Features

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – It has been a decade without seeing the smiling faces of Illinois Wesleyan University students gracing the pages of a yearbook. The last issue of the Wesleyana was printed in 2000, and then discontinued when no one stepped forward to take up the helm.

This year, the Wesleyana returns. The planned 160-page tome with its theme of “restart” is set to be printed in April, with sophomore Cameron Ohlendorf at the head. A business major from Beecher, Ill., Ohlendorf said he felt something was missing on campus without the Wesleyana. “Where is the history of what our classes are doing? There really isn’t one right now,” he said.

Sitting in the sparse Wesleyana office in the Memorial Center, Ohlendorf flops open a 1985 yearbook to answer the question of what inspired him to resurrect the publication. “Those are my parents,” he said, pointing to a smiling couple in the glossy pages. Greg and Melissa (Packard) Ohlendorf were both editors of the Wesleyana when they attended IWU. “They got me interested in yearbooks in high school, and when I got here I figured it was something I could restart,” said Ohlendorf, who notes his parents have been proud of his efforts.

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BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Though Illinois Wesleyan University’s campus may not yet be covered in budding trees and flocking birds, students who are aware of the Bulgarian tradition of the martenitsa will be ready to embrace these signs of spring.

The martenitsa is a small piece of adornment made from yarn that is worn starting on March 1. This day marks the Bulgarian holiday Baba Marta, which means Grandmother March, and celebrates the beginning of the end of winter. Friends tie martenitsi to each others’ wrists while making wishes. Wearing it brings the hope that winter will pass quickly and that removing it will bring health and good luck. These martenitsi are red and white to symbolize blood and purity, which combined, mean health. They are worn until the first time an individual sees a stork, swallow or budding tree. When any of these symbols of spring are spotted, the owner of the martenitsa either ties it to the tree that they saw in bloom or puts the martenitsa under a stone in the area they saw the forementioned bird. This is symbolic of passing one’s own luck onto the surrounding nature.

Seniors Stefan Stoev and Teddy Petrova are both senior economics and finance double majors from Bulgaria; Stoev is from Plovdiv while Petrova is from Silistra. These Illinois Wesleyan students celebrate the coming of spring by bringing martenitsi to the campus.

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BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – There are worlds where dinosaurs can talk with tigers, and gravity is only a suggestion to those who fly from island to island. This is not a world of literature, but a virtual world, accessible to anyone with a computer.

One of the most successful virtual worlds, Second Life, recently announced a new interface that could offer a more user-friendly door into these computer-generated worlds. That development could mean more educators will be able to take advantage of the virtual world with much greater ease, said Sascha Vitzthum, Illinois Wesleyan University’s assistant professor of business administration.

“Right now in the virtual world, everything has to be done by key strokes – every gesture, every move,” said Vitzthum, who teaches a course on emerging technologies and working on creating the information systems concentration in business administration at Illinois Wesleyan. “Whether the virtual world becomes user-friendly enough to let people behave the way they want to behave will be the key, but I believe it is going to get there.”

According to Vitzthum, there are around 80 virtual worlds currently operating on the Internet, which allow participants to create an online version of themselves, known as avatars, and interact with one another in the computer-generated world. People from across the globe “meet” in virtual worlds, such as Second Life, where they can talk, play, shop and learn.

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BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Illinois Wesleyan University sophomore Li Haoda spent the first 10 years of his life in a small village in China before he moved to a nearby city of Guangzhou. Years later, when he returned to visit to the rural village, he realized his childhood friends had few educational opportunities.

“The people I went to school with [when I was very young] were just as smart as I was, but about one in five of them dropped out of school,” said Li. “The rural schools just did not have the opportunities that were available in the city.”

The disparity of educational opportunities spurred Li to join the Peer Experience Exchange Rostrum (PEER), a not-for-profit organization geared toward bringing educational equality to China. The group recruits Chinese students studying abroad to volunteer at summer tutoring camps for students in rural, impoverished areas of China.

“We dedicated ourselves to a seemingly impossible mission: to provide resources for disadvantaged children in China, supporting their continued education to change their lives,” said Li, who joined PEER in 2008 when the organization only had 10 volunteers. “We faced obstacles in our work, such as enduring an eight-hour bus ride to a remote rural school, and coordinating multi-national volunteers in nine-hour online meetings, but with each minute devoted to my work, I better prepare volunteers, thereby helping the poor students gain more from our summer camps.”

Now in is third year with the group, Li became executive director last year. “When you create opportunity, people can discover their passions,” said Li, an Illinois Wesleyan sophomore with a double major in political science and economics. “That works both for those getting help, and the volunteers providing it. People can have a passion, but no opportunity. This is an opportunity.”

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BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Two Illinois Wesleyan University classes are taking advantage of a wealth of information from local sources in Bloomington, and returning the favor by providing new insights on the data – all part of a collaboration with the city the University calls home.

“I really wanted my students to get into the local community,” said Associate Professor of German and Eastern European Studies Sonja Fritzsche. In her German 488: Von Demokratie zur Diktatur (From Democracy to Dictatorship) class students are introduced to the concept of German immigration by translating old, German-language newspapers from the Bloomington-Normal area that are housed at the McLean County Museum of History’s archives.

For Associate Professor of Economics Diego Mendez-Carbajo, the idea of using real data from the City of Bloomington for his new class titled Economics 370: Time Series Analysis was more than a good way to study financial and economic variables.

“Quantitative analysis skills are one of the comparative advantages that business and economics majors bring to the job market,” said Mendez-Carbajo, who noted students who take the class should be able to look at a long series of observations and discern the patterns. “I wanted students to learn about the data-gathering process itself. At the very least I would like them to be the one person that steps forward when their future boss or supervisor asks ‘can anybody make sense of these numbers?’”

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