By Megan Bradford

AUSTIN- In the midst of finals season, students at The University of Texas at Austin stop at Square Peg coffee truck for a caffeine fix and conversation with the spunky cashier — a nine-year-old named Danger.

The truck that opened on UT’s campus last August has already earned a reputation among students for its family-operated dynamic and the friendly faces of the owner’s children who work the register every morning.

“The first time I stopped there was just for a quick coffee before class, but seeing this little boy actively working hand-in-hand with his dad is the reason I kept going back,” Junior Colton Harrelson said. “I’d rather give my money to a family like that than a large corporation.”

Owners Kirk and Kymberly Richard have four children named Ember, River, LileeLark, Hezekiah Danger and are expecting their fifth child any day now. Richard said their ten-year-old daughter River and nine-year-old son “Danger,” are central to customer relations.

“I think it’s fun that the kids do a lot of the customer interaction…we want to make sure that everyone in the family grows up with the culture of helping and serving others,” Kirk said. “The shop is a way for us to do that.”

Square Peg coffee truck on 21st St. Photo by Megan Bradford

Richard said every family member has an integral role in the shop. Kirk is the barista. His wife Kymberly bakes goods every night to stock the shop for the morning shift and the children work the register. Each child has a specialty drink named just after them.

What customers might not know is that the truck is a product of a long spiritual journey for the Richard family

Kirk Richard said he attended the University of Houston for one year before he dropped out and moved to Southern California to surf. There he met Kymberly, a Southern California native. The two got married and had River and Danger during their ten years in California.

Richard was working as a restaurant manager when he and Kymberly decided that with children, he needed a job that was “more financially stable.”

“We wanted to do more than change our jobs, but change our own scope on life,” Kirk said. “We felt called to use our vocation as way to serve with more practical means.”

But he said his was not a quick transition.

Kirk and Kymberly explored the idea of missionary work abroad, but found they “weren’t fit for the over-seas mission.”

They moved to Houston and worked in a maternity home called LifeHouse that helped young women with crisis pregnancies. During their four years in Houston, Kirk and Kymberly had their third child, Ember.

“We enjoyed it, we really found out a lot about who we are and what we were called to do,” Kirk said. “One thing we loved about the job was that our whole family interacted in the job… our kids were not just helpful, but foundational in helping people.”

With this new insight, the Richards pondered how to convert this insight into a business venture.

A coffee shop came to mind.

“Coffee shops can feel a lot like a home and it would afford us the opportunity to serve people as a family,” Kirk said. “That’s the idea, so we decided we wanted to open a coffee trailer.”

The couple’s ambition to facilitate a “doors-open-fences-down” environment brought them to Austin, Texas.

“Before we opened Square Peg, we actually came out here to help start a coffee shop in conjunction with a church plant as a way to connect people in a larger community,” Kirk said.

Kirk said they started having people over, specifically college students, since their move to Austin three years ago.

“We have a heart for college students,” Kirk said. “Being separated from family is a hard thing and we like to be available if people just want a cup of coffee and an ear to listen.”

The deciding factor to locate the truck on UT campus boiled down to the walkup traffic and the connection they already established with the student community. According to Kirk, they were “just following the path.”

Sophomore Riley O’Hara, a frequent customer, said he personally liked that the truck horizontally faces oncoming traffic because it establishes an inviting environment. Square Peg is the only truck on this site that faces downhill traffic.

At the start of the 2017 Fall semester, Square Peg officially opened for business.

“The name comes with the idea that we operate differently not just as a family business, but culturally different,” Kirk said. “People aren’t customers, but neighbors.”

This culture did not go unnoticed by student Paige Dausin.

“Every time I go up, it feels as though they genuinely want to know how I am doing,” Sophomore Paige Dausin said. “Whenever you stop there, you aren’t stopping just for coffee, you’re stopping for the experience.”

According to the University Policy Office that delegates food vendors policy, the addition of food trucks on campus are part of a larger growing trend here in Austin.

Kirk, however, is unsure of the future for Square Peg as a trailer establishment.

“I’m happy and sad because I see a glimpse of what we want to be…there are so many beautiful shades to this we haven’t seen yet,” Kirk said. “It’s hard to say what the future holds, but for just opening, we are moving in the right direction.”

Local Nonprofit Inspires, Teaches Arts to Austin Youth

By: Paul Iskra

AUSTIN — B*Tru Arts teaches various art forms to kids, showing them life lessons and encouraging teamwork among different individuals.

“The arts are universal,” said Aisha Melham, founder and CEO of B*Tru arts. “No matter where you are from, you can appreciate it and connect to various artistic performances on all levels.”

B*Tru is a local nonprofit organization that teaches theater, film, acting, voice lessons, dance, and other arts to Austin residents of all ages. These lessons are accompanied by multiple performances which occur throughout the year, giving experience as well as practice to all B*Tru members.

For Mirabella Sessums, a 12-year-old commercial actress, the lessons she has learned from B*Tru have helped her develop more than just her skills.

“It’s different. They treat you like you’re an adult,” Sessums said over a phone interview. “If you are used to everyone holding your hand, you’re are going to fail in life.”

Mirabelle’s mother, Sasha Sessums, said the lessons that Melham teaches are applicable in any field of expertise.

“It’s good to learn how to work with all different types of people,” Sasha Sessums said. “Aisha does have extremely high standards, and I think that it’s really good to work alongside someone like that, who expects a lot from you. You learn how to give your best.”

After the summer of 2016, B*Tru Arts became formally certified as a vendor for Austin Independent School District, allowing it to partner with AISD schools and provide classes on campus, said Melham. Scholarships are available to prospective students who wish to participate with B*Tru Arts, but the limited funding and financial accommodation of students limits the amount of partnerships to only a few schools, said Melham.

“It doesn’t promise a contract with the school, but it allows us to reach out to the school,” Melham said. “If the school needs a program like ours, and we have the budget for it, then we can begin offering our classes there.”

B*Tru serves as an open invitation for students looking to experience the Arts without enrolling in official classes, where audiences and expectations can be larger and more severe, said Lucy Figueroa, a Program Coordinator at Fullmore Middle School.

“The good thing is that the students have the opportunity to choose B*Tru. They are sixth grade, seventh grade, and eighth grade,” Figueroa said. “In that aspect, different grade levels are all working together.”

Figueroa also added that the students are encouraged to take an active role in performance decisions.

“She really gives them leadership skills to try to choose what they want to do with the program,” Figueroa said. “It’s more geared to their interests than her making the decision for them.”

For Melham, originality is everything, as B*Tru performers create their own content — across all age groups.

“I try to get [the kids] to be creators rather than consumers,” Melham said. “Why not teach the students to create something that they feel connected to and that they resonate with, because that is only going to help their performance and the audience’s response to watching it.”

For many B*Tru Arts performers, this is a chance for voices to be heard, which would otherwise go unnoticed in AISD classes, according to Melham.

“A lot of students have said that in the current school curriculum system, they don’t feel like they are allowed to voice their thoughts,” Melham said. “I provide that safe environment in my classes for kids to speak their truth in a judgement free zone.”

This confidence building that occurs in B*Tru Arts classes goes beyond practice, according to Figueroa. Students of any art form are encouraged to partake in performances throughout the year, Figueroa said

“She is also trying to go into the community and take what the students have learned, take the performance they have created, and have them present it to other people in the community,” Figueroa said. “That way, they are not just doing it for their parents. They are doing it for a live audience, which is going to build their confidence even more.”

Melham pushes students to be true to themselves and perform accordingly, Mirabella Sessums said.

“Aisha always tells us to do what comes naturally,” said Mirabella Sessums. “Don’t force it.”

B*Tru Arts will host its largest festival Inspiro Festiva May 12th. Admission is free.

Adopted UT student makes pilgrimage to her Chinese orphanage

By: Laura Laughead

AUSTIN- Just weeks after birth, a baby girl was left on the doorsteps of a Chinese government building in 1997. Born with a heart disorder and a chromosomal condition that left her with multiple birth defects, her abandonment illustrates the impact of China’s one-child policy, which forced many couples to give up their children, especially in cases with little girls like this one.

Almost 20 years later, that child is now in her second year studying speech pathology 7,700 miles away in Austin, Texas. Although University of Texas sophomore Sarah Felt doesn’t remember anything about the first four years of her life in a Chinese orphanage, she knows exactly what she wants for her future. She plans to go back to China this summer for the first time since her adoption 16 years ago to find her roots and finally “get answers.”

“To be honest, I don’t know what to expect. I really don’t have any memories of that time, so I don’t know if it will trigger memories… I’m not sure what I’m going to feel,” Felt said.

This July, Sarah and her mother Sally Felt, a Houston accountant, are going on a 10-day trip throughout China, starting in the city of Lu’an, Sarah’s birth city and the location of her orphanage. The adoption agency Sally used to adopt Sarah 16 years ago is organizing the trip.

Sally, who raised Sarah as a single mother, said she is very excited for Sarah to be able to go back to her birth country.

“I think it is important that she has a connection to her heritage, and we can make a trip that she will remember,” Felt said.

Although Sarah said she feels both “nervous” and “excited,” she also said the experience means a lot to her because she often thinks about what her life would have been like if Sally hadn’t adopted her.

“There definitely have been times where I wonder, and it’s like ‘Oh, where are my parents? I wonder what their situation was,’” Sarah said. “I don’t think we’ll ever know because basically there’s no trace of them.”

Sarah wonders how similar she is to her biological parents. Standing at exactly 5 feet tall, Sarah lives with both a congenital heart disorder and Turner syndrome, a chromosomal disorder which affects her height, her reproductive ability, and her appearance. She still experiences health problems that doctors attribute to the malnourishment and lack of care in the orphanage.

“It’s hard to tell what resulted from being adopted and having that delay in language and cognitive development and what comes from the Turner syndrome. It kind of all meshes together,” Felt said.

In her teenage years, she wore braces for six years and gave herself nightly injections of human growth hormone. Before her senior year of high school, she underwent a jaw reconstruction surgery that prevented her from eating normally for almost six months.

“I got used to it,” Sarah said. “I’m very resilient, or so I’ve been told.”

She said that sometimes she struggles with the difficulties she has in her life, either because of her genetic disorders or the orphanage. Because of them, she said she often has to “work extra hard to get people’s respect.”

One person whose respect she quickly earned was her first-year college roommate, Chloe Nguyen.

“I honestly wouldn’t have been able to tell that she used to be a Chinese orphan if she hadn’t told me or introduced me to her mother,” Nguyen said. “She seems like a very normal, well-adjusted person.”

She said she really “admires” Sarah’s plan to go back to China as well as Sarah’s decision to keep her original Chinese name as her middle name. One year later, and they’re still friends.

“I don’t know anyone else with a similar background. I think I gained a newfound respect for her,” Nguyen said.

Sarah’s adoption process started when she was two. Sally Felt said that although the Chinese adoption system forced her to wait a year before she could adopt Sarah, she is very “grateful for foreign adoption.”

“There is not the uncertainty that a birth parent will go back to court and be able to take your child from you. It has been a wonderful experience, and if I were younger, I would be going back,” Sally said.

Sally also said that being Sarah’s parent has changed her life for the better.

“When you become a parent your entire life changes. It is no longer about you but about your child,” Sally said. “I would not trade any of that for one minute of being her mom.”

According to Sarah’s high school guidance counselor, Christine Oliphant, Sarah and Sally’s relationship is a testament to both of them.

“Sarah was blessed to be adopted, but she was blessed to be adopted by someone who devoted her life to raising children,” Oliphant said.

Oliphant emphasized that raising children from foreign adoptions can be difficult for both parties.

“It will go one or the other way. They’ll (children from foreign adoptions) either overcompensate and try to be almost perfect like they’re afraid they will lose their status if their grades are not good. Or they’ll just say, ‘I don’t care, I’m not worthy,’” Oliphant said.

Oliphant also said that Sarah’s hardworking and helpful attitude cemented her as a success story of foreign adoption.

“Sarah was always working, and she was always willing to help. If I asked her, ‘could you help me out and greet these people, or could you help me out and do this,’ she would never tell me no,” Oliphant said.

In addition to Sarah’s dedicated personality, Oliphant said Sally was “instrumental” in helping her become a successful student and adult.

“When Sarah wanted to give up, Sally would keep building up that self-esteem and that self-confidence in her,” Oliphant said. “Sally never missed a single event. She was always there.”

As she parented Sarah, Sally said she learned a great deal herself.

“In parenting Sarah, as with any child, I learned it is more about being the parent your child needs so they can reach their full potential rather than trying to mold them into the person you think they should become,” Sally said.

To Sarah, her mother is a source of strength and support.

“What’s really helped is my mom is amazing. She’s always been a good source of support throughout everything,” Sarah said.

However, if she had the chance on her upcoming trip, Sarah said she would still like to meet her biological parents.

