Campus Events Category
05.02.2013
Four graduating seniors will receive the Mathews Medal, the highest non-academic distinction awarded to NC State students, at a ceremony tonight at the Dorothy and Roy Park Alumni Center. The Mathews Medal is modeled after the Watauga Medal and is administered by the Alumni Association Student Ambassador Program.
The award is named after Walter Jerome Mathews, the first student to arrive on the campus of the N.C. College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in 1889 (we chronicled Mathews’ arrival on campus in the commemorative 125th anniversary issue of NC State magazine). The Mathews Medal recognizes seniors who have made significant contributions to the university based on leadership and service.
Here are this year’s recipients:
Emily Tucker of Gaithersburg, Md. Tucker, a Park Scholar, served on the University Affairs committee as a student senator and founded the Reusable Regatta, a raft race to on Lake Raleigh to promote campus sustainability. She also chaired the Krispy Kreme Challenge and served as president of the Institute of Industrial Engineers.
Josh Privette of Wendell, N.C. Privette was transportation and campus safety chair in his time serving in the Alumni Association Student Ambassador Program. He also represented student interests in his time serving on the Physical Environment Standing committee, streamlining access to campus departments for students.
Mary Charles Hale of Morehead City, N.C. Hale, a Park Scholar, served as a Service Leadership Team committee member for the Center for Student Leadership, Ethics, and Public Service. She led a service trip to the Dominican Republic as a junior and directed NC State’s 125th anniversary homecoming celebration, the largest student-led homecoming in the country.
Andy Walsh of Pittsboro, N.C. Walsh served as student body president. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and served in the Alumni Association Student Ambassador Program, where he implemented the University’s Tradition Keepers program, known as The Brick. He also oversaw the Coaches’ Corner project aimed at celebrating NC State’s most beloved coaches.
05.01.2013
The 2010 men's club team poses with the national championship trophy it won that year.
There’s a lone disappointment for senior Grayson Eubanks when he thinks back to his freshman year at NC State in 2009-10. Having played basketball in rec leagues all his life and for Athens Drive High School, he figured he had the skills to make the NC State men’s club basketball team, which is different from intramural sports in that club teams make cuts.
It was a manageable first round of cuts, which annually includes more than 100 people vying for five-to-six new spots on the 14-man roster. But the second round was much more difficult, with skilled players each trying to make a name for himself. And at the end of the day, it was not meant to be for Eubanks, whose brother was on that team that went on to win the 2010 national club championship. “He gives me a tough time about it all the time,” Eubanks says.
Eubanks, who will graduate May 11th and pursue medicine at East Carolina’s Brody School of Medicine, made the team the next two years. And this past year, he served as the club’s president. He says that role has helped him cultivate leadership skills that extend beyond the out-of-bounds lines on a court.
“With a lot of 21- and 22-year-olds and with a lot of people who have played high-level basketball, everyone has a lot of ego,” Eubanks says. “We have a lot of attitudes. But you learn to deal with people so that everyone is still friends and go out to dinner together.”
And it’s also equipped Eubanks with skills he can apply in the professional world, like raising money and budgeting for the team’s needs. In the past, the team has just checked out intramural jerseys from University Recreation, which houses intramural and club sports, but toward the end of this year, Eubanks purchased jerseys online. He and his girlfriend then took them to A.C. More, where she put all the lettering on each jersey. “It pays to date someone in textiles,” he says.
The men’s club team began in 2009 and plays its games in Carmichael Gymnasium on NC State’s campus. It competes against other universities’ club teams. In addition to winning the national title in 2010, it hosted the National Intramural Recreational Sports Association 2013 National Basketball Championships on campus in April. More than 70 teams from 19 states came to compete for the championships in Raleigh.
With events like that, the club team continues to raise its profile and sometimes sees its success translate into a player or two making it to the varsity squad. Jay Lewis walked onto the varsity squad during the 2012-13 campaign after success at the club level. But that can also mean more work for Eubanks and future club presidents to fill spots. “I’m always hoping the don’t steal my players,” Eubanks says. “But they do.”
For more on club sports at NC State, check out the Spring 2013 issue of NC State magazine. We profiled the rich program at the university and featured different club sports teams, some of which are the most successful and the best-kept secrets on campus.
