Road trip...Tooele

Have I mentioned that I love my new position as the regional campus rep? I am just getting started gearing up for the new school year but already I get to do some really cool stuff. One thing I am doing is visiting the regional campuses. I wanted to get to know the student government officers and learn more about each campus and the communities they are located within.
I thought that as long as I got to visit them that I would share some pictures and little tidbits that I learned at each campus.

Today I visited the Tooele campus. It is a beautiful building that is literally growing both in size and enrollment!
You can tell there is plenty of Aggie spirit and pride at this campus. I knew I was in the right place when I turned the corner and saw this 6 foot "A" in front of the campus.
This is V.P. Randi Gamble (L) and President Rachel Anderson with me.
I was very impressed by both of them, they seemed very excited to get involved in student government and I think they will do a great job at the Tooele campus.

Rachel and Randi took me on a tour of the campus that is just nearing the end of a big addition that includes many new state of the art classrooms and new offices for faculty.
Not only is the campus itself growing, but the enrollment is currently increasing by about 20% each year. This campus is a great asset to its community where many working adults are furthering their education along with traditional students.

Check out this fabulous new biology lab!

This is Dean Gary Straquadine who is new to the Tooele campus this year. I enjoyed visiting with him about the campus, the students and community. In my opinion, he is a really nice guy who seems to be genuinely excited and enthusiastic about USU Tooele. I think he will do a great job as the new dean.


This is a tradition at the Tooele campus. Every year they repaint the rock and the students sign it, I think after a few years the paint on this rock will be so thick that the rock will actually grow larger.

So, at the risk of making a really corny pun I'll say this anyway...

USU Tooele rocks!

Summer update

I haven't posted anything here of a couple of weeks so I thought I'd do an update on what I'm doing this summer.

As you can see, the garden has really taken off... we are now eating, peas, beans, zucchini, yellow squash and cucumbers and in a couple more weeks we'll have corn. My son has taken this on as his pet project , he spends a lot of time making sure it is weeded and watered and he's doing a great job.

I realize that it doesn't look like we've made much progress on the living room yet but actually the fact that I'm putting down the sub-floor is a good sign. It means that we have finished working on things under the floor. We ran cable and electrical for more tv jacks and outlets. We also repaired some floor joists that were in sad shape and poored some cement for footings for a project in the future. Now that we have a sub-floor, we can start working on the maple flooring !

And finally...

this is what I've been anxiously checking the mail for every day for the last 10 days. It's the results for the Miller Analogies test that I took at the beginning of July. I've been waiting to see if I did well enough to get into the master's in school counseling program here at USU. I realize that you can't read the writing on this picture (that was actually my intent) but I will say that I am happy to report that my score was good enough to do the trick!!

Research

This is a training meeting for the research project that I am getting involved with this summer. Emi Sumida is on my right. She is a psychology grad. student who is doing a study looking for a correlation between emotion regulation and depression. On my left is Sara Stevens, she is doing a study that looks at emotion regulation and eating disorders. Because they are both interested in emotion regulation they are working together and I get to be one of their research assistants. This summer we have been doing training meetings. When fall semester starts we will be looking for participants by having psychology students fill out questionnaires. We will then select the students who fit the criteria we need and interview them over the phone. I am so excited to be involved in this project, it's a great opportunity for me to spend my senior year learing more about psychological resaerch. Dr. Stein is overseeing this research and I can tell that everyone on the team is very committed and enthusiastic. I think it will not only be a great learning experience but also a lot of fun.

Happy 4th of July!

As you know, I live in a small town. I love some of the unique things about living in a small town. Life is just different than in a big city. Our town has several traditions for the 4th of July, and my family and I look forward to the community activities. First, the local scout troup has a fundraiser and cooks breakfast at the park. They make pancakes, bacon, eggs and hash browns. The entire town comes to the pavilion to eat together. Next, at 10:oo the sheriff comes and closes the main road through town and we have a parade. You will never see a parade like this anywhere but a small town. The parade begins at the church in the middle of town and goes north about 1/4 mile where it turns around in front of my house and goes all the way back to the church... so you get to see the entire thing twice. The parade consists of first the cub scouts presenting the flag, followed by the grand marshall ( usually the oldest person or couple in town who hasn't been the grand marshall in the past.) The rest of the parade is made up of anyone in town who wants to be in the parade. There are kids on decorated bikes, four wheelers pulling trailers, kids on horses, tractors, motorcycles, hay wagons loaded with grandchildren and anything else you can imagine. There is always an old fashioned band on a trailer with people playing accordions, a wash board, banjo, etc. It's a small town so there is no regulation against throwing candy so there is always a lot of salt water taffy and tootsie rolls. The funny thing about the parade is that most of the kids in town are in the parade, so the audience in made up almost entirely of adults. The entire thing lasts maybe 15 minutes.

MAT

This week my youngest daughter is out of town visiting my sister, and my son went to scout camp so my house was pretty quiet. I took advantage of that to get some stuff done for school. On Thursday I took the MAT (Miller Analogy Test.) It was one thing I needed to get done as part of my application for grad school. The test wasn't too terrible. I had one hour to answer 120 questions. the questions are all phrased as analogies. I had been told that it was pretty much impossible to study for this test, but that it was good to do a couple of practice tests to get a feel for how much time you have and familiarize yourself with the diffferent types of analogies that would be on the test. I think that was good advise.
The program I am applying to is the master's of school counseling program here a USU. They require that I get a score of at least the 41st percintile on the test. That unfortunately doesn't mean that I need to get a score of better than 40%. It means that for every hundred people who take the test I must have a better score than 40 of them. From what I understand, scores on standardized tests like this or the ACT or SAT are fairly stable over your lifetime. That means that even though I took the ACT back in 1985, my score on the MAT should be fairly similar to what I got on the ACT. I now have to wait 2-4 weeks before I get my score in the mail.

Zucchini

Sunday we picked and ate the first thing from our gardern this year. (Well, other than strawberries, we've been picking them for a few weeks now.) It was a zucchini of course. By the end of the summer we will be really sick of eating them but at this point in the season we were excited about it. This is our favorite way to eat it. We slice it about 1/4 inch thick, dip the slices in egg and then cracker crumbs and fry them. My kids all love these!