“It’d be weird. Are they even still alive? . . . If I could, I would want to. I would want answers from them. It would be nice to have answers,” Sarah said.

Lava Records Artist Hessari is Embracing His Heritage — and Hometown

By: Mandie Meier

WACO, TX — From an outsider’s perspective, newly signed artist Aria Hessari seems to be living a dream. However, it hasn’t always been so easy for the Texas native.

“We shared a small van as our only mode of transportation,” Hessari said. “My parents didn’t make much money back then.”

Aria Hessari, known as Ariaa, signed onto Lava Records, a branch of Republic Records, in September 2017. The artist describes his music as pop-trap: catchy pop melodies on happier trap beats.

During the first few years of his life, Hessari says his family moved around Texas in hopes of finding a stable job and living environment. At four years old, his family settled into a small apartment in Waco, Texas.

Eventually, his father found a more stable job and Hessari said the family moved to a house in Hewitt, a local Waco suburb.

Hessari said seeing his father work long shifts to make ends meet was a big factor in his drive to become successful.

“Money was always a big reason in why I started music in the first place,” Hessari said. “I wanted to prove to people that you can make it out of the city of Waco without having to even leave.”

Even though he’s making it while living in Waco, Hessari said there are still struggles that come with living away from LA or New York as an artist.

“People don’t take it seriously,” Hessari said. “You tell anybody you’re making music in this city and they’ll hope you’re sticking to your day job — so I just stopped telling people and hid my identity.”

The rising artist said the relatively small town is a not as accepting as he wishes. He said most people aren’t so quick to accept that he’s following his dreams.

Although he said compared other cities the town doesn’t have much of a music scene, Waco has its perks. For example, he’s learned to prefer recording music in his bedroom at his parents’ house.

Hessari said he spends most of his days and nights in the blacklight illuminated room. Before he was signed, he had shoeboxes holding up his speakers. He later upgraded and spent $10,000 on a setup.

“That room means a lot to me,” Hessari said. “It’s the same room my brother made his first beat for [platinum recording artist] Chief Keef, and the place where I recorded my first debut single.”

His best friend Ty Sadler has been with Hessari throughout his journey of becoming a musician. Sadler said he knew from the first song Hessari showed him that things were going to get serious.

“When I first met him, he was super quiet — even when he first started making music,” Sadler said. “But he was always very ambitious, you could tell he had it in him.”

Hessari said his favorite song that he wrote was called “Farsi.” He said the hook of the song was recorded on his first take.

The concept was one that meant a lot to him, as it paid a tribute to his Persian roots. Because he didn’t want to rush the song, he waited until the next day to write his verse.

“It was just the most effortless song and ended up being the one that got me signed,” Hessari said.

He said it also received a lot of positive feedback through social media from the Persian-American community in the U.S. and from Iran.

“There’s people saying this song made them prouder of who they are and prouder of being Persian,” Hessari said. “To have something that I created that changes other people’s lives like that makes the song 100 times more meaningful to me.”

“Farsi” was originally released in 2017, but was picked up by T-Pain, who worked with Hessari to re-release the track. T-Pain was Hessari’s favorite artist growing up.

The remix with T-Pain was released on April 5 and has already compiled over 100,000 streams on Spotify.

Hessari said it was important for him to include people from his hometown with this release.

“Lizzie and Cade are great friends of mine and very talented, bright people,” Hessari said. “I just wanted to try to put some people on.”

The cover art includes his friend and Waco local, Lizzie Whitney.

“Lizzie is an angel,” Hessari said. “She’s a beautiful, amazing person. If I had to pick anybody to represent a song as meaningful as ‘Farsi’ it just had to be her.”

Whitney said being on the cover meant a great deal to her. She said she not only loves being able to work with a friend, but is also honored because she admires Hessari as an artist.

“When Aria asked if he could use one of the pictures from that shoot, of course I said yes,” Whitney said. “I’m so happy to be the face of what he’s created.”

Cade Kegerreis, the photographer of the cover art, also enjoys working with Hessari.

“He’s a very humble guy that has always been passionate since I’ve known him,” Kegerreis said. “He knew his vision before things played out and I’m excited to see him continue to rise to the opportunity.”

Hessari said he plans to move when his funds get more comfortable. However, he plans to keep a house in Waco to return to in the future.

“I just love the people in this city too much to leave forever,” Hessari said.

Hip-Hop’s Mainstream Ascent Creates Cultural Concerns

By: Derek Udensi

AUSTIN — AUSTIN — On his remix to Atlanta-based rapper Future’s hit 2017 single “Mask Off,” Kendrick Lamar asks the listener two significant questions. “How y’all let the braids on TV? How y’all let the hood at the table”? According to a 2017 Nielsen Music report, Hip-Hop, an art rooted in black culture, is now the most popular music genre in the United States.

Hip-Hop’s meteoric rise has reached extraterrestrial levels in the last couple of years. According to Billboard, Hip-Hop/R&B represented 24.5 percent of American music consumption in 2017. Kendrick Lamar’s 2017 album, “DAMN.,” won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in music, becoming the first non-jazz or classic work to win the award.

A hip-hop album has already topped the weekly Billboard 200 chart nine times in 2018. In 2013, a hip-hop album topped the Billboard 200 chart nine times during the entire year. While hip-hop continues to ascent into the mainstream, questions regarding the genre’s ability to retain its cultural roots linger.

According to an April 2018 Washington Post article, hip-hop’s style makes it more suitable for music streaming sites like Spotify and Apple Music. According to the report, streaming is reminiscent to a race, with hip-hop’s prevalent use of trap beats leading to faster streams in comparison to other genres.

A Billboard report said in 2016 more people were listening to music than ever before. According to Billboard, the music industry witnessed record-low sales in 2016, with physical copies of albums moving the least units since the advent of SoundScan (now Nielsen Music) in 1991. According to Nielsen, hip-hop had a 72 percent increase in on-demand audio streaming from 2016 to 2017.

“It’s not just a genre for African-Americans anymore, it’s a genre for everybody,” said KUTX 98.9 Program Director Matt Reilly. “In Austin, there’s a growing hip-hop scene even as we lose the black population.” According to Reilly, a KUTX-organized event at this year’s SXSW festival was indicative of hip-hop’s future both locally and nationally. “The crowd was awesome. The crowd was young and extremely diverse. It was all races and genders,” said Reilly.

Since 2017, KUTX has aired a hip-hop driven show, “The Breaks,” every Saturday nights. The show is hosted by East Austin residents Aaron ‘Fresh’ Knight and ‘Confucius’ Jones. “They came to me and said 50,000 kids are walking UT Austin’s campus with earbuds in and I guarantee most are listening to hip-hop,” said Reilly. “I said, ‘I think you’re right,’ so they get three hours on Saturday night to do whatever they want.”

According to 18-year-old high school student Enrique Iglesias, hip-hop is both an outlet for the oppressed and an umbrella of unity for everyone. “I think a lot of hip-hop is embracing who you are and achieving what you want,” said Iglesias. “I think that rags-to-riches theme is a recurring thing, it’s like a motif. So many minorities can relate to it, so many can relate to the stories of oppression.”

“People like black culture from a non-black face,” said UT Austin freshman Ghaffar Balogun when describing the growing popularity of non-black rappers. “I feel like everyone can be a fan of hip-hop, but there is a line that has to be drawn. You don’t want to be listening to a song that has the n-word and you want a white person singing the song.”

Balogun said that he was surprised to learn that hip-hop is now the most popular genre of music in the United States. “I feel like within the black community it’s more popular, but I’m not necessarily sure about the white community or any of the other communities on campus,” said Balogun.

19-year-old Austin resident Sebastian Torres said that hip-hop is a culture that runs deeper than the bassline of a song. “Everyone can’t talk to each other, but in reality we all listen to music,” said Torres. “The lyrics may be different, but we all listen to the same thing. It’s rhythm. You feel it. We’re all humans.”

UT Austin senior Colin Henry said he realized hip-hop was growing in popularity when an unconventional song dominated the airwaves. “I feel like I felt hip-hop becoming popular when ‘Bad & Boujee’ went number one (on the Billboard 100 chart),” said Henry. “That’s not pop-rap like Drake going number one, that’s Migos.”

According to Reilly, hip-hop’s rise is not a surprise due to black artists laying down the groundwork for some of the icons of rock ’n’ roll. “Basically, all the early rock ’n’ roll artists, like Elvis, were stealing from black artists,” said Reilly. “So it’s not really surprising the genre of hip-hop is dominant because the black perspective has always been there and it’s always kind of been what we base our popular music on.”

UT Austin professor Renita Coleman said the ability of hip-hop stakeholders to adapt to the new era of music consumption plays a key role in the genre’s mainstream popularity. “Rock didn’t embrace (streaming) as quickly or as fully as hip-hop did, which was partly out of necessity on hip-hop’s part,” said Coleman. “Hip-hop artists and promoters really jumped on that technology early and figured out how to use it to their advantage.”

Waterloo Records manager Cameron Choate is not an avid fan of current hip-hop, but understands that time waits for no one. Choate said that his store initially suffered a setback after the advent of music streaming services, but has since bounced back. “I know that hip-hop has to always evolve to stay relevant,” said Choate. “I don’t ever want hip-hop to go back to the old days because the art world and hip-hop world are exactly the same, it should always be moving forward. It should always be politically conscious, but also enjoyable.”

According to Choate, the idea that purchasing music is the best way to support an artist is a misconception. “I don’t find that to be true because artists don’t make a lot of money on their music physically,” said Choate. “If you really want to support an artist, go see them live. If you want to support local music stores, you should absolutely do that too

According to Iglesias, the idea of using the purchase of music as a parameter of fandom is elitist. “In terms of supporting, sometimes people don’t have the similar means as somebody else, it doesn’t mean you’re a better fan,” said Iglesias. We’re all united as fans.

As hip-hop continues to increase in popularity, Balogun said that the quality of hip-hop has slightly declined. “I feel like as the years go by, people start to deviate from what hip-hop stands for,” said Balogun. “They don’t rap to make a change, they rap to make money.”

Balogun said that hip-hop’s negative stigma still exists. “I think it’s a way for people to characterize or stereotype black culture or black people in general, so I feel like that stigma is still there. But it’s a growing industry,” said Balogun.

Coleman said that any music genre that becomes the ‘most popular’ loses its stigma by default. “Once hip hop made its way to one of the most popular Broadway shows ever, its acceptance by mainstream audiences was assured,” said Coleman. “Of course, some people still don’t like it and some have old fashioned or racially ideas about it still. But by and large, it is no longer a fringe form of music.”

Coleman said that hip-hop is following a similar trajectory to that of rock ’n’ roll and other past popular genres, a trajectory that might be accelerated by new technologies. “Rock ‘n roll was underground, then became popular. The establishment, or older people, thought it was horrible and had warning about all kinds of slipper slopes into the end of society as we know it,” said Coleman. “The next phase will be where (hip-hop) gets dethroned for being too popular. As everybody starts to listen to it, people on the cutting edge will start looking for something else.”

Torres said that he loves the direction hip-hop is going in due to the diversity now found in the genre. “It doesn’t matter what skin color you are. Race, background, we’re all related to hip-hop,” said Torres. “The culture is here to stay. It’s not going anywhere.”

UT campus election reflects national trend of women of color running for office

By: Brittany Wagner

AUSTIN — Hannah McMorris hoped to create a new University of Texas that would support the often neglected minority student population on campus, but she never anticipated the intense pushback she would receive from her opponents’ supporters.

McMorris, a political communication and African and African Diaspora studies junior at UT Austin, exemplifies the larger trend of women of color who are running for office. According to The New Yorker, “472 women have entered the race for the House this year, and 57 have filed or are likely to file their candidacies for the Senate.”

The UT student government (SG) election period began in late February and didn’t close until the end of March, weeks later than planned. McMorris ran for vice president alongside sociology and design senior Guneez Ibrahim, who ran for student body president. They were the first women of color on the UT ticket for president and vice president. The duo ran against nutrition senior Colton Becker and Mehraz Rahman, a marketing and Plan II junior.

Ibrahim approached McMorris about running as an executive alliance because they were both dissatisfied with SG’s “superficial steps toward diversity.”

“I wanted to truly make waves and create change for students of color on this campus,” McMorris said. “It was very important to me that the people who hold the Exec Alliance seats are people who are principally focused on improving the experiences and expanding the resources for marginalized students. That is not something I’ve seen manifest in any recent Exec Alliance.”

McMorris and Ibrahim are only two threads in the larger tapestry of women of color who ran or are running for office this year, whether it be state representative, justice of the peace or district court judge.

According to the online database Black Women in Politics, there are 76 African-American women running for office in Texas this year. Aurora Martinez Jones is one of them. Currently serving as Travis County’s associate court judge, she is running for Travis County district judge.