04.16.2013
The Alumni Association and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences are hosting a book signing and reading to celebrate the release of novels by Jill McCorkle, professor of practice of creative writing at NC State, and Elaine Neil Orr, a professor of English at NC State, on Wednesday, April 24, at the University Club. The event includes a seated dinner with an opportunity to hear the authors read and answer questions during dinner. After dinner, the authors will be available to autograph their novels. Registration closes Wednesday, April 17.
McCorkle is the author of four collections of short stories and six novels, five of which have been named as New York Times Notable Books. Her most recent, Life After Life, published by Algonquin Books in March, centers on the lives of several residents and workers at the Pine Haven Retirement Community in the fictional Fulton, N.C.
Much of Orr’s debut novel, A Different Sun, is set in Nigeria, where she spent much of her childhood growing up as a child of missionaries. Her novel draws on the real-life 1853 diary of the wife of a missionary from Georgia who moved to Nigeria.
Look for interviews with McCorkle and Orr, as well as excerpts from their new novels, in the summer issue of NC State magazine, accompanied by an interview with NC State professor Wilton Barnhardt, whose novel, Lookaway, Lookaway, is due out in August.
McCorkle and Orr spoke with freelance writer and former NC State editor Cherry Crayton about their writing process, books that influenced them and their next projects. Today, we feature excerpts from the interview with McCorkle. Yesterday, we posted excerpts from the interview with Orr.
You’ve written about your father’s hospitalizations and the fact that he suffered from depression. Has that influenced your writing? I look back now and see that my childhood seems pretty easy and pampered compared to what I know so many go through, but I think I was really aware of the darker parts of adulthood when I was a child. I think I had worries that most 7- and 8-year-olds don’t have. I shouldn’t say most, but some. …It’s like everything else on the journey, you can’t regret anything out there or you wouldn’t be where you are now. You can’t start pulling threads away.
Where do your ideas for stories and novels come from? It is that combination of what you see blending with imagination. Imagination is a key part of our experience. We see something we don’t understand, but our brain is determined to make sense of it and to keep firing suggestions as to what might be the reason this is happening. I like to tell my students that it is your brain’s job to be a couple of steps ahead of you seeking reasons. So if you’re always walking around with your eyes and ears opens open you can’t help but see a whole lot of stories.
Just yesterday, I went online and there was a news story about a gym teacher stealing from students. Your first thought is, “Who is this person?” I found myself all day yesterday thinking of the message there and the implications. …There’s a story there, and if you follow that story, you will find something really human.
Life After Life is set in Fulton, which is also the setting in many of your other novels and which you’ve said is based on your hometown of Lumberton, N.C. Why do you keep going back there? For people who know my novel Ferris Beach, Abby [a 12-year-old in Life After Life] is living in the same house as Katie [one of the characters in Ferris Beach]. And the cemetery behind Pine Haven is in both books. You wouldn’t know it, but I know it. I’ve constructed this universe, and I guess it’s a lot easier to stay with that. It also looks a lot like Lumberton looked when I was about 8 or 10 years. I just scooted Lumberton about 30 minutes to the coast.
What’s challenging for you when you’re writing? It’s not enough to just accumulate parts on the page. You have to then really pick and choose and decide what deserves attention and why. To me that’s the real challenge of putting a novel together, and the real exciting part.
What were some early books you read that made a big impression on you? In sixth grade, the book I was asked to not check out anymore was Where the Red Ferns Grow. As a kid, I was much more drawn to biography, and the ones I read incessantly over and over again were those of Helen Keller, Marie Curie and Abraham Lincoln. And then I was pretty young in junior high when I read Diary of a Young Girl and Little Women. I think to be a young person who wants to write — the combination of Jo March, Anne Frank and Helen Keller — they are all so much about just trying to put life into perspective.
What are some recent books you read that you’d recommend to others? I will have to say Ron Rash’s book of short stories, Nothing Gold Can Stay. And Holly Goddard Jones’ The Next Time You See Me — that was one I could not put down.
What are you working on now? I’ve got a new novel started, and a whole batch of ideas for short stories for I’ve gotten while working on the novel and didn’t have time to work on. And there’s a play I really want to try. I’ve never done a play. I’m very interested in monologues and the power of a single voice telling a story.
04.15.2013
The Alumni Association and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences are hosting a book signing and reading to celebrate the release of novels by Jill McCorkle, professor of practice of creative writing at NC State, and Elaine Neil Orr, a professor of English at NC State, on Wednesday, April 24, at the University Club. The event includes a seated dinner with an opportunity to hear the authors read and answer questions during dinner. After dinner, the authors will be available to autograph their novels. Registration closes Wednesday, April 17.
