OPINION
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2004
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
EDITORIAL BOARD
www.kansan.com
Enrollment approaching: Process nearly painless
With Fall Break now past and various professors and departments emailing students to make appointments for advising, the time for enrollment is near. While enrollment will always have problems, the University has done a good job of improving the process nearly every year.
The days of waiting in line at Strong Hall and missing a class to enroll are gone. No longer do students have to choose a class at th last minute because the one they desired and all their alternates filled up. And the process of add/drop, while still tedious, is not quite the nightmare it used to be.
Instead of roped lines and a room full of data entry workers and computers, there is Enroll and Pay, which you can operate from the comfort of your own home. It may have had its problems in the beginning, especially with permission numbers. But after some fine tuning by the University and adaptation by students this evolved form of enrollment is easy and efficient.
Finding the classes you wish to enroll in hasn't always been easy, either. With the elimination of the paper timetable several years ago,
the University turned to an online version, available at www.opensections.ku.edu, and updated every hour, on the hour on weekdays. This new online timetable was easy to navigate by just clicking on individual departments for a listing of classes.
The University attempted to improve this model by making it into a search engine of sorts, allowing students to limit search time by typing in specific data. This version was hugely unpopular and inconvenient for students, so the original online timetable has been brought back.
While enrollment is the easiest and simplest it has probably ever been, there is always room for improvement. Perhaps making a general sitemap for Enroll and Pay would make it easier for newer students to navigate. An online method for requesting permission numbers instead of having to hunt down a professor would also be more effective.
Either way, so long as students are willing to take enrollment seriously and University employees willing to aid them, enrollment can be a less than painful experience.
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OK, something has to be done about 9th Street. When it's raining, going down 9th Street, all the frickin' lights are reflecting on the streets and you can't see any of the...what do you call them? Street paints? What do you call them? Street lines? Road lines? Anyway, you can't see them when it rains and I'm really pissed about that.
Pink KU shirt: $15. Short, short running shorts: $20. Will having to wear these to class for losing a bet on the KU/K-State game: Priceless.
guest columns submitted by students, faculty and admins.
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Yup, my boyfriend just definitely opened up his fridge and peed in it. Who pees in their fridge?
guest columns submitted by students, faculty and admins.
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Ha, hal! I just sent every article I could find about us beating K-State to my high school calculus teacher, who did nothing but ridicule me about going to KU. Take that!
guest columns submitted by students, faculty and admins.
The Kanan reserves the right to edit, cut to length, or reject all submissions. Letters to the editor should be no longer than 200 words and guest columns should not exceed 550 words. To submit a letter to the editor or a column, e-mail the document to oippian@kanan.com with your name, homestown, year in school or position and phone number.
Just because Mark Simmons has the same last name as you and he's from Texas, doesn't mean you're related. Dude, look in the mirror. What up, yo?
guest columns submitted by students, faculty and admins.
The Kanan reserves the right to edit, cut to length, or reject all submissions. Letters to the editor should be no longer than 200 words and guest columns should not exceed 550 words. To submit a letter to the editor or a column, e-mail the document to oippian@kanan.com with your name, homestown, year in school or position and phone number.
Computers are the root of all that is evil.
guest columns submitted by students, faculty and admins.
The Kanan reserves the right to edit, cut to length, or reject all submissions. Letters to the editor should be no longer than 200 words and guest columns should not exceed 550 words. To submit a letter to the editor or a column, e-mail the document to oippian@kanan.com with your name, homestown, year in school or position and phone number.
John Kerry: Why are you so tan?
Why is the Athletics Department trying so hard trying to make us forget to pick up our basketball tickets?
Yeah, so I read an article in the Kansan today that I should pick up my sports package first round basketball tickets by tomorrow. Low and behold, at the ticket window, the tickets are postponed until the 18th. So, there's a lack of professionalism on the part of the ticket department or the Kansan. Or perhaps both. Come on, people, do your job
图
Courtney, I found your Social Security Card as I was walking back to class on Tuesday, I returned it to the Social Security Office on Wakarua Drive.
So, I definitely just saw a man walking down the street in a kilt and I liked it!
What does Snoop Dogg use an umbrella for?
Fo' drizzle!
guest columns submitted by students, faculty and admins.
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People hate me so much for wearing New York Yankees caps.
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'Play every game like it's your last'
Editor's Note: In April of last year, Kansan staff reporter Andy Marso fell ill with meningitis. Recently, Andy was released from the hospital and began to write again. This piece, which he typed with just his thumb, is reprinted with permission from the Basehor Sentinel.
It was late April and fairly warm, but I shivered as a chill ran through my body.
There was a strong breeze that day, kicking up dirt on the softball field where Basehor-Linwood had just finished the first game of a doubleheader.
I blamed the wind for my shivering. Sickness didn't cross my mind. After all, I was immortal; young, strong, in the best shape of my life. But the shivering got worse. I rushed home, but my body continued to break down. I spiked a high fever and broke out in cold sweats, feeling nauseous but not throwing up.