Martinez Jones may turn the tide in favor of women of color in Austin’s courthouse, should she prevail in the ballot box. Of 11 civil district judges, three of them are non-white, according to the Austin American-Statesman. Orlinda Naranjo and Gisela Triana are leaving after this term, leaving Lora Livingston the sole African-American judge.

African-American women comprise 7.3 percent of the U.S. population, but “make up less than 5 percent of officeholders in Congress, statewide executive offices and state legislatures,” according to The Washington Post. Martinez Jones said this lack of representation pushed minority women to run for office and make changes for themselves.

“What’s happening (nationally) is that women, especially women of color, are seeing that we’re not being adequately represented in a leadership role, and we’re starting to realize that because of that, our voice is not being heard,” Martinez Jones said. “So we’re saying, well then we might as well make a difference.”

Evita Escobedo voted for McMorris and Ibrahim each of the three times the polls were open. She said as a Latina student, she wanted to see a more diverse executive leadership.

“I feel like as a Latina, my UT experience is different from that of a white student, because they are the majority,” Escobedo said. “I wanted Hannah and Guneez to win because I thought they could make some changes that would be more inclusive of the minority community.”

As the weeks went by, the campaign season turned increasingly contentious.

McMorris said she anticipated some racist and sexist backlash from online trolls, but didn’t expect it to be so severe.

“I received verbal harassment when walking around campus so I stopped going to class,” McMorris said. “Guneez was receiving threats to her and her family, as well as verbal and physical harassment. It was a derailing experience to our lives.”

Escobedo, a government sophomore at UT, said the rivalry between the alliances ultimately centered on the issue of race, as many students saw McMorris and Ibrahim as a voice for minorities, and their opponents as a voice against.

“The stuff I was seeing on social media everyday was shocking,” Escobedo said. “Everyone was picking a side and sticking to it, like it was a presidential election. It got racial pretty quick.”

One Facebook post accused McMorris and Ibrahim of “being complicit in anti-Semitic rhetoric,” according to the Daily Texan. Becker liked this post, prompting the Electoral Supervisory Board to ban him from campaigning for four hours.

McMorris received a lot of criticism for old tweets that resurfaced right before polls opened in the first round of voting. One tweet from Sept. 8, 2017 reads, “I really don’t have patience for white Greek life or people who want to be silent about how oppressive the system is.”

McMorris said the spread of her tweets was a planned attack, meant to irritate students in fraternities and sororities.

“It was incredibly eye-opening but debilitating,” McMorris said. “I’ve never experienced so much outright hate and racism, even from distant mutual friends.”

Becker and Rahman were victorious in the first round of voting, but the result was nullified because McMorris and Ibrahim appealed. The second election resulted in a runoff that ultimately led to the election of Becker and Rahman.

Requests for comment from Becker and Rahman went unanswered.

McMorris said even though she wouldn’t want to relive the tribulations of another student government election, she encourages other minority women to pursue their ideas even if they are unpopular.

“Do not try to do what’s been done before, or assimilate into the palatable WOC many will expect and want you to be,” McMorris said. “Stay true to who you are and what you want to accomplish. In the end, you’ll have bigger regrets for not sticking to what you set out to do.”

By Paul Iskra | Free Press staff

AUSTIN — At a university of thousands, Native American students number fewer than 100 people.

“Most of the time, I feel very lonely. You don’t see a lot of Indigenous folk around,” said Mario Ramirez, Co-Director of the Native American and Indigenous Collective (NAIC) and a dance major at the University of Texas at Austin. “These institutions were not built for people of color in the first place.”

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 0.1 percent of the population at the University of Texas at Austin identifies as American Indian or Alaskan Native amongst the school’s 50,000 students.

Of the students who are enrolled at the university, legal methods of identification, such as federally-issued papers which identify tribal constituency, and cultural disconnection complicate life and unity among the Native American and Indigenous student population. Support from the NAIC has helped, but the absence of a formal Native American and Indigenous student center on campus hinders students’ ability to comfortably engage in cultural practices, Ramirez said.

“The (NAIC) has made some events for us to be seen,” Ramirez said. “But we don’t have a place where we can go and feel like we’re not ostracized. We don’t have a space where we can practice our spirituality and our way of living at all.”

For currently enrolled Native American and Indigenous students au UT, issues of identity are undergoing transformation in the wake of centuries of educational assimilation, said Laura Tohe, an English professor at Arizona State University and the Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation.

“I think it’s going to be a lot of work to reverse generations of the mindset that your way of life is secondary, your way of life is something to be ashamed of,” Tohe said.

Scholars are studying lost aspects of Native American and Indigenous culture that had been previously subdued, Tohe said.

“There is now this movement to try to revitalize our languages, to understand this experience and what it meant to us,” Tohe said. “To understand how assimilation taught us to think: that I have to think in the way of a colonizer.”

The Native American and Indigenous community as a whole faces internal dispute, partly due to government-mandated blood quantums, which validate heritage on a percentage of “Native American” blood composition, Ramirez said. The US National Parks Service categorizes blood quantum as “One-quarter –or at least one full-blooded grandparent,” but this requirement can vary across state lines.

“That causes communities to become smaller and smaller and not mesh with other communities,” Ramirez said. “If people marry outside of the community, the blood quantum will go low, and you can no longer have rights to certain things.”

Biases also work against unity among communities, Ramirez said.

“When I go to certain places, I’m seen as someone who is not Native American because I’m not of a specific tribe,” Ramirez said. “I don’t have something, and it goes back to stereotyping within our own community.”

However, Native American and Indigenous populations are growing again, both in population size and cultural connection, Tohe said.

“We are in an era now where Native individuals are trying to decolonize themselves,” Tohe said, commenting on Native American and Indigenous communities’ re-prioritization of their cultural practices over white-centered ideologies. “We have to deal with the legacy of assimilation.”

The Native American and Indigenous Studies program, which was first created in 2006, was formally certified within the College of Liberal Arts after an open letter was sent to the Executive Vice-President in April 2017, according to Luis Carcamo-Huechante, Director of Native American and Indigenous studies at UT.

“We, as a NAIS Program — a faculty collective and a community of students — have been working in creating a supporting environment for native students at UT,” said Carcamo-Huechante over an email.

However, UT has yet to undertake university-wide efforts to increase Native American and Indigenous student pretense on campus, Carcamo-Huechante said.

“There is no sign of concrete support or course of action on the part of the President¹s office in regard to the recruitment of and support for Native American and Indigenous students,” Carcamo-Huechante said. “There is no a comprehensive institutional plan yet.”

However, a lack of university aid does not diminish students’ determination to stay connected to their roots, Ramirez said.

“There’s a saying we like, ‘our existence is our resistance.’ Our simple way of doing what we do is an act of resistance,” Ramirez said. “We are continuing what we know and what we have been taught, and therefore it is surviving through our subsequent legacy.”

I-35 represents segregation for African Americans

By Zachary Leff | Free Press staff

AUSTIN- African Americans say they feel separated from the city they live in not only because of the rapid growth in other areas of Austin, but the way I-35 has acted as a barrier to equality.

“The east side has long been underserved across institutions — banking, healthcare, transportation, education, employment and all of the quality of life areas,” said Sukyi McMahon, the Director of Operations for the Austin Justice Coalition, a social justice organization for African Americans. “It is a visible demarcation that was backed by red-lining.”

According to the Federal Reserve Bank, red-lining is a practice where institutions deny particular services to people of certain areas based off of the racial framework.

“Austin history is steeped in racism… that segregated the city along I-35,” McMahon said. She said I-35 has been a blockade in the community since these regulations were presented and realize the differences in both areas.

“The Master Plan of 1928 is what started the segregation issues in the city, and has kept African Americans in East Austin today,” said Kenneth Thompson, a long-time resident and chair of the African American Resource Advisory Commission. Thompson said that the plan was designed to make African Americans move over to the eastern part of the city. If they resisted to move from the West side, they would be denied services where they lived and be forced to go into East Austin for their necessities.

There are two main reasons for a highway according to Kyle Shetlon, a professor at Rice University and a well respected urban historian. One is to drive economic development and activity into and through the city. The other is to separate the city or community whether it be racially or economically motivated.

“Highway building operated as a form of urban renewal in this vein, allowing cities to either separate non-white and lower income communities from white areas or the business district (a la I-35 separating East and West Austin) or by completely destroying “blighted” read non-white and low-income areas,” Shelton said.

“Transportation infrastructure has almost always been used as a dividing line,” Shelton said. “Infrastructure serves as a helpful physical and mental marker in the creation of boundaries.”

Lawrence Fowler, a long-time resident of East Austin, talked about his childhood growing up on the East side of Austin.“I was told as a kid from my mom ‘Don’t go over there’ (in reference to the West Side of Austin),” Fowler said. “It was understood that people of color stayed over here unless you are working.”

“My mom worked as a maid and the bus would take here every day East to West on I-35,” Fowler said. He said that when he drives on the highway and looks at both sides, it’s hard to believe that these areas are part of the same city.

Diana Morrison, an employee at the Givens Recreational Center agreed with Fowler’s sentiments on the issue. “I never thought of that before, but I could see how people think I-35 is a barrier,” Morrison said. “I work in a school district on the West side and I rarely see any African American or Latino(a) children in the classrooms.”

Kenneth Thompson historically understand sees how I-35 divided the city, but thinks that it is a “barrier of choice.” “The west side of Austin chooses to when they want it to be a barrier for when they want to identify issues that they are trying to get support for from the community.” Ultimately, Thompson wants the city that gives everyone equal value and that is considered to be a safe place.

“Today, the key questions are about how do we want our cities to grow with and around our existing structures,” Shelton said. He understands that I-35, like many other freeways across the country, continues to represent something more to certain groups than just a way of transportation.

“Desegregation is paramount to me,” McMahon said. “Black people need to have freedom of movement and to see faces that look like theirs in areas where we weren’t welcome before. The city needs to embrace the progressive title it’s given itself by cracking open the west side and ensuring that Austin is livable for everyone, anywhere.”

Leaving home scares undocumented families

By Pedro Luna | Free Press staff

AUSTIN — Members of Austin’s Latino community say increased activity by immigration enforcement in their neighborhoods is increasingly discouraging them from leaving their homes.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began cracking down on immigration in February 2017, according to ICE’s 2017 fiscal year report.

“I’ve heard about it, but I haven’t seen it,” said 15-year-old southeast Austin resident Angel about ICE arrests in his neighborhood, “one time my soccer practice was cancelled, because all the families were Mexican — they didn’t want to go to the fields because they were scared.”

Angel is a first-generation child; his parents are legal immigrants and he attends public school. His days are like many other Latino children, school in the morning, soccer practice in the afternoon, and after-school programming in the evening.

At the program, kids run and play games, anything is fair game, from tag to hide-and-seek. They go outside and sit on pastel-colored benches after finishing their assignments, and they eat food provided by the program.

Inside, under a 30-year-old roof and fluorescent lighting is where Angel completes his assignments. The program is where he socializes the most, he said. Here he has met many friends like himself, also children of immigrants, who he says fear their families being arrested by ICE.

“Some are scared but they joke about it to not be sacred,” said Angel.

Angel’s family are among these people, although his mother is a documented resident and working on her citizenship, said Angel.

“Two of my cousins have DACA,” said Angel, “and one of my aunts just did her citizenship.”

“Concha,” who also wished to remain anonymous and withhold her immigration status, is one of many mothers from Angel’s after school program that are fearful of increased ICE presence around the city.

“It’s just something we have to deal with,” said Concha, in a Spanish interview. They didn’t always have to deal with this, she continued, as ICE raids on neighborhoods began early last year.

“ICE moves in a way that you cannot predict,” said a tenured social work professor at a southwest university, who wished to remain anonymous due to his immigration status.

“The Obama administration went after mostly criminals,” said the professor. Non-criminal offenders were being put on the “bottom of the stack.”

During the Trump administration, however, he said, anyone might come home one day to see an ICE truck in front of their neighbor’s house, he said.

Concha says she is very aware of this chilling reality, that any day she could witness her neighbors being arrested by ICE. She blames the Trump administration for inciting fear into her life, she said.

“It wasn’t even a question with the last president,” she said.

“He has hate towards Mexicans,” said Angel, referring to President Trump, “he’s scared that Hispanics and other minorities are gonna take over — that whites are gonna become a minority.”

According to a Pew Research Center Study, conviction of non-criminal immigrants had a steady downwards trend under the Obama administration.

However, this decline reversed in the last year, as President Trump’s January 2017 executive order mandated the “execution of the immigration laws of the United States” against “all removable aliens.”

This has become an issue, said the professor, because ICE is now targeting criminal and non-criminal offenders alike, which is putting families at greater risk of being torn apart. People are getting deported for simply not reporting their immigration status, he said.

The San Antonio and Houston ICE regions accounted for 22,075 ICE arrests in 2017, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center study.