McCorkle is the author of four collections of short stories and six novels, five of which have been named as New York Times Notable Books. Her most recent, Life After Life, published by Algonquin Books in March, centers on the lives of several residents and workers at the Pine Haven Retirement Community in the fictional Fulton, N.C.
Much of Orr’s debut novel, A Different Sun, is set in Nigeria, where she spent much of her childhood growing up as a child of missionaries. Her novel draws on the real-life 1853 diary of the wife of a missionary from Georgia who moved to Nigeria.
Look for interviews with McCorkle and Orr, as well as excerpts from their new novels, in the summer issue of NC State magazine, accompanied by an interview with NC State professor Wilton Barnhardt, whose novel, Lookaway, Lookaway, is due out in August.
McCorkle and Orr spoke with freelance writer and former NC State editor Cherry Crayton about their writing process, books that influenced them and their next projects. Today, we feature excerpts from the interview with Orr. Tomorrow, we will post excerpts from the interview with McCorkle.
You’ve written scholarly articles and books, poems, memoirs and now your first novel. How have you been able to transition across these various styles of writing? I’m definitely either a scholarly itinerant or itinerant in my writing. I link that to my growing up and living across two continents and various time zones at different times in my life. I naturally move about because of my life of moving about. I’m always curious about what another territory is like, whether it’s an actual territory or an intellectual territory or a creative territory. My sister and I have talked about how we feel about the need to move every three or four years, because that was the pace for us growing up. Every three or four years you need a new world or looking for a new world.
What was the biggest challenge for you while writing your first novel, A Different Sun? Pacing was a big challenge. I don’t know if I have any natural talent, but if I do have any, I think it’s more in poetry or memoir writing, where you’re focused on lyricism and the sound of language and evocation of place and sensibility. You’re not trying to keep a taut plot line. Memoir can be more meandering. Lyric poetry doesn’t even have to meander; it’s just a moment. It was a steep learning curve.
How did you learn to do it? I never took a fiction writing class, so I read and I read and studied exactly how a scene works. It’s like architecture and looking behind the sheetrock. What’s behind this? What’s really holding this up? Or you’re going under a house to look at the all groundwork that is holding up the structure. The edifice you see on the outside and the painted walls are what the readers see, but the writer has to be able to construct all that hidden architecture. And you have to do it in a way to make it seem natural.
What did you learn about writing while completing this novel? I have enormous new respect for novelists that I could have never grasped without writing this novel. Writing even a mediocre novel is an enormous achievement, because you have to do all this research, create a universe, create the histories of people and keep them all a float and moving. I used to think that literary theory was hard, but that was before I encountered novel writing.
Describe your writing process. I love every part it. I love to sit down and begin writing. I love to come back the next day and write. I love to come back on the third day and go through everything I wrote. I love to go take a walk and come back to it. On the walk I think, “Oh, now I know what to do.” I always have to carry something to write with so I don’t forget. When I get a draft, I love to read it aloud. And I love to revise it. I love to do the research. And I love to finish a manuscript and stay away from it for about three months and then go back to it. And I love when you get to the very end and you get to do embroidery. You’ve cut enough and tightened enough that you can put a little touch of beauty to one sentence. I really don’t find any part of it agonizing. I find all parts of somewhere on the scale from enlivening to thrilling.
In your memoir, Gods of Noonday, published in 2005, you not only wrote about being a child of Baptist missionaries who served in Nigeria but also having end-stage renal disease and needing a kidney transplant. How is your health these days? My health is really good. I haven’t felt this well since I was in my 30s. It has been 12 years since I had my transplants, and the window just keeps opening.
Has your health influenced your writing? It gave me a sense of urgency. When I was doing my M.A. at Louisville, I published a poem on the Ethiope River, and I did not come back to the Ethiope River until I wrote that memoir 22 years later. I had wanted to write about Nigeria for a long time, but I didn’t give myself permission. When I was ill, that was the time to write about Nigeria because I didn’t know if I would live. If I was going to have a limited amount of time, writing about Nigeria was the last thing I was going to do. And then I had time for another book and now another book.
What book are you writing now? I’ve started a novel that is set in North Carolina. I went to first grade in Winston-Salem. And in this novel, rather than the U.S. going to Africa, Africa comes to the U.S. It’s still transatlantic, but it’s more contemporary and set in the 1960s.
