Sojourn News Release

The Sojourn brought home Saturday, April 13 from Bloomington, Ind., nine awards from the Indiana Collegiate Press Association, the preeminent group of college journalists in the state. Three were all-level, meaning Indiana Wesleyan University students won against all schools in Indiana, even large programs such as Indiana University and Ball State. Four of the six awards within the paper’s size division were first places.

All-level

Third place: Jeremy Sharp, Ben Middelkamp and Elise Hulce, Best Breaking News Reporting Online; Jeremy Sharp, Ben Middelkamp and Elise Hulce, Best Special Presentation Online; Haley Page, Jeremy Sharp and Ben Middelkamp, Best Use of Twitter

Division III

First place: Staff, Best Overall Design; Staff, Best Single Issue; Josh Gales, Aaron Goshen and Jeremy Sharp, Best Photo Essay or Picture Story; Jeremy Sharp, Best Sports News Story

Second place: Staff, Best Front Page

Third place: Jeremy Sharp and Ali Cravens, Best News Feature Reporting

Sharp is the editor in chief of the paper. “I told the staff we don’t do what we do for awards, but it’s pretty great when they happen,” he said. “It’s a great reflection that we’re doing things right and all our hard work is paying off.”

Sharp also has won a Society of Professional Journalists student award for spot news reporting, another all-level statewide nod. SPJ is the top professional journalists’ association in the USA and Indiana.

“Jeremy is a fine student journalist who is very versatile in reporting on varying topics and in different writing styles,” said Dr. Kyle Huckins, The Sojourn’s faculty adviser. “The rest of our people at the newspaper also have done well in building skills and displaying these to an increasingly energized on-campus readership as well as students and professionals around the state and nation.”

Huckins will be receiving an SPJ statewide professionals’ award in column writing for religion pieces carried by the Marion (Ind.) Chronicle-Tribune and other area daily newspapers. This honor and Sharp’s will be presented Friday, April 19 in Indianapolis.

Hundreds of Indiana Wesleyan University students took to Twitter on Sunday night into early Monday morning with one thing on their minds: a snow day.

As of 8 a.m. Monday, more than 230 Tweets registered on an all-inclusive Twitter search containing the hashtag “#IWUcancellation,” each representing a call for the university to shut down classes.

The tweets ranged from serious to comical and even desperate.

“I’m from New Mexico, I don’t know how to function in this much snow. #IWUcancellation” Twitter user @CherylPinto93 tweeted.

“My Mario’s pizza froze before I got back to the dorm #iwucancellation” said user @tgreathouse.

“John Wesley statue is shivering #iwucancellation” added user @TJHegs.

Just before 1 a.m. Monday, The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning in Northern Indiana, including the Marion area. The warning was set to last until 10 a.m.

Certain parts of IWU’s campus had received five inches of snow by 2 a.m., even prompting the Grant County Sheriff’s Department to take action.

“The roads in Grant County have become hazardous. Please do not travel unless absolutely necessary,” the Department said in a statement, later adding Grant County had been put on a travel watch through Monday. “Only essential travel, such as to and from work, and emergencies, is recommended.”

For IWU student Nick Clay (jr), that warning came too late. Clay was driving back to campus around 2 a.m. from his home in South Carolina when the snowy roads caused his car to end up in a ditch on Highway 37 just 10 miles away from campus. Clay expressed concern for those traveling to and from IWU, calling the roads “garbage.”

The last time IWU cancelled classes University-wide was during the 2010-2011 school year, when icy conditions made sidewalks nearly impassable. This was the same winter when The Sojourn reported one student broke an elbow, another their leg and at least eight more suffered minor injuries due to falls on a day IWU did not cancel classes.

As snow continued to fall 8 a.m. Monday, there had been no official word from the university regarding any cancellations, though some students reported individual classes had been cancelled.

Update: IWU officials did not immediately reply to an email requesting comment Monday morning.

Update No. 2: Just after noon, IWU’s Student Development Office sent an email notifying students the university would shut down at 3 p.m. Food services were scheduled to operate on normal schedule. At 4 p.m. the #IWUcancellation hashtag had reached more than 300 tweets.

From Friday, Feb. 8 to Sunday, Feb. 10, a large part of the Indiana Wesleyan University campus had either no or limited wireless Internet access. After working through the weekend, the university’s Information Technology discovered the network had maxed out capacity.

Gary Green, associate vice president for IT, said the previous bandwidth, about 500-600 MB, wasn’t large enough for the ever-growing network. He said during the past couple weeks, workers noticed the network had some problems, so they attempted to fix it. The issues carried over into this weekend as they added more servers, which doubled the bandwidth to 1 GB.

“We had our network folks in this weekend, along with our vendors to take a look at it and figure out what’s going on,” Green said. “Our vendors said it looks like traffic was going through like it should. What was helpful was we had students tweet and we kept an eye on the tweets and that helped determine it, because what we were looking at didn’t seem to indicate the issues we had.”