Statistics like these affect immigrants in more than one way, said the professor. For instance, he pointed out, crimes are going unreported, including domestic abuse.

According to S.B.4, authorities are not able to detain anybody if their sole reason of detention is they are “a victim of or witness to a criminal offense” or “reporting a criminal offense.”

However, the Senate Bill offers a loophole for law enforcement, in which authorities can ask for a victim or witness’ immigration status if deemed necessary to “investigate the offense.”

This doesn’t make immigrants feel better about reporting crimes, said the professor. In many cases, “the problem with persecution is so widespread that they are afraid it may happen to them,” he continued.

S.B 4’s overall intent is to allow any officer to inquire about a detainee’s immigration status, according to the bill, making it justifyingly frightening to any undocumented person, according to the professor.

Persecution is so extensive that even tenured professors like him are at risk of deportation, the professor said. His own status as a resident means he still runs the risk of being deported for various reasons, such as DUI.

“When I go out I don’t drink more than one drink,” said the professor, “for immigrants, a DUI can mean deportation,” because authorities are rounding up everybody they can, including “folks who had a DUI 10 years ago.”

Many questions remain unanswered, said the professor, such as the true scale of ICE operations in Austin and Austin’s fate as a sanctuary city.

“There is a big question mark on sanctuary cities,” he said, meaning that while they are still in question, police are not forced to cooperate with immigration officials.

The professor said he knows the struggle that uncertainties like these can cause in the immigrant community, but it doesn’t discourage them to learn their rights, he added.

“I see resilience in the immigrant community,” he said, “you see the resilience but also widespread fear.”

“There is very justified fear in the Latino community,” he said, “for everybody that doesn’t have their immigration in line, they have to be afraid.”

Mental health services becoming limited as more students reach out for help

By Reagan Morrisey | Free Press staff

AUSTIN- Freshman chemistry major Sindhu Venkat has always taken mental health seriously and planned to do the same when she arrived at the University of Texas. After setting up counseling with the Counseling and Mental Health Center (CMHC), she was surprised to find that she was only offered six sessions.

“Six appointments should be enough to help someone who is adjusting to something smaller but not someone who has a long-term mental illness and needs a support system,” Venkat said. “That’s not going to cut it.”

The CMHC offers several ways to help students with mental health on campus. However, some students said the problem wasn’t the services, but rather accommodating all the students who were seeking them.

The problem with service shortages is not unique to UT. According to a report by the National Council on Disability, some people have argued that the nation has reached a “campus mental health crisis.”

The percentage of students seeking support for mental health at college campuses is increasing according to a report from the National Council on Disability. In addition, the report also shows that many are not receiving treatment.

Venkat is just one example of many students who have had trouble getting services on UT’s campus. She went to the CMHC around her first month at UT and began seeing a therapist there. She said the services were helpful, but she started to struggle when she ran out of sessions.

After her sessions were up, Venkat continued her counseling off-campus.

“It’s really frustrating,” Venkat said. “If [the appointment] was on campus it would be roughly an hour and that’s a lot easier to fit in than two hours.”

Similarly, junior public relations and dance major Ginnifer Joe reached out to the CMHC after going through a crisis her freshman year and found it was hard to continue getting services.

Although Joe was able to see a counselor at the CMHC, she was unable to schedule more sessions since it was so close to the end of the semester.

“I think the CMHC is super helpful and I’ve found the counselors great, I think it’s just the structure that they’ve set up that is not necessarily the best,” Joe said.

According to the CMHC, the reason they do not offer students more sessions is because it is a short-term counseling center and is only able to accommodate individual counseling on a limited basis.

Associate Director for Prevention and Outreach of the CMHC, Katy Redd said “[Services] are definitely an increase in demand and it’s a similar issue other universities across the country are facing.”

Recently, the CMHC cleared up that there is no defined limit on the number of sessions a student can attend. However, only short-term counseling is offered which is why students are only there for a limited time.

Redd said that there are a variety of factors that go into determining the number of sessions a student will attend.

“We can serve everybody with some services,” Redd said. “But it might not be the exact service they were hoping for at that time.”

Redd said the CMHC has been experiencing an increase in demand for many years now, but this is especially true now since the costs of services have recently been reduced.

After students voiced their concerns about pricing at the CMHC, university officials announced they would be reducing the costs of services. In January, President Greg Fenves sent out an email saying psychiatric costs would be reduced and counseling costs would be subsidized effective in the spring semester.

“We had anticipated that there would be an increase, but I don’t think we anticipated for quite this much of an increase,” Redd said.

Redd said the CMHC staff realizes how much of an increase in demand they are experiencing and said they are doing everything they can in the CMHC, on campus, and throughout the community to get services to everyone who needs them.

“We certainly can’t hold all of the mental health issues on campus, we just don’t have the capacity for it,” Redd said. “Its hard because we want to be able to serve everybody and we can’t serve everybody.”

Venkat said she has taken her mental health seriously since being on campus just as she said she would. She said although she is no longer able to see someone on-campus at the CMHC, she knew continuing her therapy off campus was important to her and her well-being.

“I know how important therapy is to my mental well-being, so I also know that I would be at a disadvantage if I just stopped therapy,” Venkat said.

Women, minorities remain underrepresented in STEM degrees

By Ryan Prokell| Free Press staff

AUSTIN — UT faculty and students remain concerned with underrepresentation of women and ethnic minorities in STEM degrees.

“The lack of minority participation in STEM majors is the direct cause of underrepresentation in the workforce for those fields. Taking control of this issue is higher education’s opportunity to fix a lot of persistent problems in our country,” said Tamara Perry, assistant vice president of UT’s Division of Diversity and Community Engagement.

“Our mission as a division,” Perry continued, “is to create an inclusive environment with a diversity of people and ideas and perspectives–that benefits everyone. There is a clear problem in higher education, and the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement is doing everything it can to correct it.”

The problem, according to a 2017 report by the US Department of Commerce, is broad stagnation in this mission to lessen the STEM gender gap. The report “demonstrates that women are underrepresented both in STEM jobs and among those with undergraduate STEM degrees” and that “there has been little overall change in this underrepresentation since our last report using 2009 data.”

Mohammad Zaidi, a civil engineering student at UT, is able to witness firsthand this underrepresentation of women in STEM degrees. According to statistics released by the Cockrell School of Engineering, despite making up 51.5% of UT’s population, women account for only 28% of undergraduate engineering students.

“I feel like UT is a relatively diverse place, but there’s always room for improvement,” said Mohammad Zaidi, a civil engineering student at UT. “I think we could definitely do a better job getting more women into engineering. If I had to pick one problem at UT that might be it.”

Ariel Blaylock, a petroleum engineering major in UT’s Cockrell School of Engineering, agreed with Zaidi’s observation. “I didn’t really think I was doing anything out of the ordinary when I came in as a petroleum engineering major but I noticed pretty quickly that I was one of a pretty small percentage of girls in most of my classes. It doesn’t really make things harder, it’s just interesting. Cockrell is male dominated for sure.”

Blaylock, a junior undergraduate student, says her time at UT has helped her understand and come to terms with the idea of spending the rest of her career in a field dominated by a disproportional male presence.

“I know it’s not going to change anytime soon. If there’s, like, a 75/25 ratio here there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be even worse in big companies.”

According to UT graduate engineering student Veronica Stuckey, the effects of this skewed ratio lead to the creation of a “vicious cycle of underrepresentation.” Having such a low rates of women enrollment in the Cockrell School of Engineering, Stuckey says, makes it less appealing to potential female applicants and might account for the continued suppression of proportional representation.

Another facet of underrepresentation occurs on the faculty side of higher education. A 2008 report to UT’s Gender Equity Task force found that women constitute only 25% of tenured faculty at UT, and an update to that report released in 2015 concluded that “no progress has been made on closing a significant gender gap” in “salary satisfaction, faculty communication, career progression, and consequences for using family accommodations” since the release of the 2008 report.

“I’ve been at UT for three years now and in engineering specific classes I’ve had probably less than five women professors,” said Connor Flanagan, a civil engineering student at UT. “Women are definitely a minority in engineering — as students and as professors. I definitely get the whole ‘unwelcoming environment’ thing.”

“For me, the higher up in my coursework I get, it seems like the higher up you get the less likely you are to have a non-male professor,” said Blaylock. “I don’t have the numbers on that but it’s pretty apparent and I’m sure a lot of other people see it too.”

Perry, despite this apparent lack of progress for the cause in recent years, remains optimistic that underrepresentation issues in both the student and faculty populations will soon be corrected.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done,” Perry said, “but we have every reason to believe that things are only going to improve. Our division and the university as a whole are working every day to create a more fair and equal environment for all of our students.”

Software makes coding accessible for visually impaired students, but uphill battle remains

By Brittany Wagner | Free Press Staff

AUSTIN — Technology companies developed software to provide visually impaired students access to coding programs, but the number of visually impaired college graduates remains low.

Apple representatives introduced their new Swift Playgrounds curriculum, which teaches students about coding, to the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (TSBVI) on March 7.

A group of 17 students tinkered with the app, using VoiceOver technology, which reads the words on the screen aloud, or screen magnification. Once they became familiar with the program, they wrote a code that could fly a drone outside at the end of the day.

Vicki Davidson is a technology teacher at the TSBVI and was one of the faculty members present for Apple’s demonstration. Apple employees, some of whom were software engineers who worked directly on the Swift Playgrounds app, worked with the students in separate groups.

Davidson said. The students chosen to participate came from a wide variety of coding experience. Some are in the coding club that meets after school, and some had no idea what

coding was, Davidson said. But all of them were excited about flying drones at the end of the day.

“Some of them worked, some of them didn’t because of their program, but they all thought it was pretty hysterical,” Davidson said.

TSBVI’s current technology curriculum teaches students how to use an array of devices such as iOS on the iPhone, braille note takers, screen readers, portable digital magnifiers and keyboards.

The school may adopt the Swift Playgrounds curriculum into their classrooms because of its accessibility features, Davidson said.

Apple CEO Tim Cook advocates for making coding a high school graduation requirement, and TSBVI is slowly working to implement this vision, Davidson said.

“We’re starting with baby steps here at our school with the coding club that meets after school hours,” Davidson said.

Though coding may be incorporated into TSBVI classes, there is no guarantee these students will go on to study engineering at a university level.

According to a 2015 National Federation of the Blind study, 30 percent of people with a visual disability attain some college education, while only 14 percent attain a bachelor’s degree or higher. It does not specify what fields of study these students pursue.

Of 11 University of Texas at Austin engineering professors contacted for this story, six said they never taught a blind or visually impaired student. The other five didn’t reply.

Jonathan Valvano is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and has been part of the UT-Austin faculty since 1981. He said it would be difficult to accommodate students in the engineering department.

“I have thought about it, and I can’t imagine how we could accommodate,” Valvano said in an

email. “Electrical engineering is such a physical discipline (building and assembling circuits; the

parts all feel the same but coded with numbers and colors). Circuits can be very dangerous with hundreds of volts that can kill (you).”

Though it has been several years since a visually impaired student enrolled in a coding class, accommodations have been made before, according to Emily Shryock, the assistant director for

Services for Students with Disabilities at UT-Austin. She said every situation must be handled individually because each student is different.

“Each student is unique so we have to work individually with each student, course, and instructor regarding the tools and technology they need to access the material,” Shryock said.

Davidson said she is unsure how many TSBVI students go on to study engineering because many don’t stay for the traditional four years.

“Sometimes we get kids that could do that, but they’re in and out of here pretty quickly and go back home and get some of that stuff there,” Davidson said. “So it’s kind of a catch-22 there.”

Local Partner Offers to Mend Mendez

By Derek Udensi | Free Press Staff

AUSTIN — Several signs, bearing a similar theme, line the main hallway of Consuelo Mendez Middle School. The largest of these signs is a blue poster with the hashtag “#WeBelieveInMendez,” complete with signatures from Mendez Middle School students.

“We’re not closing,” said Mendez Principal Chris Jones, an African-American who is in his first year in charge of the struggling, predominantly Latino campus. After four years of failing scores, Mendez is at risk of state closure if scores do not improve. In the wake of this looming threat, Austin ISD officials have intervened to ensure Mendez Middle School is around for years to come. While it’s not a certainty that these moves will ensure Mendez’s future, Jones is confident that state officials will approve these moves.

On April 9, the Austin ISD committee selected Communities in Schools of Central Texas to help Mendez from state closure. Acceptance of Communities in Schools’ proposal from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) would grant Mendez a two-year grace period to improve results. Communities in Schools of Central Texas would be working with UT-Tyler’s STEM Coalition and UTeach Institute in helping reshape Mendez. Jones said that he fully expects the TEA to accept the proposal when it’s put before the agency in May.