What have been some important books in your life? I was good in English, but my reading life wasn’t important to me in Nigeria. It didn’t begin until I came to the U.S.; because when I came to the U.S., I was completely lost and in culture shock. I began to read contemporary novels – the novels of the 1960s and 1970s. I was reading Saul Bellows’ Dangling Man and Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut and Surfacing by Margaret Atwood. From those novels, what I learned was that other people were confused and lost and searching, too. Literature became my home…… I really didn’t start reading African literature until I started writing my memoir in the 1990s. I realized that I couldn’t write my own book about West Africa until I read other books by West African writers.
What books by writers from Africa would you recommend? The Famished Road by Ben Okri, and Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee.
What’s a book you read recently that you’d recommend to others? Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, a fictionalized memoir of growing up in Ceylon, which is now Sri Lanka.
04.13.2013
Alan Aitken ‘63 usually needs a good reason to leave his home in Juneau, Alaska, every spring and fly halfway around the globe. And that reason is usually the Final Four, the annual culminating weekend of college basketball that crowns a champion.
But it just so happened this year, he had two. Last weekend, he attended the Final Four in Atlanta, his 22nd in a row, and arrived in Raleigh Wednesday night for the Class of ‘63 reunion, going on this weekend at NC State. That put a cherry on top of his 3,900 mile trip across the country, the longest distance that any alumnus traveled to this year’s reunion.
“I’m looking forward to seeing campus again,” Aitken says. “When I was here, there were 13,000 students. Now you have 34,000.”
Aitken originally came to NC State from New York state in 1961, when the college was the first forestry program to respond to him with an opportunity to transfer out of a tw0-year program in New York. He vividly remembers his first trip to the South and the culinary adjustments Raleigh’s diners brought.
“I ordered two eggs over easy with bacon,” he says. “When the waitress brought it out, I said, ‘Why did you give me Cream of Wheat?’ She said, ‘That’s not Cream of Wheat. That’s grits.’”
But, he says, he quickly liked the people in the South, something he appreciates to this day in his travels. “They’re friendly and they’re courteous,” he says. “They say, ‘Thank you’ and ‘Glad to see you.’
Aitken worked more than 30 years for the U.S. Forest Service in Alaska, retiring in 1994. And he still remembers where he was when he got the offer to go West here at NC State. He was a senior living in Turlington Residence Hall when he got a call from his mother. She had a telegram with a job offer in Alaska. And it was an easy choice for him.
“It just sounded like a big adventure,” he says.
04.12.2013
John Earnhardt was surrounded by farmers as a boy growing up in Salisbury, N.C. “I was just a little country boy who knew how to milk a cow,” he says.
So, naturally, he assumed he would be a farmer when he grew up. Earnhardt once told someone he planned to have the biggest farm around, never mind that he didn’t have much land or money at the time.
Fortunately, Earnhardt also happened to be pretty good at math and science. So his interest was piqued one Sunday when one of the visitors to the church was an engineer. It sounded like interesting work to Earnhardt.
So when he arrived at NC State, Earnhardt was ready to become an engineer. Being from a small town, Earnhardt was struck by how big the campus was when he arrived in 1959. “It was big, although not compared to now,” he says.
Earnhardt, who now serves on the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Advisory Board for the College of Engineering, says engineers still relied on slide rules in those days. While he appreciates the technological advances made with computers, Earnhardt says something was lost when the slide rule was replaced. “You had to think through problems,” he says. “You had to talk with other people, collect the best thinking.”
Today, Earnhardt’s old slide rule hangs on a wall in his house in Mooresville, N.C. — an unfamiliar artifact to his children and grandchildren.
Earnhardt went on to graduate in 1963 with a degree in chemical engineering. One of his faculty advisers suggested that he consider pursuing graduate degrees, but Earnhardt was ready to get to work.
He ended up working for DuPont for 32 years at nine different locations. One of his first projects was helping develop the commercial process to make Nomex, a fire-resistant material, available for market. After retiring from DuPont, Earnhardt started his own environmental management consulting company. He’s also an accomplished bass singer in a barbershop quartet. His group, known as You Kids Get Off My Lawn!, finished 14th in the world championships in Florida in January.
