The Office of Undergraduate Admission has posted the 2013-14 application essay questions on its blog. Some of these, such as “What is your favorite word and why?” are old favorites and have been in circulation before. Others are brand new, such as “To tweet or not to tweet?”
Read the rest at Notes From Peabody.
Image courtesy Caitlin Eberhardt
U.Va. Today’s Jane Kelly reports:
Over the summer, rising second-year University of Virginia Law School student Caitlin Eberhardt is blogging about her Center for Global Health research project in Guatemala. Here’s an excerpt from her first entry:
“Hola Amigos,
My name is Caitlin, and I’ve already decided that in Guatemala, it will be Catalina. I like to change my name to fit where I’m going—it makes me feel like I fit in more. I’m a native Texan, and although the title of this blog might suggest I have some Tejano/Mexicano roots, sadly, that is not the case. Although I love Latin music, Tex-Mex, and some good salsa dancing, I’m a Dallas girl that fell in love with the Latino culture and took too many Spanish classes in high school. So, bearing all of that in mind, I’m using (making up?) the word “Texana.” Texana en Guatemala = I am a Texan girl in Guatemala!
…
I am sitting on a plane and currently en route to Guatemala where I will spend the next two months working with Mayan women in the town of Patzun, Guatemala.”
Read the rest of the entry and visit her blog, Texana en Guatemala, for more.
Image courtesy of Caitlin Eberhardt.
There was a new face at last night’s City Council candidate forum on environmental issues, held in City Council Chambers.
Doctoral student Jessica Gephart (far left) moderated the May 29 City Council candidate forum on environmental issues. Photo courtesy of Charlottesville Tomorrow.
Sitting at the Council dais, alongside the five Democratic and two Republican candidates, was the forum moderator, Jessica Gephart, a University of Virginia doctoral student in environmental sciences who serves as the political chair of the local Sierra Club chapter, which cosponsored the event with 10 other organizations that work on local environmental and transportation issues.
Gephart has been interested in environmental policy and active in student political organizations, including the University Democrats, since her undergraduate days at Miami University of Ohio, she explained. During this year’s General Assembly session, she traveled to Richmond with a group of UVA students to speak with legislators about environmental issues. Continue reading…
Here’s a great U.Va. sports trivia question: Now that Brian Boland has finally broken through and led U.Va. to its first NCAA men’s tennis team championship, how many current members of the U.Va. athletics department (coaches and administrators) have coached a team to at least one NCAA championship?
The answer is here, in Jeff White’s column celebrating Boland’s first title after several near-misses. (Hint: The coaches have totaled 12 championships between them.)
It’s a pretty impressive list, and Boland certainly has earned his way on it. His teams, consistently ranked among the best in the nation, have reached at least the NCAA quarterfinals every year since 2005, and were runners-up for the past two seasons. Now that they’ve broken through, Boland’s Hoos certainly appear poised to add to their trophy haul, replacing two graduating seniors with the nation’s top-ranked recruiting class.
So, who will be the next Cavalier coach to join the NCAA champions’ club? At the risk of putting too much pressure on a real good guy, Brian O’Connor’s baseball team has made two appearances in the College World Series in the past four years and is gunning for a third, beginning Friday. As the No. 6 national seed, they Cavs are projected to be among the eight teams likely to reach Omaha, Neb., the annual site of the College World Series. Things will have to fall into place — the pitching and defense have been a little inconsistent, by standards of his past teams — but this was expected to be a rebuilding season, with another peak next year.
Head University of Virginia football coach Mike London will host a football camp for women Friday at the new George Welsh Indoor Practice Facility. The itinerary includes skill instruction, offensive and defensive strategy and the responsibilities and mechanics of the officiating crew.
Find out more:
(Disclaimer: The University of Virginia is not a sponsor or co-sponsor of Mike London Football Camps.)
A full gallery of images from Final Exercises 2013 is now available on the University’s Flickr page.
Here’s a small sample:
Make sure to check out other photo sets from Finals weekend, including Valediction with Stephen Colbert.
(Photos by: Dan Addison, Cole Geddy, Justin Ide and Mina Pirasteh)
The University of Virginia held its 184th Final Exercises Sunday. Here’s a time-lapse view of the academic procession as it moved down the Lawn.
The University put together this video as a thank-you to the 222,452 donors who contributed to the successful completion of the $3 billion Campaign for the University of Virginia.
Virginia Sailing competing in the 2013 ICSA Coed Dinghy Semifinals
The Sailing Association at the University of Virginia — a student-run club sports team open to all U.Va. students — recently qualified for the 2013 College Sailing Spring National Championship, the first time the U.Va. club has qualified for the national finals.
