Website for students, interns coming to South Africa

The editors received a message announcing the launch of a fairly comprehensive online resource that will be of interest to any student interested in traveling to South Africa, whether for a study exchange or internship. Among the helpful sections are a listing of internship opportunities, travel and accommodation planning for foreign students, and more.

----- RELEASE -----

Cape Intern is a free 'online information portal for foreign students' coming to South Africa. Cape Intern is all about giving students free access to information and opportunities in the Internship & Volunteer markets.

South Africa is a growing destination for overseas students looking to do Internships and volunteer programs. Information for these students is limited at the best of times or fees are involved. We at Cape Intern would like to support and encourage these students with our knowledge and research, which we post on our website www.capeintern.com. We believe South Africa has a lot to offer students from all over the world.

Cape Intern offers the following information:
Provide Internship Database
Provide Volunteer Database
Contact details for the main Universities
Medical internship programs and opportunities
Language schools and Volunteer work opportunities
Safety guidelines
Accommodation
How to get around Cape Town
Activities in Cape Town
Map of important locations

Information and opportunities for Internships and Volunteer programs in South Africa are available in three languages:

http://www.capeintern.com ( English )
http://de.capeintern.com ( German )
http://nl.capeintern.com ( Dutch )

African-American History 101 Contest

It's back!

Take our African-American History 101 Pop Quiz, and you could win $50.00 cash, and be named THE BLACK COLLEGIAN's African-American History Scholar on your campus. Your photo will be posted on THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Online at www.blackcollegian.com!

View the current magazine edition for more details.

Pre-Registration for 2010 Virtual Diversity Career Fair

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN is pleased to announce that pre-registration has opened for the 2010 Virtual Diversity Career Fair, co-presented this year by THE BLACK COLLEGIAN, the IMDiversity.com Career Center & Multicultural Villages Network, and the Howard University MBA Program!

Diverse college students, soon-to-be college graduates, and entry-level jobseekers from all backgrounds, areas of study and educational institutions are invited to attend the annual, pre-graduation careers event, hosted on THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Online at http://www.blackcollegian.com/careerfair.

The seasonal Virtual Diversity Career Fair features detailed profiles, recruiter statements, diversity information, and job or internship opportunities by diversity-committed employers who are still actively recruiting in the second semester.

Additional features include career advice content from recruiters and career center directors, Fair update email alerts, resume drive with private job tools for quick posting of your employer-searchable resume during and after the Fair, prize drawings and private content for registrants, and expanded custom job search tools for searching tens of thousands of additional job listings across the world.

The Fair will coincide with both the circulation of the new First Semester Super Issue (Top 100 Employers/African American History Edition) of THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Magazine on college campuses nationwide, and the springtime MBA Diversity Forums careers event on the campus of the Howard University Graduate School of Business (details to come).

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Second Semester Issue Shipped

The editors are pleased to announce the release of THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Magazine Second Semester Super Issue, now being distributed on college campuses nationwide, and released in an extended online edition at THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Online.

This edition includes The Top 100 Employers for the Class of 2010, Profiles of African-American Chief Executives, History of Employment Discrimination in America, a profile of businesswoman and super model, Tyra Banks, who launched her career in THE BLACK COLLEGIAN, the annual African-American History 101 Contest, and much more.

New feature spotlights "Gentlemen of Quality" on HBCU campuses

We're glad to announce the return to THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Online of contributor Ian Evans ("The Dress Code" First Semester Super Issues 2008) with a new feature, "Gentlemen of Quality," and examination of "Young Black Men who are upholding the tradition of achievement".

The far-ranging article features young men from across America's HBCUs, who in photographs and quotes tackle the challenges of being young, Black and male in a society where "positive images of quality, educated, enlightened young black men are few, while the image of uneducated drug dealers, pimps and thugs are widely known and celebrated."

The piece gives a compelling look at what men from Morehouse, Dillard, Howard, FAMU, Tuskegee and Fisk feel about the opportunities and hopes, and the continuing challenges and stigmas that lay ahead for Black men in Obama-era America.

Study: Black Student-Athletes More Likely to Finish School

Interesting findings from by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, as reported on Miller-McCune.com:

A study released Monday on the occasion of National Student-Athlete Day (or, as is more widely celebrated, the last day of the men's March Madness tournament), turns on its head a long-standing stereotype about black college athletes and the schools that recruit them.

Since the integration of major college athletic programs two generations ago, universities have been accused of using black athletes to win titles and build lucrative brands — with nary a degree exchanged in the process.

But today, it turns out, athletic departments are doing a better job of graduating black students than universities are as a whole. Put another way: black student-athletes are more likely to finish school than black students who aren't athletes.