Earnhardt returned to the Park Alumni Center today for the 50th reunion of the Class of 1963. About 130 alumni, family and friends will spend today and tomorrow revisiting some old haunts and seeing some new facilities like the James B. Hunt Jr. Library on Centennial Campus. Head football coach Dave Doeren is scheduled to speak at tonight’s Class of 1963 banquet. On Saturday, Chancellor Randy Woodson will speak at a luncheon welcoming new members into the Forever Club and the weekend’s festivities will end with a barbecue dinner at Vaughn Towers.
Earnhardt, permanent president of the Class of 1963, loves what NC State has become in in the 50 years since he graduated. “I’m proud of the work that comes out of here,” he says, “and the people I meet from here are all good people.”
Earnhardt says some of his classmates will be shocked to see how much the campus has grown over the past five decades. He says they will be impressed with what they see.
“I’m looking foward to the whole thing,” he says. “This school’s done so much for me.”
04.01.2013
A federal ROTC officer came to campus in the spring of 1963 and saw that NC State ROTC cadets had no guns for their drills, according to an article in The Technician from that year.
“Informed sources stated that during a recent Army ROTC federal inspection, the inspecting officer asked a cadet for the range of his weapon,” The Technician reported, “to which the cadet sternly replied, ‘Just as far as I can throw it, sir.’”
Air Force ROTC cadets training at NC State in the 1960s. Photo courtesy of NCSU Libraries.
As a result on this day in 1963, a new requirement, which would actually take effect that fall, was handed down that all NC State Air Force ROTC cadets were to carry M-14 rifles during scheduled drills.
“We don’t want our cadets to be so ill-prepared in this modern age when anything can happen anytime,” Air Force ROTC officials told The Technician. “Our cadets will be fully equipped. Their rifles will have firing pins, and ammunition will be available at a moment’s notice.”
03.25.2013
Though Eldrige Cleaver was speaking in Raleigh, he was focused on something broader in scope — a world revolution.
And on this day in 1983, Cleaver appeared on NC State’s campus in Poe Hall to reflect on his time as a member of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and to call on revolutionaries to fight for a better world.
“I’ve always been curious about people who hate the term ‘revolutionary,’” Cleaver said to his audience, according to the Technician. “All of us are revolutionary.”
Eldridge Cleaver speaking to a crowd in Poe Hall. Photo originally appeared in 1983 issue of the Technician.
Cleaver said that Che Guevara, who was a guerrilla leader in Cuba, was his model for what a revolutionary should be. Communism, Cleaver said, brought about many negative effects he saw in his tours across the world, and it was democracy that was the ideal political system for a country to have. He went on to add that from that vantage point, America was in good hands, but it was the country’s economic system that was divisive and at the root of so many of society’s problems.
Cleaver died in 1998 after a controversial life, chronicled here in a New York Times piece about his life.
03.23.2013
Central America was a region of civil unrest and political turmoil in the 1980s. There was no more potent symbol of that than when Archbishop of San Salvador Oscar Romero was assassinated in 1980.
And it was on this day in 1983 when students at NC State turned their conscience toward that region and held a fast for peace. There they honored Romero, whose assassin was never caught.
The students also read the names of everyone who had died or disappeared in Guatemala, where the government was committing mass genocide, and El Salvador, where the nation was embroiled in civil war.
The event was sponsored by Cooperative Ministry and the NC State Committee for Central America. There was also a Central American film festival held all week in the Walnut Room to raise awareness about the strife in that region.
03.06.2013
Few moments in NC State’s history have been as divisive as the fight over the university’s name that took place in the mid-1960s. Supporters of the consolidated system, including its head Bill Friday, wanted the name to be the University of North Carolina-Raleigh, and students and professors believed North Carolina State College’s unique identity be preserved.
But no voice was more vocal in opposing the name change than the university’s alumni. And on this day in 1963, State College alumni attended an open hearing held by the N.C. Senate and House education committees on a bill that incorporated the use of “North Carolina State, the University of North Carolina at Raleigh.” Though the name was seen as a compromise, alumni suggested the name was just as offensive.
R.W. Graber was one of those alumni who chose to be heard that March afternoon, according to an article in The Technician. And he suggested that the UNC system was trying to “swallow” up NC State, which he pointed out was often an afterthought with insults like “Cow College” being thrown its way. “But beef is pretty tough,” Graber said in the hearing, “and UNC would have a hard time digesting State.”
The fight and the protests ensued for two more years until 1965, when the university was named North Carolina State University at Raleigh, the formal name it goes by today.
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