Green said they had to figure out if it was a problem with the actual Internet access or with the access points around campus. IT concluded that it was a problem with Internet access, which led to the realization of the over-capacity of the network. Green added that students tweeting, using hashtag “IWUWiFi”, their location and connection problem helped guide the process.

“We can’t fix a problem if we don’t know about it,” Green said. “Once the tweets come in, then we know, but as far as we know things are going well if we don’t hear any noise.”

Garrett Muller (jr) said he actually did have Internet this weekend on campus. Muller owns a Macbook Pro, and it could connect to both IWU-Staff as well as through an ethernet cord.

“I felt bad for everyone else, and I told my girlfriend Kim and told other people, ‘Look, IWU-Staff’s working in East Lodge, and if you are super-desperate, our lodge is open and you can use it,’” Muller said.

Green said he’s not sure why some students could get Internet through IWU-Staff, as there shouldn’t be a difference between a Mac and a Windows-based computer when it comes to wireless Internet.

On Saturday, IT thought it repaired the problem as workers fixed the first location they heard about near South Hall and Beckett Hall. Once more tweets and calls came into the help desk, Green said they found people still didn’t have access. It wasn’t until Sunday when they fixed the majority of campus.

Anna McTaggart (fr) said she first noticed the Internet cutting out when she took an online quiz on Blackboard. It kicked her off after two questions. Once the quiz reset by her professor, she attempted to finish, but was kicked offline again.

This didn’t happen on a wireless network, as McTaggart took the quiz on a computer in Beckett Hall’s computer lab connected through ethernet.

One aspect of the network that IT changed in trying to fix the Internet is iPrism. Green said iPrism has three main functions: authenticating, filtering and monitoring. Earlier in the week, IT turned it off and on to test it. In response, IT modified iPrism to only monitor the capacity. Green said in order for the best student experience for Internet, it means the authentication and filtering function of iPrism will be suspended for a period of time.

“One of the things that iPrism has is when you get to a level of capacity and limitation on the iPrism, it will default or fail over and perhaps give you the capability of getting outside until the capacity gets lower,” Green said.

He added IT brought in a new server to help facilitate iPrism’s capacity.

Green said he doesn’t want this to happen again and hopes the changes made this weekend and continued input from students through Twitter and phone calls can help prevent it from taking as long to fix in the future.

“You guys live here, this is your city. … We work here and go home and connect to the Internet. This is your home, this is your Internet, and you need to have that up and we understand that,” Green said. “We’re trying to be able to get better feedback quicker when items or the Internet are not working so there won’t be any downtime.”

By Taylar Camacho

The Council for Interior Design Accreditation is evaluating Indiana Wesleyan University’s interior design program, which is attempting to become an accredited major by 2014.

The long and detailed process of applying for accreditation began when IWU administrators approved the motion in 2010. After receiving approval from the university, the staff began compiling the necessary paperwork to begin the accreditation process.

The CIDA accreditation process requires a six-step evaluation of the educational proficiency of IWU’s interior design program. During the evaluation, the CIDA will assess 16 different standards of the interior design curriculum.

Once the CIDA has evaluated the curriculum, members will visit campus to determine if the university has met the standards of accreditation. This visit will consist of three officials from CIDA coming to IWU for three days to evaluate the courses and students’ work.

“We are currently meeting all of the standards being evaluated by the CIDA,” said Wendy Puffer, assistant professor and coordinator for the interior design program at IWU, who initiated the accreditation process.

Anna Luke (jr) said the accreditation process affected the difficulty of the courses offered for interior design majors at IWU.

“At that point, the classes began to adjust and become more challenging [in order] to reach the requirements for CIDA,” said Luke.

Although the curriculum’s difficulty increased, Puffer said the accreditation process would not affect staffing. Currently, there are three adjunct professors who are assisting Puffer in the interior design program.

Along with the curriculum, the CIDA is appraising students’ work. Puffer said her desire to initiate the accreditation process stems from their inspiring work. “These students have strong design abilities and they should get recognized,” she said.

“Not only do we want the privilege to graduate from an accredited program, but we also want that for the future interior designers of IWU,” said Luke. “Having graduated from an accredited program can only help when entering the professional field of interior design.”

Students currently in the program will directly benefit from the accreditation process. Alumni have also expressed the importance of entering the workplace with a degree from an accredited program.

“The accreditation process is very important for the future of interior design at IWU,” Jonica Klein (alumna ‘12) said. “It sets you apart from the competition when you have an accredited university on your resume.

“I’m finding in the job search that lacking a CIDA endorsement next to my university does limit some of the jobs I’m able to apply for,” said Klein. “If you want to work for the best architecture and design firms, they often require a four-year degree from a CIDA-accredited university.”

“Our journey to accreditation has been long and meticulous,” Luke said, “but the end result will be nothing less than rewarding.”