During a semifinal back in April, a team comprised of then-fourth-year Gordon Wolcott, third-years Chris Stessing and Ellen Hubbard, second-year Hannah Varden and first-years Caitlin Grumbling and Sam Patterson traveled to the ICSA Coed Dinghy Semi-Finals at Old Dominion University and took ninth, good enough to qualify for the Gill/ICSA Coed Dingy National Finals on May 28-30.
The team practices at Lake Anna, about a 45-minute drive from Grounds, where it has a fleet of nine FJ boats.
Stessing and Hubbard recently sent along these accounts of going through semifinals and qualifying for nationals.
Chris Stessing – Commodore:
“Although we are only a club sport here at U.Va., the ICSA (Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association, the highest level of sailing available to college athletes) sees varsity and club teams in the same light. This mean that everyone weekend we compete against the top teams in the country who are fully funded, have multiple coaches and practice five days a week. It is a very tall order for us to be able to sail at the level of these other teams seeing that we practice at most once a week, and have a volunteer coach that only meets us on the weekend. Everything else is done by the sailors on the team from administrative duties to finding vehicles to take each weekend around the country and running our own practices.
When I came to U.Va. it was a far-out dream to even qualify out of our conference (MAISA – Mid Atlantic Inter-collegiate Sailing Association) to make it to the semifinals of the National Championship. Our “A” skipper Gordon Wolcott and I (“B” skipper) have long been talking about how cool it would be to make this happen and it still feels surreal.
Sailing at the semifinals felt slightly out of place when we arrived. The top 36 teams in the country arrived all in large 15-passenger vans with their head coach, assistant coach and a full team of starters and backups of at least 10 sailors. They were all wearing their provided team gear and looked really official. We were definitely out-matched off the water with our six sailors showing up in a small SUV with our assistant coach in tow. Even though we may have been outclassed off the water, the actual racing takes place on the water and it was clear from the first start that we were good enough to hang with the top teams in the country. After the first day of racing with a great performance from Gordon (winning one race), U.Va. was in seventh with the top nine teams qualifying for the finals. The second day of the regatta started off great with me winning a race in B division and us moving into the top five. Things quickly changed as the wind picked up and the increased level of fitness of the varsity teams took over in the breezy, more physically demanding conditions. We slid all the way to ninth place and had to fight off the 10th-place team in the last two races of the regatta.
In the end we were in disbelief at the accomplishment that we had achieved, and it is still hard to wrap my head around the level we have achieved with so many odds against us. For the first time ever, U.Va. is a ranked team in the country (18th), and we are sailing at the final round of our sport’s national championship. I hope we can represent U.Va. well!
From left: Chris Stessing, Caitlin Grumbling, Hannah Varden, Ellen Hubbard, Alexandra Brenin, Gordon Wolcott, Sam Patterson, and KC Fullmer.
Ellen Hubbard – Co-Captain:
We are all very excited to have the opportunity to compete with the best of the best down in Florida. Going to semifinals was an accomplishment in and of itself, and it was electrifying being in Hampton once we realized we were moving on to the finals. Sitting among some of the best college sailors in the country at the closing awards and now among them in the rankings at No. 18 will undoubtedly remain highlights of my time at U.Va., and I’m sure the rest of the team would say the same.
The team will be practicing twice a day for the week leading up to the championship, which may be more practice than we have had the luxury of conducting all year! This is the first time in school history that the sailing team has competed in either the semifinals or the finals of the co-ed ICSA national championship, and we are enjoying every minute.
For more, visit the Virginia Sailing website.
May 28 update: A live stream of the national finals is available.
Among the many impressive images from Final Exercises this weekend were photographs of mortarboards decorated by members of the Class of 2013.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest written record of the term “mortarboard” (as it applies to graduation hats, anyway) came in 1854 in “The Further Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, An Oxford Under-Graduate” by Cuthbert Bede.
In it, the author describes the mortarboard as an “academical cap,” a term we suspect Mr. Jefferson would have approved of. So here’s a look at the academical caps worn at the Academical Village during Final Exercises 2013. Click for bigger versions.
Any favorites?
(Photos: Cole Geddy and Justin Ide)
Here’s a time-lapse view of a past Final Exercises graduation ceremony, courtesy of the Rotunda Cam.
(Or click here if it doesn’t play automatically.)
The University’s staff photographers have been visiting the Lawn this week, documenting the changes taking place in preparation for Final Exercises 2013. Staff photographer Cole Geddy took these shots on Wednesday and Thursday. See a post from earlier this week for comparisons. Click for bigger versions.
The preparations for Final Exercises 2013 are in full swing this week. University of Virginia staff photographer Cole Geddy took these pictures on the Lawn as work continued Tuesday. Click for bigger versions.
Of course, those working to transform the Lawn aren’t the only ones getting ready. Fellow U.Va. photographer Dan Addison put together a GIF to capture the sentiment among members of the Class of 2013.
Want a live look on the Lawn? Check the RotundaCam.