By the next morning my arms and legs were covered with purple blotches and I could barely get out of bed because my feet screamed in pain when they touched the floor.
Within 24 hours of that first chill I was being airlifted from Lawrence Memorial Hospital to KU Med.
I felt awful, but still didn't know just how sick I was. The helicopter touched down on the roof, and I was
As I lay in the hospital for months and months, I tried to come to terms with how different my life would be when I got out.
carried towards a door on a gurney Just before we went inside, the world swirled in a dizzy haze and went black.
That night, while I was still unconscious, my parents rushed from our home in Minnesota to KU Med after a doctor called and told them I was gravely ill.
When they arrived, the doctors told them I had a severe case of bacterial meningitis. The disease was infecting my bloodstream, and rapidly destroying capillaries, or small blood vessels. Areas like my hands and feet, which have few capillaries, were beginning to die from lack of blood.
Bacterial meningitis kills roughly 20 percent of its victims, I, who had 24 hours earlier been in excellent physical condition, was now teetering between life and death. I went on like that for almost three weeks before the antibiotics killed the bacteria and my condition stabilized.
But by then, ghastly damage had been done to my hands and feet. Four months and six surgeries later, all of my toes and fingers had been amputated. The one digit I had left was a stubborn right thumb, which somehow never gave in to the disease.
As I lay in the hospital for months and months, I tried to come to terms with how different my life would be when I got out.
One of the toughest things I had to accept was that I would never enjoy playing sports in the same way as I did before. It's something I'm still struggling with now that I'm out of the hospital and rehabbing.
Prosthetics will help in the future, but with artificial hands I'll never again feel the thousands of tiny bumps and smooth, wide grooves of a basketball. I'll never have the privilege of feeling that ball slide gently off my fingertips and watching it swish through the net. And that's just one of my favorite games. What about soccer, tennis, bar league softball, or snow football? None of them will ever be the same
"Play every game like it's your last." It's not just a cliché, it's for real. I wish I would have.
Marso is a St. Cloud, Minn., graduate. He lives in Mission.
Late Night fouls out for disabled
On Friday, I went to Late Night in the Phog expecting a good time, but got a bitter lesson in the inadequacy of accessibility for deaf people at KU athletic events.
NOT UNHEARD OF
My roommate and I, both deaf, were given lousy accommodations and expected to accept it and enjoy the show.
I actually wish I didn't go. As a diehair KU basketball fan, that's saying a lot.
Disability access on campus is like a basketball game. It requires teamwork. And Friday night, there was none. The Office of Services for Students With Disabilities asked the KU Athletics Department for reserved seating so deaf attendees could see both the interpreters and the court. They asked for scripts. Then they passed the ball to the department. But they didn't follow up.
Foul one; Reserved seating location
Then the Athletics Department screwed up too.
After we went to the events management office and complained, they moved
Poul one: Reserved seating location.
The department chose the worst possible location for our seats — in a corner, behind some rails. This creates an impossible scenario for interpreter placement. If the interpreter stands at the appropriate distance, he is bumped and blocked by people entering and leaving. If he stands on the bleachers in front of us, as one Athletics Department employee suggested, we get a crick in our necks and can't see the action on-court through the interpreter.
TARA SCHUPNER
opinion@kansan.com
us over one section, to the front row. It was no better. Because it was right next to the entrance, people kept filing in front of the interpreter, creating intolerable amounts of visual "static." One department employee actually stood right smack between me and the interpreter.
The only place for the interpreter was out of my line of vision with the court. I had to look back and forth 90 degrees, missing half of what the interpreter was signing and half of the activity on-court.
If I had known earlier where the reserved seats were, I would have sat with other students for a better view of the court. But I shouldn't have to choose between decent seats and seeing the interpreter.
Foul two: Seat labeling.
Foul three: No script.
The Athletics Department did not
The Athletics Department labeled our seats, "Hearing-Impaired Seating." Big politically incorrect, no-no. I'm not impaired. I'm just deaf.
provide the interpreters with a script for the evening's performances. Interpreters need to know the order of events, people's names, words to music and any other transcript they can get in order to do the best job they can. Not everyone can spell Moulaye Niang cold. Paul four Sound system
Because of the echo effect in Allen Fieldhouse, even if the audience is quiet, the interpreter cannot make out some words. The SSD office needs to make sure the Athletics Department provides the interpreter with headphones with direct audio feed.
Foul five; Lighting.
When the lights went down in Allen, there was no spotlight or lighting on the interpreter. Just because deaf people can't hear doesn't mean we can see in the dark. Even if the lights were only dim, we couldn't see the interpreter with the flash bulbs popping around him.
The departments foul out of the game! If our men's basketball team had played as poorly as the departments did Friday, KU fans would run them out of town like former player David Padgett.
Deaf Jayhawk fans shouldn't be excluded from athletic events because of inadequate accessibility. The departments have considerable work to do to avoid fouling out again.
Schupper is a Lenexa senior in journalism and English. She is deaf.
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