Since the creation of the STAAR test, the TEA assigns ratings to districts and campuses to indicate their academic progress via an accountability system. The ratings system, which is posted online annually on the TEA website, has the following labels in order of viability: met standard, met alternative standard, improvement required, not rated.

Mendez Middle School is currently in IR-4, which means the school has had the label of “Improvement Required” for four consecutive years. According to Jones, the state has the right, by law, to seize control of a campus once a school has entered IR-3 territory.

Jones said that Austin ISD waited too long in trying to help turn around the school because change cannot transpire in one year, especially when issues compound each other. “What happened in IR-1? IR-2? There were no resources. I’m from Chicago so I understand the difference between neighborhoods that have, the haves and have nots,” said Jones. “I think the district has to really take a look at that because to pull out the resources that they did after year four in IR, and they could…could’ve done that after year one or two.”

With 46 percent of Mendez’s student population being enrolled in ESL/bilingual education, Jones said that hands-on, project-based learning will hopefully lead to more engagement from students. Jones said that he’s in favor of Communities in Schools’ plan because of the proposal’s adaptability in relation to academic proficiency.

Austin ISD currently offers free tutoring to students in grades 1–12 in the form of the VICTORY Tutorial Program. These tutoring sessions occur at select Austin Public Library branches Monday through Thursday on a weekly basis during the school year.

Stacy Stewart, a project specialist for the VICTORY Tutorial Program, said that parents need to take on some form of accountability when it pertains to the academic development of their children.

“Too often, teachers are expected to do the parents’ job. The parents need to get involved,” said Stewart. “We need to make parents aware of how to improve education, of all the opportunities available.”

While Stewart believes that parents need to be held accountable in some capacity, she also recognizes the challenges of learning in a household where English isn’t the only language. “Sometimes, we need to educate the parents and teach them how to help with homework,” said Stewart.

According to Jones, Mendez students need consistency, a fact highlighted by his regime as principal starting during May of the 2016–17 school year. “I think that (turnover of staff) is a huge issue in this community and for these students because they don’t get the opportunity to build relationships,” said Jones. “I think 95 percent of my 6th grade teachers in core classes are new. My 8th grade students have seen three different administrators.”

As STAAR season starts for Mendez, Jones said that he’s not in favor of one item representing an individual’s academic readiness. “We’ve been taking short-cycle exams every two, three weeks, we’re just over testing our poor kids,” said Jones. “We had to remind them that (this week) is the real thing because everyone wants to see this data, are you growing, so they’ve put us under the microscope.”

While Jones and the rest of Mendez Middle School waits for what will be a decisive May, Jones said he is encouraged by the change in culture he’s already seen under his regime.

“This building was completely different. There was no learning. This hallway was full of kids. They were doing what they wanted to do,” said Jones. “The teachers had given up they said by December (of 2016). It was pretty chaotic, but that’s what the kids had seen or not seen since the first day of school.”

The newfound signs of solidarity that now mark the hallways of Consuelo Mendez Middle School left an impression on one particular visitor. “TEA walked in and was like yeah, it’s entirely different school,” said Jones.

By Jaqueline Ting Quesada

Austin — The city of Austin is considering a program designed to directly help fund candidates aspiring to run for office.

Austin’s Charter Review Commission met on February 19 in the HEB Mueller Community Room to discuss implementing the program for the next November 2018 municipal elections.

The city-funded program would provide $25 vouchers to all registered voters in Austin. Then, the voter could choose to financially support any candidate of their choice by mailing the vouchers back.

These vouchers would be called “democracy vouchers,” paper certificates intended to financially help support a specific political campaign.

This program was introduced first to Seattle in their 2017 elections. Teresa Mosqueda, a representative of the program, attended the Charter Review Commission Meeting to discuss how the program works.

Seattle launched the first voucher program in 2017. Mosqueda, a Seattle City Council woman, financed two-thirds of her campaign through democracy vouchers. She was the first candidate in the nation to win a political seat through this new system.

All registered voters in Seattle got four vouchers in their mail 11 months before the municipal election. They were each worth $25 and were to be mailed back with the name of the candidate that they wanted to financially support written on the certificate.

Mosqueda said that this allows people to be more engaged in the election process in ways that they have never been before.

“Folks feel like their voice does not count, that they aren’t heard,” Mosqueda said. “So engaging folks in a new way in politics means that they can take those democracy vouchers and speak with that voice. This helped me run for office.”

In Seattle’s city council elections, 27 percent of voucher funds came from young adults — aged 18 to 35, according to Mosqueda. This was nine percent higher than cash donations from this same age group. Mosqueda said that democracy vouchers helped increase the opportunity for low-income households to help fund campaigns of their choice. This specific election saw a 42 percent increase in financial participation because of the democracy vouchers. Austin aims to experience the same increase in voter donations if the program gets approved.

Right now, Austin’s 2014 municipal elections showed that $726,000 dollars were donated to finance campaigns, according to a campaign spending analysis provided by the government. That figure comprised only 11.5 percent of the 6.3 million dollars of the total money spent during that campaign season.

The Charter Review Commission hopes to see public financial donations increase at least 300 percent, the way that it did in Seattle.

“I think this program is an important one because we have a direct connection to funding people’s campaigns and that is a lot of power,” said Martha P. Cotera who attended the Commission meeting.

Board member and chair Jessica Palvino said that the goal of this program is to diversify campaign donors in terms of gender, race and income.

The project aims to give more people the opportunity to run for office without letting money be a barrier and for people to be more personally invested in elections by being given a voice with the voucher.

“It gives people, the common person, the opportunity to have a say in the political realm,” Shiraz Rizvi, a University of Texas sophomore and political activist said. “If you have skin in the game, you are more likely to give it your all. If you have an interest on what’s going on, on the election, it could mobilize a whole new group of supporters and get people interested in politics.”

The Charter Review Commission plans on making a few changes to Seattle’s voucher system if the Austin City Council approves of the program. For one, the voucher would be re-named democracy dollars, because according to the board, the word “voucher” has a bad connotation to it.

The board also wants each certificate to be worth $50 dollars instead of $25. What the Charter Review Commission wants to launch the program before the Austin November 2018 municipal elections, which would allow voters to participate in the elections with the democracy dollars that they may receive in the mail.

“I would definitely use the vouchers.” Molly Rhodes, a cashier at Mozart’s Coffee Roasters said. “If the city is the one funding them, why not use them?”

The Charter Review Commission will hold public hearings this year, so the public can comment on the proposal. A majority vote by the Austin City Council would be required to put the proposal on the ballot.

Austin practices pedestrian safety with safety action plan

By Reagan Morrisey

AUSTIN, — Between 2010 and 2015 there were nearly 1,900 pedestrians involved in traffic crashes in Austin, of which 121 were fatalities. The Austin Department of Transportation is working on a Pedestrian Safety Action Plan, to make walking safer. We have to do better,” said Greg Anderson a pedestrian and advocate for a national effort called Vision Aero “We used to have very walkable cities.”

The Pedestrian Safety Action Plan, adopted in 2016, is working to help the city improve pedestrian safety. The plan is in its next stages and is working to incorporate Vision Zero, a plan that was originally adopted in Sweden.

Pedestrian coordinator Joel Meyer gave a presentation about the Pedestrian Safety Action Plan at the Downtown Commission meeting on Feb. 21. During his presentation, Meyer said that people walking, biking and riding motorcycles account for less than seven percent of commute travel in Austin, but they account for over half of traffic deaths.

Of those fatalities, Meyer said pedestrians make up 29 percent of them and “are the most vulnerable users.”

Vision Zero is an international program designed that aspires to reduce the number of people who are injured or die in traffic crashes to zero. According to Austin’s Vision Zero website, Austin is aspiring to reach this goal of zero by 2025.

The Vision Zero project has been adopted by many other U.S. cities including Washington D.C. and New York City. Data shows that after adopting Vision Zero each of these places has seen reduced fatalities.

In an interview, Vision Zero advocate Greg Anderson says he does not own a car but instead uses his bike for about half is travel. In an interview, Anderson talked about the importance of Vision Zero and how it can help pedestrians, such as himself, stay safe.

“There are ways that we can design our roads to where we all have a much better shot of getting where we’re going safely,” Anderson said.

For safety, the Pedestrian Safety Action Plan offers 21 key recommendations in areas such as engineering, education and enforcement. During his presentation, Meyer said the Austin Department of Transportation is focusing on engineering improvements such as adding better crosswalks.

“We think this is where we can have a really big impact,” Meyer said. “What we can do long term to change the systems.”

The Austin Department of Transportation conducted a yearlong study to better understand the causes and consequences of pedestrian crashes in Austin. They were able to find where and why the crashes were happening and create a top intersection priority list.

According to the Pedestrian Safety Action Plan, The city of Austin allocated $15 million to revisit the engineering of the intersection priority list. The first eight intersection Safety Projects are underway, with a current budget of $8.5 million.

In a live webcast on the Vision Zero page, author of “Walkable Cities” and expert on walkable-friendly places, Jeff Speck noted how critical, safe and easy to use intersections are.

“There’s a technical solution for [fixing an intersection] properly and signalizing it properly,” Speck said. “If you do that right you will save lives.”

Randy Machemehl, an expert in transportation engineering and University of Texas professor of civil engineering, has researched transportation system operations for more than 25 years. Machemehl is working with the Austin Department of Transportation to conduct research on bicycle signals and pedestrian crossings.

He said they are currently experimenting with several different sets of devices to see if they have beneficial effects for pedestrians and drivers.

“Everything we can do from an engineering perspective to make pedestrian crossing safer is a really good idea,” Machemehl said.

As stated in the Pedestrian Safety Action Plan, the engineering and design of streets and crosswalks have a substantial impact on crash severity. Machemehl said the engineering side is the easy side of the plan.

“Those things can generally be done pretty easily,” Machemehl said. “And so, it would seem to me we would be foolish if we didn’t take the low hanging fruit.”

Similarly, Speck said, “It’s amazing the degree to which we’re not [fixing intersections] in so many communities when a very limited investment would save many lives.”

The Austin Department of Transportation and Vision Zero will continue work to enhance pedestrian safety throughout the year. The Pedestrian Safety Action Plan is to be incorporated into the Austin Strategic Mobility Plan, which is currently under development and is expected to be presented to Council in late 2018.

“We’re just not building our cities the way we used to,” Anderson said. “They’re not walkable cities anymore. But they don’t have to be that way for the future.”

Momentum Picks Up for Water Industry Makeover

By Megan Bradford

The Austin Water and Wastewater Commission recommended approval for a $50,000

grant for water technology development to a UT research incubator on Wednesday, Feb. 14.

“I’m a huge fan of breaking down the silos,” said commissioner Travis Michel referring

to the gap between the water business and technology.

The Water RIOT grant will provide funding to the Austin Technology Incubator, a

research entity within the University of Texas. The goal is to improve operational efficiency and

leverage software to minimize cost for water utilities. If the grant is approved by the council, the

incubator will use these funds to identify technology, help companies vet the idea to see if it’s

worth commercializing and provide resources for training on company development. The money

for the grant comes out of the Austin Water fund that provides support to enhance research in the

water sector every year.

Chief investigator Charles Upshaw spoke on behalf of the Austin Technology Incubator

(ATI) at the commission meeting on Feb. 14, and explained ATI’s mission to foster

technological innovation and ecosystem development. This research entity has been around since

1989, providing resources, connections to investors and mentors for strong intellectual property

based companies.

“The water industry is more conservative and reactive than a lot of industries,” Upshaw

said at the meeting, explaining the potential he sees for start-ups and smart technologies in the

water realm, both environmentally and economically. Upshaw describes ATI as the middle-man

in getting past “the valley of death” where people have an idea, but lack the resources or money

to conduct a full operation.

Upshaw said there is a need for help identifying researchers and entrepreneurs within the

water and general tech community who are working on water problems or tech that could be

applied to monitoring operations in the industry. In addition to supplementing innovative

research, ATI will also use funding to organize “reverse-pitching” events where people are

encouraged to relay their problems with the water industry to entrepreneurs, researchers and

start-ups.

“The big picture benefit to the city of Austin is: save water, save money,” Upshaw said.

The problem, Upshaw said, with a lot of utilities is they are rate based in terms of their

funding model. For the city of Austin, the funding model is heavily dependent on water

consumption to contribute to operating costs.

According to Upshaw, the idea behind employing operation monitoring software and

sensors is that the more water utilities can reduce their operating cost, the less financially

dependent they will be on water consumption. This shift of primary support, in theory, will result

in a reduction of lost water, money saved and potential room for more conservation programs.

Some of the operation monitoring software that is already underway focuses on zebra

mussels. These are an invasive fresh-water species that can be destructive to aquatic life, water

recreation, and even water supply. Popular Austin lakes such as Lake Travis and Lake Austin are

already classified as “infested” with zebra mussels. Upshaw said this developing software will be

important to monitoring this presence of zebra mussels and what the next step is moving

forward.

