SFC and Mannion Food! *
Today is Wednesday April 6, 2011 and the SFC was today. SFC stands for Student Faculty Conference and it’s where students and faculty meet up to discuss core reform and in each specific major, issues that arise with research and academics. Each major had a specific committee with representatives from each year. The committees met and gave presentations that were open to all students (there was even free food!). I went to the general SFC where they talked about core reform and then I went to the math major discussion. There are a lot of good ideas on the table for the core reform and I’m really looking forward to see which direction the core ends up going. In most people’s opinions, a lot of the changes are going to be improvements. At the math major SFC, we talked about research, classes, math requirements, and a lot more. I enjoyed being able to voice my opinion to the faculty about the things I felt would make the math major better.
The SFC, however, is not the only place where you can interact with professors or give your opinions about what could be improved. We have ombuds meetings every term to give feedback to the department chair for every class. An ombuds meeting is where a representative from each house signs up to meet with the department chair and then all of the representatives meet with the department chair for a class to talk about what could be improved. I have been to an ombuds meeting and the faculty really do listen to what the students have to say. A lot of classes improved because of them.
Even though we students are really involved in academics and improving our academic experience here, we also do get breaks once in a while. Today at Coffee House, Tom Mannion gave out free pulled pork sandwiches to the first 125 students to show up! Coffee House (or “Chouse” as we call it) is a place where students to go late at night (10:00 pm - 2:00 am) to get milkshakes, french fries, coffee, cheese sticks, and more. In the daytime, Chouse is the Red Door Cafe which is a cafe on campus. At night, students take over and work making all of these cool snacks for us to eat while we’re up working on problem sets. Tom Mannion is basically the coolest guy ever. He is the instructor for the cooking class here (which is one of the only classes that there is a lottery for because everyone wants to take a class taught by Tom Mannion). Tom Mannion’s job on campus is to make all of our lives much more fun. He came up with the idea of having pies at pies on 3/14 at 1:59 am (26 pies of each flavor and 5 flavors) and helped us set up and serve them all on the Olive Walk. Did I mention he makes amazing food? Whenever there is “Mannion Food” you should expect a crowd. There was a huge line going out the door at Chouse of people waiting to get pulled pork sandwiches.
This post severly lacked pictures. Sorry about that! I forgot my camera almost all week. There will be pictures in my next posts! For now, here’s a picture of my cat sitting in a bookself:
