparation rather than life preparation. While it is important to prepare teenagers for their academic future, there are some essential skills that we are missing out on. Baby boomers always like to comment on our “lack of basic knowledge,” but do not understand where it comes from. Well I say we need a serious education reform. Bring back “Life Prep” classes. Let people decide if they want to take on that extra AP class, or if they want to take Weekly Meal Prep 101. Maybe then we can find a balance between academic knowledge, and how “adult.” Adulting can finally become a thing of the past, and we can finally stop saying things like, “Ate something for dinner that wasn’t Nutella today! #adulting.”
The Defense Department had to present their audit this June and could not account for $6.5 trillion. Investigators, including Reuters who first released the report, believe the missing money is due to “unreliable” data and “fudged” numbers.
The Defense Department’s annual budget is roughly $600 billion, but according to their audit report, “The Defense Finance and Accounting Service Indianapolis (DFAS Indianapolis) did not adequately support $2.8 trillion in third quarter adjustments and $6.5 trillion in yearend adjustments.” The DFAS managed to double their already enormous loss in the last quarter of the fiscal year. In addition to the trillions lost, more than 16,000 files “vanished” from the DFAS’s computer system because of “a flaw in the computing software,” according to the report.
The Defense Department, located in the Pentagon, is responsible for wars, healthcare, personnel, housing, equipment, and procurements appointed to them by Congress. “Though there are a high number of adjustments, we believe the financial statement information is more accurate than implied in this report,” said Dov Schwartz, an Army spokesman. Schwartz added that Army is still reviewing the report.
The Pentagon, who apparently has a reputation for bad accounting practices, has never completed an audit before June of this year. In 1996, all federal agencies were ordered by the court of law to perform routine financial audits. However, the Pentagon has failed to complete an audit within the last 20 years. Scott Paltrow’s 2013 Reuters investigation revealed the Department of Defense commonly “fudges” or misrepresents their financial accounting numbers.
The Department of Defense’s errors are almost 1000 times higher than last year’s $7 billion in financial errors. If the Defense Department stuck to their budget, the “missing” 6.5 trillion taxpayer dollars could have paid for over one-fourth of the national debt, or pay off the student loan debt roughly five times over.
Capitol Hill Lawmakers are trying to keep the Pentagon accountable by imposing penalties if the Pentagon cannot complete a legally mandated full audit scheduled to happen September 30, 2017.