“The most important thing this relationship offers is the ability to be resilient in the future

and have all the tools at our disposal,” Environmental Program Coordinator, Shannon Halley

said on potential partnership with Austin Water.

Halley also sees the potential economic benefits from the partnership as well. Halley said

she even recently had a conversation with a colleague discussing the job opportunities that could

come out of the implementation of new software systems.

“Just how distributing solar has created jobs for distributing on site solar energy systems,

monitoring these systems could be a whole industry,” Halley said.

Upshaw also foresees the grant having a positive impact on the Austin community

because start-ups create jobs, which increases the amount of money circulating in the city and the

economy in general.

However, Halley voiced concern about the potential of the grant not winning final

approval. Halley expressed there might not be enough knowledge available of this shift in culture

of water and wastewater. Looking forward, she said more work might need to be done in order to

demonstrate the impact of bringing technology into the next phase of the water industry.

“We haven’t done a great job of telling the story of how important the transformation of

the water sector is,” Halley said.

While Halley acknowledged the potential for opposition to the grant, she still emphasized

the importance of educating people on the need for a shift in the water industry. Halley said that

grants like the Water Riot and other educational tools would prepare the water industry for an

evolving environment.

“The future we face is very widely unknown,” Halley said. “The more tools we have in

our tool box to address those challenges, the more resilient we will be for these changes in the

future.”

The City Council will vote on the Water RIOT grant on Thursday, Mar. 1 at 10 a.m.

Report says Austin’s transportation hinders medical accessibility for residents living with HIV

By Paul Iskra

AUSTIN — A new report says around one in four Austin residents living with HIV have trouble accessing medical services due to inadequate transportation.

The “2017 Austin Area HIV Needs Assessment” was published at an Austin Area HIV Planning Council meeting on Tuesday at Austin City Hall after a presentation of the report and discussion of the gathered data. Among the “barriers”, or prohibitions, that people experience when trying to access medical services in Austin, transportation was cited as one of the most consistent issues, according to the report.

“Everyone in Austin knows that transportation is an issue,” said Taylor Stockett, the Communications Coordinator for Aid Services of Austin, an AIDS Service Organization. “For our clients it’s a more extreme issue due to the fact that most of our patients are at 150 percent below the Federal Poverty line.”

For many low-income individuals, public transportation is the primary method of commute around Austin, according to Stockett.

Federal programs have been established to financially help uninsured or under-insured individuals cover HIV/AIDS medical transportation costs across the country, but many of the transportation difficulties within specifically Austin are due to an overabundance of people accessing a limited amount of resources, said Glen Crawford, the Secretary of the HIV Planning Council. According to Crawford, most people who need medical transportation are directed to pursue only Medicare and Medicaid assistance, but not with the Ryan White fund, which is another federally-funded assistance program for people living with HIV/AIDS.

“A lot of people qualify for Medicaid transportation, which can be a very lengthy and difficult process to actually get transportation assistance,” Said Laura Still, a committee member of the Austin Area Comprehensive HIV Planning Council and a primary contributor to the HIV Needs Assessment. “They may not have ever known that Ryan White transportation assistance existed because they are always funneled towards Medicaid transportation.”

Under the most popular system of medical transportation requests, a reservation must be made from a client, which counts as a trip from only one destination to another but not back again, Crawford said. Traffic congestion and a large demand from patients can waste hours in the day of anyone trying to go to an appointment, or refill a prescription, or get groceries from a food bank.

“Even when you are able bodied and have your own car, just getting around in this town is a challenge,” Crawford said. “And it has been for years.”

A similar HIV Needs Assessment report was published in 2014 which identified the most demanded medical services and their most impactful barriers. Transportation was one of the primary problems there, too.

“It’s a recurring issue that we know about,” Still said. “There are a lot of different ways to go about it.”

Non-profit organizations are proposing ride sharing programs to ease the demand on public transportation, Still said.

“Something that Community Care is doing for their patients is that they have Ride Austin providing ride shares to their clients to help them get to and from medical appointments,” Still said. “This is an opportunity. We want to fund whatever will get people to their medical appointment.”

AIDS Services of Austin plans to bring medical services to clients by building a primary care clinic in its main office, Stockett said. Bus stops, primary care physicians, food sources and housing assistance experts will also be stationed around this new clinic.

“We’re basically going to be a one stop shop in order to help reduce that transportation barrier that a lot of our clients in the HIV community here have,” Stockett said.

All of this results in a cumulative response to the existence of HIV/AIDS, Stockett said.

“Our relationship is to partner in every way possible and make sure that we get to zero new infections and that we really end this epidemic,” Stockett said.

Texas sees deadliest flu season in nine years

By: Laura Laughead

AUSTIN — More than 4,000 Texans have died of the flu this season so far even though experts say the season is only half-over.

“Influenza activity is high across the United States and in Texas,” Dr. John Hellerstedt said during the Health and Human Services Commission Executive Council Meeting on Feb. 22.

“It is too early to tell if influenza has peaked for the season in Texas.”

Dr. Hellerstedt, Commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services , updated the Council on the influenza activity across the state and in Travis County.

He said that 4,153 Texans, including six children, have died of the flu this season, making this the worst outbreak of influenza activity in the state in nine years. The Austin Public Health Department reported that in Travis County, 42 people have died of influenza-related causes.

University of Texas sophomore psychology major Molly Neale knows first hand how bad this year’s flu season is. During this school year, she contracted the flu twice, one strain in September and then a different strain in February. Her symptoms became so bad that the honors student was forced to withdraw from the fall semester. Neale said that her symptoms were manageable at first but quickly escalated in severity.

“For me, it would build up over time. The first couple of days I’d just feel not great, and then I’d wake up one morning in a cold sweat,” Neale said. “You feel UT students turn to the age old remedy of tissues and cough syrup to help fight flu symptoms this season.like you can’t move, and it’s just terrible. It really does feel like you’re going to die, and then you know you have the flu.”

According to the Austin Public Health Department , this flu season has witnessed the rise of a new flu strain called H3N2, the most predominant form of influenza circulating in Texas right now. Epidemiology Program Manager for the Austin Public Health Department, Jeffery P.

Taylor, MPH, said that this new H3N2 strain may be to blame for the increased influenza activity as well as the uncommonly severe flu symptoms, like Neale’s, this season.

“The predominant type of influenza virus circulating this season is an A(H3N2) strain, said Taylor.

Most public health professionals would agree that A(H3N2) strains are more likely to cause a ‘worse’ season than A(H1N1) or B strains ,” Taylor said.

University of Texas Health Services Consumer Education and Outreach Coordinator, Sherry Bell, echoed Taylor’s theory that the new H3N2 strain may be escalating the severity of this year’s flu season.

“We see more serious symptoms, lasting longer and causing more complications. Another reason that H3N2 has been seen in so many people is because it occurs less frequently than other types of influenza viruses, and because it occurs less frequently, fewer people are immune to it,” Bell said. “When the same flu strain shows up year after year, people in those regions tend to develop some immunity to that. It’s (H3N2) a strain that doesn’t show up every year.”

Bell said that seasons with H3 viruses generally drive more patients to University Health Services because the H3N2 virus “kicks the body’s immune system into overdrive.”

Neale said that in addition to high fevers, cold sweats, and fatigue, she also experienced episodes where she temporarily lost her sight and almost fainted.

“I was really hot all the time and really flustered,” Neale said. “But I started to get this thing where I stopped being able to see, almost to the point of passing out.”

According to Bell, this time last year, the University Health Services had diagnosed 256 positive flu cases on campus. The total number of cases for last year’s flu season at the

University of Texas was 325. A year later, the University Health Services has already diagnosed 525 positive flu cases on campus, 200 cases more than last year’s total, and the flu season is only at the halfway point.

Because of the increased number of cases and severity of symptoms, Dr. Hellerstedt emphasized the importance of getting the flu vaccine, especially for children, the elderly, pregnant women, and people with chronic health conditions during last week’s meeting.

“We at the Texas Department of State Health Services continue to encourage people to get vaccinated and stress the appropriate precautions about getting the flu,” Hellerstedt said.

He urged council members and Texans to wash their hands frequently and cover their coughs with their elbows and not their hands. Although no children have died in Travis County, the 42 reported influenza-related deaths of people aged 30 and up is enough reason to take precautions according to Dr. Hellerstedt.

“It is absolutely not too late to get a shot. In fact, right now, we’re in the peak of activity. We don’t know if we’re going to have a downturn… The activity here is very high, higher than it’s been in several years,” Hellerstedt said.

AUSTIN — People become sports fans to feel connected to each other, said Adam Earnheardt, a sports fandom during a talk at The University of Texas at Austin last month.

“We become fans because it makes us feel like we are a part of something,” Earnhardt said to a crowd of roughly 40 people.

Earnheardt, a professor of communication at Youngstown State University, was hosted by UT’s Center for Sports Communication and Media. His lecture, titled Function of Fandom, focused on why people are sports fans and how it affects society.

Earnheardt said the ancient Greeks were the first sports fans. He said they came together centuries ago to watch the ancient Olympic games for the same reasons people gather to watch the Olympic games today; that it brings people together to celebrate sports and its finest athletes.

“We have encouraged this idea of being sports fans for centuries,” Earnheardt said.

He gave three reasons for why people become sports fans. He said people watch sports to gather information, feel as though they are a part of something, and create a sense of identity.

Earnheardt said a big reason or for why millions of people tuned into the Super Bowl was to be informed. He said people want to know what happens during the big games and want to be able to talk about the big plays with those around them.

Sophomore Connor Turley said he talks about games with his dad and grandfather. “After the game I’ll call them and breakdown what we saw and how we felt about it,” said Turley.

Earnheardt also said people become sports fans because it makes them feel like they are a part of something. “A big reason why we do this is to feel a sense of community,” Earnheardt said.

He said fans go to sporting events for social connections and to be with people and that the tailgates and the dressing up all help people to make connections with one another.

In an interview, Former NFL coach and professor Daron K. Roberts said sports have a way of bringing people together who otherwise wouldn’t. “Fandom tends to bring [together] people who normally wouldn’t spend the same time [together].” He said sports has the power to take people of different backgrounds and “by virtue of being a fan of a particular team, they come together, even if for brief moments.”

As an example,e UT student Connor Turley said, “I played football in middle school and that connected me with people I probably wouldn’t have met outside the sport.”

This illustrates Earnheardt’s argument that “When that something we are a part of becomes successful, it amplifies people’s fanship.”

Freshman Katie Guy said she wouldn’t call herself a sports fan and doesn’t watch games regularly. However, when it came to her hometown team’s success in the world series, she said that all changed. In an interview Guy said when the Astros played in the world series she would say “I have homework? It doesn’t matter I’m going to watch the Astros play. I would never do that before.”

According to Earnheardt, the reason people become sports fans centers back on this idea of identity with a primary group. Earnheardt said sports fans form identity’s around their teams so much, that when their team wins they feel like they have won.

Senior Advertising major Sakina Kasamali said she feels just that. “With fandom, when my team wins…it’s like I won too,” she said.

No matter why it is people choose to become sports fans, Earnheardt said “the fans are just as important to the game as the players itself sometimes.”

AUSTIN — A local public health expert advocated the need for Americans to take more ownership over their health during a lecture at UT Austin last week.

“Health outcomes have little to do with actual health care,” said Mark Hernandez, chief medical officer of the Community Care Collaborative.

During a lecture held Feb. 6 at the UT Austin School of Nursing, Hernandez spoke about the importance of making good, long-term health decisions. “We invest an incredible amount of money, 88 percent, in health care, but it’s really about acute management,” said Hernandez. According to Hernandez, socio-economic factors such as education, employment, income, family/social support, and community safety along with health behaviors such as dieting and smoking habits constitute 70 percent of health’s social determinants. In comparison, he said, health care is only 20 percent of what influences a person’s health.

Hernandez said he wanted to make an impact in the community. Hernandez noted that he became a physician ten years later than normal and didn’t travel a road less traveled to achieve nothing.

“What I felt like with these patients was, I don’t know if I do any good,” said Hernandez. “I do the same thing to the same people over and over again, so you [could’ve] argued that my efforts [made] no difference.”

After a career path that took him from working as a fast food worker to getting his MD from Baylor Medical School in his 30s, Hernandez said that he’s trying to get people to better health, regardless of the requisite process.

“In the CCC, in my organization, we’re trying to change this paradigm for the safety net. We’d like to change it for everybody,” said Hernandez. Hernandez later discovered it was the overall management of health (health care + acute health management) in the United States, not his efforts as a doctor that led to his patients returning to the same hospital ward time and time again.

Hernandez said Austin’s health care system historically is reminiscent of what he calls a renter-landlord dynamic, which leads to an “incredibly fragmented health care delivery” that is an “inefficient waste of money that doesn’t create the outcomes you necessarily want.” Traditionally, health care is constructed by people who don’t deliver health care, which is peculiar in comparison to other industries, he said, whidh leads to a disconnect between consumer and health care provider during the delivery process.

Due to the health care system’s fragmented structure, Hernandez said it’s important to optimize a person’s health, even when suffering from an illness, rather than relying on frequent visits to a doctor. Hernandez said that unlike having the option to no longer reward a restaurant for bad service, patients are locked into the transaction they have made with their doctors irrespective of results, which in turn feeds a malfunctioning system.

“We make people healthier by dealing with all [social determinants of health], not just the one we’ve conveniently parked ourselves in — health care,” said Hernandez as heads in the audience nodded after the statement. The health care system “can do great things for you when you’re sick, but doesn’t have much else to offer you,” said Hernandez.

To underscore this point, Hernandez brought up the positive correlation between education and health, suggesting that the students in attendance for his lecture would have increased health in the future by attending the event.

“We’ve gotten away from the notion of thinking of the doctor as an all-powerful, all-knowing [figure] that can figure out everything. That isn’t the way health care works anymore,” said Hernandez. Hernandez continued to stress that doctors are necessary, but not entirely responsible for a patient’s health.

A woman in the audience bluntly disagreed. “Sometimes, it’s our own fault[MB1] ,” the woman said. In response to this, Hernandez used an example from his own life. Last year, Hernandez had to get a bypass surgery; his fate lied within the hands of doctors for four hours, but a life of repeatedly bad decisions led to him being on the operation table. “Nothing changes until people start to change,” said Hernandez.

I’ll keep this but it sounds like she’s agreeing with him so I don’t understand this.

AUSTIN — Civil engineering professor David Maidment said the University of Texas at Austin provided vital flood data to emergency response teams during Hurricane Harvey on UT’s campus in early February.

Maidment described the role the University played in providing flood data to the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM) during the disaster at a lecture in Goldsmith Hall Feb. 2.

TDEM Director Chief Kidd asked UT President Gregory Fenves to help provide expedited information, so Maidment got his faculty members and a computing team together, and began working on predicting flood conditions. Before that he had assisted with the geographic information system at the State Operations Center (SOC), located within Austin’s Department of Public Safety.

One of Maidment’s colleagues at the SOC was in charge of deploying rescue helicopters. “He fixed me with a thousand-yard stare and said, ‘Duck, I need data,’ grinding his teeth,” Maidment said.

The SOC was preparing for the storm the Monday before it hit, and by Tuesday it was clear to the 120 employees something serious was going to happen, Maidment said. Meteorology maps showed purple on the radar, and “any time you get purple at the SOC, that’s a bad thing,” Maidment said.

“I wrote an email to my colleagues on the faculty, and I said, ‘There is a catastrophe coming. It will be overwhelming. We can’t stop it. And I pray for the souls of my fellow Texans,’” Maidment said. “I knew what was going to happen.”

Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Rockport, Texas, on Friday, Aug. 25, 2017, and was the largest storm in the nation’s history since 2005. The death toll hovers around 80, which is relatively low compared to the 1,000 plus deaths from Maria in Puerto Rico or the 1,800 from Katrina.

Officials were so chagrined at the lack of capability to respond to Katrina that now they prepare for more damage than they anticipate, Maidment said.

“At the SOC every day the hurricane was happening, if the hurricane was a tropical storm they planned for category 1, if it was cat 1 they planned for cat 2, and so on,” Maidment said.

Maidment and two of his colleagues at the Center for Water and Environment, Harry Evans and David Arctur, combined several resources for the SOC to forecast the impact on people and infrastructure. They estimated water depth using the National Water Model discharge forecast. Then the overlaid those measurements on inundation maps and address points to get estimates on impact levels.

Zach Lewis, a government sophomore at UT, was in the audience and said he attended the lecture because he is interested in learning more about the structures in place to predict flood levels and deploy rescue personnel. He said being from Friendswood, an area just south of Houston, was one reason he wanted to attend, as one-third of his hometown was underwater, and family friends had to stay at his house because their own homes were flooded.

“It gets scary when you realize everything from the stores is disappearing,” Lewis said, thinking back to Hurricane Ike in 2008. “You don’t think of leaving because you trust where you live, and you’re never told that you’re in the direct path of a flood.”

Troy Kimmel, broadcast meteorologist and UT lecturer, said although meteorologists’ technology is good at predicting storms, it can’t control the public’s response, which is where tragedy is likely to occur.

“There has to be a certain amount of responsibility shouldered by the general public in these areas, and they have to know when it’s time to leave or what actions they have to take,” Kimmel said.

Maidment said knowledge of road accessibility and of flood data on affected roads allowed efficient rescue efforts in response to Harvey.

“The flood response that the state mounted with the help of federal (aid), volunteers and so on, I think was pretty effective,” Maidment said. “So, there’s some promise here, some better hope for a large-scale effort that really hadn’t been possible in the past.”

Pen and Ink Represents His Individuality

Pedro Luna, J310 Free Press

Joseph Wallace, a second-year RTF major at the University of Texas, has had the same psychedelic custom T-shirt for eight years.

Joseph, an Austin native, said his shirt has special meaning to him.

“I’m a unicorn,” said Wallace about his status as a native Austinite. “We’re pretty rare here.”

The metaphor that applies to every aspect of his life: in many ways Joseph says he really is a unicorn, saying how his shirt is one part of his unique personality.

He found the design eight years ago while in Dallas, where he saw the original pen and ink rendition from an artist based there.

“I saw it and said ‘holy hell this is awesome’,” Wallace said, “I gotta make a shirt of this.”

He loved this artist’s design so much that he went out and used a process called screen-printing to make a shirt out of the sketch.

Screen-printing is a lot like developing film, Wallace explained, it consists of taking a silk mesh and using it to expose the design.

It took a lot of patience for Wallace make this shirt with this long process, he took his time and made sure every detail was perfect.

“Everyone thinks it’s an acid trip Batman,” said Wallace about the shirt’s design.

This shirt would stay in his wardrobe for a long time, as it has remained his size through eight years.

“I was a fat little dude,” but that, said Wallace, worked in his favor.

As he shrunk, the shirt grew.

“That’s a life pro tip,” Wallace said. “Have fat children so that their clothes fit them longer.”

Joseph says his shirt captures his individuality, it represents who he is, and why he decided to leave Texas State University for UT.

After the 2016 election, Joseph said Texas State University’s campus felt politically and that he no longer belonged with anybody.

“All the black kids hated me because I was white, and all the white people thought I was gay because I’m from the city,” Joseph said.

This was part of the reason he came to UT, to feel welcome as a he is, where he can wear his T-shirt and be a unicorn.

Roadtripper Reminisces on Sand Sledding, Torn ACL

By Brittany Wagner, J310Free Press

AUSTIN — Marissa Muro stepped out of Dobie Residence Hall last Wednesday afternoon in a well-worn T -shirt that featured an image of two people trekking through a barren landscape of white sand, something she herself experienced one summer day two years ago.

Muro, a government junior at the University of Texas at Austin, said the shirt is a token from a road trip she took with her best friends in the summer of 2016. They started in her hometown of El Paso and threaded a route through Carlsbad, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Santa Rosa and Taos, ultimately arriving at the White Sands National Monument in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Muro said their day at White Sands began with uncertainty and a bit of panic because it had been raining, making the sand wet, and they weren’t sure how that would affect their experience. But as the day warmed up, the sand loosened and they could try their hand at sand sledding, where they sat on plastic discs and pushed themselves down hills of sand.

“That was so much fun,” Muro said. “Everyone should experience that. I’m not even kidding.”

Muro said their fun quickly took a turn for the worse when she and her friends challenged themselves to sled down an exceptionally high hill.

“We finally understood why roller coasters are built the way they are,” Muro said. “We went down some really steep ones and we wouldn’t stay on our boards we would just fall forward and flip down.”

Their friend Caitlin sledded down the hill first, and told the others that it was fine and they should try it, so another friend Mattie got on her sled and pushed herself down the slope.

“Mattie… I don’t know what happened, she fell off her board, she flipped like five times and her leg wound up twisting in a weird way and she tore her ACL,” Muro said.

Muro said they didn’t immediately pause their fun to take Mattie to a physician because they assumed she could tough it out, but after complaints from Mattie, they took her to a clinic the next day.

“All that night she was limping and she was like, ‘My leg really hurts,’ and everyone was like whatever you’re just being dramatic,” Muro said. “But it was so much fun. I wanna go back.”



Philosophy Grad Student explains A Shirt is More Than Just Clothing

By: Laura Laughead, J310Free Press

Philosophy graduate student Steven Gubka models his ‘of Montreal’ band T-shirt at the University of Texas Main Building on Feb. 20, 2018. Gubka has owned the shirt since he was in high school, over 10 years ago. Photo provided by Steven Gubka.

AUSTIN, TX — In the philosophical world of graduate student Steven Gubka, just throwing on an outfit is not possible when a T-shirt means much more than just a T-shirt.

“It’s a T-shirt that the band ‘of Montreal’ sold as part of a deal for buying one of their earlier CDs,” Gubka said. “So I have memories associated with it like listening to ‘of Montreal’

and being in high school and going to see them in a show, so it has a personal significance to me.”

Outside the Main Building on his way to work on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, Gubka, who is in his third year of a philosophy PhD program, said he chose to wear this shirt because it was comfortable and casual yet colorful, “a great T-shirt for a day like today.”

“It reminds me of those parades they have for the Chinese new year with the colorful dragons,” Gubka said.

After completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Arizona in Tuscon, Gubka came to the University of Texas at Austin to continue his studies in philosophy. Despite the changes in his life’s geography, his personal life (he’s celebrating his second year of marriage with his wife), or even in his taste in bands, he said he still keeps the shirt, 10 years and going.

“I guess I have this weird view that objects that you keep are sort of like gateways to the past. Having them and remembering them, you sort of have a special access to the

past that you wouldn’t otherwise, so keeping old things helps me sort of remember who I used to be and what I used to like,” Gubka said.

For Gubka, the simple choice of a T-shirt can reveal a lot about a person and relates back to his passion for philosophy.

“It’s an idea you find in Proust [French novelist Marcel Proust]… there’s supposed to be something special about involuntary memories, memories that just happen to you when you’re not consciously trying to remember it,” Gubka said.

“So encountering something that you used to wear, or music you used to listen to can involuntarily trigger like, ‘oh this is what I was doing when I first heard this song,’ or ‘this is who I was dating,’ and I think it’s a powerful way to sort of access our old memories.”

Band Shirt Has a Bold Statement

By: Mandi Meier, J310Free Press

Krystal Cruz, RTF Junior, shows off a shirt she calls an “inside joke.” Photo by Mandie Meier

AUSTIN — For UT Austin Radio-Television-Film major Krystal Cruz, dressing for school is more than just sporting your everyday university t-shirt. It’s a chance to make a quirky statement while also supporting one of your favorite bands.

Cruz was spotted studying outside the Belo Center for New Media. She was wearing an eye catching black T-shirt with “the Struts” stretched across the black in an eerie gothic font. From that angle, it looks like a normal band tee. From the front, the tee gives you a very different feel.

The front of the shirt reads “Luke Spiller for President 2016” in red, white, and blue lettering. The contrast from the back of the shirt and the phrase on the front is bold enough to get anyone’s attention.

When asked the story behind the shirt, Cruz said “It’s really just an inside joke.”

The shirt was released during the 2016 presidential race. It’s pretty obvious that during that time, that’s all anyone could talk about. However, you don’t really expect people from around the world to be concerned with what’s going on in the U.S.

“What makes it funny is that the band isn’t even from America.” said Cruz. The Struts are actually from England. Although the shirt appears to be a political statement, or just a joke, it’s actually much deeper than that to Cruz.

Cruz is a part of the Texas Student Media organization and works on a TSTV show called Austin Underground. The Struts were the first band members she ever interviewed for the show.

In the future, Cruz will be able to explain the quirkiness behind 2016 election jokes while simultaneously telling the story behind her first ever band interview.

Cats and Childhood Memories Reflect Creativity

By: Paul Iskra, J310Free Press

Ryan Romero, a Lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, in his office space within the Moody college of communication. Photo by Paul Iskra.

AUSTIN — Originality can stand out in various ways. For a University of Texas Creative Advertising professor, T-shirts with uncommon designs emphasize this ideal

“Spending time in the ad industry and being around designers and art directors, you tend to get snooty about well-designed things,” says Professor Ryan Romero, a Lecturer at the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations. “It doesn’t have to be a great design, but there does have to be something about it that stands out.”

Romero has been a faculty member at the Moody College of Communication since 2011 and works as a freelance writer and co-director when he is not lecturing or overseeing special projects on campus.

While he typically buys most of his shirts himself, his wife bought him this particular pink shirt two years ago, Romero said.

“I’ll go through phases. I’ll get tired of everything I have and then I’ll buy a bunch of shirts,” Romero said. “But every once in a while, there will be some random one she finds that reminds her of me, so she will buy it.”

Working in advertising long enough has allowed comfortable attire to replace professional attire on a day-to-day basis, Romero said. Button-ups or fancier shirts, while worn in appropriate settings when necessary, are not the mandated dress code.

“When you work in the industry long enough, you end up being comfortable most of the time as a creative,” said Romero, referencing normal work environments for advertising professionals. “It was a habit I fell into, wearing a lot of tee shirts, with sometimes a sports coat over it. That’s about it.”

As more than just a tool for comfort, fashion represents individuality and association with a particular group, according to Romero.

“It’s an identifying mark of the tribe that you run with,” Romero said. “A member of a subcommunity, or a subculture, dresses that way to identify with others in their pack.”

UT student shows Love for The Beatles

By: David Rubin, J310Free Press

Matthew Adams’ shirt showcases a British band with American pride. Photo by David Rubin

AUSTIN— The Beatles may have disbanded nearly five decades ago, but for one UT-Austin student, their memory lives on.

Matthew Adams, a Westford Texas resident, is a senior at the University of Texas. While most of the students on campus were covered in rain jackets and umbrellas on a rainy Austin day, Adams was donning his Beatles T-shirt with pride.

The Beatles, the popular British rock band with a lasting legacy, currently are the best-selling band in history, selling more than 800- million albums worldwide.

Their fans span many generations, which is the case for the Adams family. Matthew grew up in a house full of Beatles fans and was introduced to their music at a young age.

The first song Adams ever learned all the words to was the 1965 single hit “Eight Days a Week.”

“It was the first song that was really ever introduced to me. It has stuck ever since,” said Adams.

Adams received this specific Beatles-themed shirt from his best friend Patrick as a gift after Patrick attended an exhibit for the Beatles.

“It certainly isn’t my first [Beatles shirt], it probably won’t be my last. However, it is my favorite!” he said.

When asked whether he would wear the shirt eight days a week, if that were possible, Adams smiled.

“Only if I can wash it in between,” he answered.

The shirt may now be about five years old, but to Adams, it’s only a small symbol of his love for the Beatles.

“As long as I have my umbrella and it isn’t too cold out, I can still [represent] the inspiration that the Beatles have had on my life.”

Student Likes to Look Good on Gray Days

By: Alyssa Quiles

AUSTIN — Despite the wet and dreary weather Austin had been experiencing for a few days, some students were still finding ways to look fashionable.

Erin Walts, a Freshman Radio-Television-Film and Business double-major, decided to wear a cropped, black and white striped t-shirt. Her busy schedule, like that of her fellow peers, didn’t give her time to wash clothes.

“I was actually running out of certain pants,” she said.” The shirt worked good with the pants that I had clean. It’s easy to layer.”

It’s a shirt that she bought years ago but didn’t start wearing it until she found it when she was packing for college and was just trying to take all the clothes she could.

“When I was packing for college, I didn’t know what I was going to need, or when I was going to need it, so I just wore whatever I found,” she said with a laugh.

The short styling of the shirt means occasionally showing off a little more skin than Walts prefers.

“I don’t wear it often, because it’s pretty cropped,” Walts said. “I don’t really feel comfortable with it, I usually wear it with like a jacket or something over it.”

That is not the only reason she hasn’t been wearing the shirt though. Walts usually wears cropped T-shirts during the summer but because of her clothes shortage she had to wear what she had.

“I wear it a lot when it’s warmer outside, and it’s easier to wear with shorts.”

AUSTIN- A University of Texas at Austin media researcher said new stories seen in licensed games have increased not only the quality of the storytelling, but helped known franchises expand across different media platforms.

“ Licensed games play a vital role in transmedially expanding, sustaining and directing popular storyworlds,” said Nick Bestor, a doctoral candidate at the in the department of radio-television-film.

During a presentation on UT’s campus, Nick Bestor presented his research project on licensed games to about 25 graduate students. Bestor discussed his recent project on transmedia franchises, such as Star Wars.

Transmedia is the idea of media franchises that branch their stories across different platforms of media which include video games, movies and television shows. Bestor also introduced a term he called “worldbuilding.”

“Worldbuilding” is one of the new creative concepts that have enhanced the new storyworlds that fans of various licensed games, Bestor said. It is the idea of creating a map, or backstory for the new world that is created in a fictional game.

These worlds such allow players to create places that they do not normally see when they watch films such as Star Wars, allowing players to create their own story within their game, Bestor said.

Bestor used “Lego Stars Wars” the video game as a primary example for transmediality and worldbuilding in a licensed game.

“What licensed games excel (at) are exploiting, expanding and remixing their storyworlds,” Bestor said.

Bestor based a majority of his research off of Henry Jenkins, a professor at the University of Southern California, who coined the phrase “transmedia storytelling.”

“Transmedia storytelling is systematic, it is unified, and it is coordinated,” Bestor said. Bestor highlighted and quoted a multitude of other well respected scholars and their thoughts on storytelling, worldbuilding and transmediality.

“Games may be played with not such prior knowledge of the storyworld,” Bestor said. “This is the theme that runs throughout my project. The complex and continuative halves individuals take through a transmedial franchise.”

“The game is also engaged in a significant rebuilding of the story world,” Bestor said.

“Worldbuilding is ultimately a better model for understanding the transmediality than storytelling, especially when dealing with licensed games.”

Casey Walker, a UT graduate student who attended the presentation, said the event was helpful in understanding the world of transmedia and licensed games.

“I have a blind understanding on this particular topic, but (I wanted) to come to learn more,” Walker said.

Suzanne Scott, an assistant professor in the department of radio-television-film and the chair of the Bestor’s dissertation committee, attended the event and had positive thoughts on the presentation.

“I was really interested in the questions about the Q&A section of the project,” Scott said.

Scott said she could use these questions as helpful tips for Bestor’s project moving forward. Bestor said during the Q & A session that he will take all the constructive criticism from today’s presentation and apply it to his work in the future.

“I’m excited to see him move forward and develop it further through more research,” Scott Said.

Bestor said he is continuing to work on his project, but right now he is in the early stages of researching different transmedia franchises. Bestor continues to interview and survey people in order to gain a better understanding on how they response to franchises like “Game of Thrones” and “Star Wars” expanding to other media outlets.

“The fundamental appeal of a licensed game is that it allows consumers an opportunity to engage with known or knowable media property.” Bestor said.

“The same may provide a way for fans to play in or with a favorite story world, but what they choose to do with it is up to them.”

Austin, TX — Architects need to have a lot of material and engineering knowledge to successfully construct a sustainable, low-environmental impact building, said an award winning-expert architect who held a lecture in The University of Texas at Austin.

“The most important thing to focus on is the building of knowledge,” said architect Anupama Kundoo of Pune, the fastest growing city in India. She said that if architects increased both their material and engineering knowledge with the purpose of saving material and energy, they could cut their material use by one-third.

According to her website, Kundoo advocates the importance of socio-economical and low-environmental impact materials through her published works and lectures that she gives around the world.

During her lecture at UT to a group of 100 students and faculty, she said that cheap material alternatives could potentially be implemented in a building. Kundoo’s presentation included photos of her projects that were made out of low energy materials as examples of eco friendly and cheap architecture.

She said that architects should try to look for local or previously used materials that work for the construction of a building. She said that architects should not import materials that are more expensive, hard to get a hold of and take a lot of energy to perform on when they other alternatives.

“If you don’t know how to do things differently, you feel powerless and don’t know what you can actually do, I would like to empower people for them to be more self reliant. At least in the knowledge area.”

Her point was that architects with enough material knowledge and experimentation could find various ways to use local and previously used materials without contaminating as much as they regularly do.

“One must really think outside the box, look for solutions with radical experimentation.” She said that with experimentation comes knowledge, no matter the final outcome; that people learn and build knowledge through failure and success. She said that architects should try all different kinds of materials and engineering activities to figure out what works and what doesn’t at a cheaper price and faster pace.

“It isn’t just knowledge, you also need a little imagination,” said Lawrence Speck, the principle of Page, an architecture and engineering firm in a separate interview. He said that he is very familiar with Kundoo’s work, but he did disagree with her statement on knowledge. “Just knowledge by itself gets you to a certain point, but you also need creativity.”

Kundoo spoke about many buildings in India that were made out of mud, and how they are sustainable and altogether cheap, given the local and abundant material used in construction. She said that constructing with mud in India was a smart move because mud is very resistant to the hot climate in the country, is internally cooling, and is cheap as well as easy to obtain.

“I think that what people don’t understand is that we can reuse a lot of materials that go to waste. If we reuse materials, the outcome would be a more eco-friendly and cheaper one for sure,” said Cassandra Torres Jimenez, a geography student and ecology advocate.

Dirk Braen, an expert on construction materials and manager of Braen Stone, said that using recycled material is beneficial in architecture altogether. He said that architects are able to do more when it comes to constructing as a result of the cheaper materials that they don’t need to be produced or manufactured.

Kundoo said that various infrastructures from around the world are of poor quality because they degenerate quickly. She said that many architects do not have enough developed engineering knowledge to help motivate them to experiment with different building approaches, and then figure out what can potentially work for the construction of a building.

“When you are part of a large mechanism, you feel powerless.” She said that various architects, out of habit, continue to use methods and materials that they are mechanically comfortable working with.

Kundoo also said that in the end, without material/engineering knowledge and experimentation, a building could be very expensive, time consuming and environmentally aggressive.

“Beautiful affordable and environment friendly housing can be achieved, but we don’t do stuff because we don’t know that they can be done, we also fear failure.” said UT architecture student, Jimin Son. She then agreed with Kundoo’s ideas on the preservation of the environment through architecture.

“The building of knowledge behind the building of buildings is the most important thing to focus on because we are living in times where landscapes are changing very quickly and if they know their first principles then they will have the knowledge to tackle whatever they have to tackle” said Kundoo when she was asked what she wanted the audience to take with them from her presentation.

“We have to think about the whole problem, and we do need to take a look at our actions in a wide perspective. We have to build knowledge to do things correctly, and understand what kind of community to build.”

People become sports fans to feel connected to each other, said Adam Earnheardt, a sociologist and professor of communication at Youngstown State University, during a talk at The University of Texas at Austin.

“We become fans because it makes us feel like we are a part of something,” Earnhardt said to a crowd of roughly 40 people.

Earnheardt was hosted by UT’s Center for Sports Communication and Media Monday afternoon. His lecture, titled Function of Fandom, focused on why people are sports fans and how it affects society.

Earnheardt credited ancient Greece with the first sports fans. He said they came together centuries ago to watch the ancient Olympic games for the same reasons people gather to watch the Olympic games today. It brings people together to celebrate sports and its finest athletes.

“We have encouraged this idea of being sports fans for centuries,” Earnheardt said.

He gave three reasons for why people become sports fans. People watch sports to gather information, feel as though they are a part of something, and create a sense of identity.

Earnheardt said a big reason or for why millions of people tuned into the Super Bowl last week was to be informed. He said people want to know what happens during the big games and want to be able to talk about the big plays with those around them.

Sophomore Connor Turley said he talks about games with his dad and grandpa. “After the game I’ll call them and breakdown what we saw and how we felt about it,” said Turley.

Earnheardt also said people become sports fans because it makes them feel like they are a part of something.

“A big reason why we do this is to feel a sense of community,” Earnheardt said. He also said fans go to sporting events for social connections and to be with people. He said the tailgates and the dressing up all help people to make connections with one another.

In an interview, Former NFL coach and professor Daron K. Roberts said sports have a way of bringing people together who otherwise wouldn’t.

“Fandom tends to bring [together] people who normally wouldn’t spend the same time [together].” He said sports has the power to take people of different backgrounds and “by virtue of being a fan of a particular team, they come together, even if for brief moments.”

Likewise, Connor Turley said, “I played football in middle school and that connected me with people I probably wouldn’t have met outside the sport.”

Earnheardt also said, “When that something we are a part of becomes successful, it amplifies people’s fanship.”

As an example, UT freshman Katie Guy said she wouldn’t call herself a sports fan and doesn’t watch games regularly. However, when it came to her hometown team’s success in the world series, she said that all changed. In an interview Guy said when the Astros played in the world series she would say “I have homework? It doesn’t matter I’m going to watch the Astros play. I would never do that before.”

According to Earnheardt, the reason people become sports fans centers back on this idea of identity with our primary group. Earnheardt said sports fans form identity’s around their teams so much, that when their team wins they feel like they have won.

Similarly, senior advertising major Sakina Kasamali said she feels just that. “With fandom, when my team wins…it’s like I won too,” she said.

No matter why people choose to become sports fans, Earnheardt said “the fans are just as important to the game as the players itself sometimes.”