Read the rest of the report, Grad Rates Higher For Black Athletes Than Black Students

New Section: Xtra Video & Media

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Online editors are pleased to introduce a new feature, Xtra Video and Media, highlighting original videos or multimedia pieces contributed by our readers.

Want to see your original video featured on THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Online? Visit the section to view our inaugural submissions and share your own original clips showing your talent, passion or hobby, your campus and friends, your life as a collegian.

New Features: Students & the Shaky Economy

Everybody's talking about it. But how does today's shaky economy affect students?

From our Campus & Student section, two timely new features zero in on the problem of shrinking dollars in the face of the rising costs of being a student.

Campus and the Economy: How Wall Street Woes Impact You
You're getting back to the books and may be buried in the fervor of a still-fresh semester. But when you come up for air, you're likely to find that Wall Street's woes extend to campus corridors. How so, and what you can do to survive what may be a rough ride?

Rising College Costs - It is a Presidential Campaign Issue!
It's not just the
economy that tops voters' concerns. The rising cost of college is a critical,
yet largely overlooked issue for voters this election, according to a new
National Education Association (NEA)/Project New West survey.

Dr. Sidney A. Ribeau Named 16th President of Howard University

Washington, D.C., (May 7, 2008)—Sidney A. Ribeau, Ph.D., has been named President of Howard University, one of 48 private doctoral/research intensive universities in the United States, the University’s Board of Trustees announced today. He was the unanimous choice of the University’s Trustees. Dr. Ribeau becomes the 16th president of the nation’s premier historically black institution of higher learning.

Dr. Ribeau has been President of Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, for 13 years. At the University he initiated a number of successful, innovative, values-based initiatives that provide students with an academic environment that develops culturally literate, technologically sophisticated, productive citizens.

See full release at Howard University site.

Invitation: Underrepresented Student Groups Family & Work Survey

We received the following invitation from enterprising student researchers at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia. While not affiliated with THE BLACK COLLEGIAN, the survey appeared to take seriously the worthy goal of exploring student views about their future plans for work and family. Based on our discussions with the authors, it also seemed well designed to specifically take into account the (possibly significant) influences of gender, ethnic and racial background in developing these views.

After corresponding with the survey authors, we said we would be happy to pass along word of their invitation to our readers. Following is the provided introduction to the survey.

We encourage any of our readers who participate in the survey to stop back here and let us know about the experience, and any thoughts on career and family it may have raised for you.

Hi, my name is Samantha, and I am a student researcher at the University of Mary
Washington, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, working under the supervision of Dr.
Mindy Erchull and Dr. Miriam Liss.

We are collecting data from individuals between the ages of 18 and 30 who have never been married or have had any children. We are especially interested in exploring the experiences of ethnic minority college students as these groups have been traditionally underrepresented in the research on career and family plans.

Do African American students expect a greater division of labor than Hispanic
American students?

Is there a difference in drive to marry between Asian American students and African American students?

These are just some of the questions we hope to answer with our research. There has been very little research completed on ethnic minority students and we are seeking your assistance. Please help us learn more about college students' expectations on their future regarding work and family. If you are interested, I’d love to have you fill out my survey. By following the link below, you are helping
broaden the research and understanding of traditionally underrepresented groups
of college students' expectations for their career and family life.

As an added bonus, once you complete the survey you will be entered into a drawing to win a $25 gift card at Target.

Thank you for your participation, feel free to share this information and link with your friends!

Follow this link to go to the survey: http://www.ff5umw.com/samconsent.html

Around Town: Black Greek Letter Organizations Step Up for NOLA

The relevancy of Black fraternities and sororities may be a recurring theme on the national level, but local chapters are proving their worth.


From providing communities with informational resources to gutting houses, undergraduate and alumni members are providing the service their founders intended, as well as helping rebuild a fractured city.


Chavez Cammon, a political science/criminal justice major at Southern University at New Orleans and president of the Epsilon Nu chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, said his chapter is ready to work.


“We’re in the process of setting up a partnership to adopt one of the schools in the recovery school district near SUNO,” said Cammon, whose chapter has also set up voter registration drives and political awareness campaigns.


However, Cammon said there is plenty yet to be done.


“We have a young leadership among the student government, and there’s a movement to get all the organizations on campus together and figure out how we can all make a difference as undergrads.”


Ross Johnson, a graduate of Dillard University and chaplain for the citywide alumni chapter of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, said that in his opinion undergraduate chapters are working hard.


However, Johnson said for those members of the Greek black letter organizations that his challenge is simple: “You are mandated to service, and it’s time show up and serve.”

Not to be Forgotten: Other Coast Colleges Struggling

While most national media coverage of the week's hurricane anniversaries has focused on Louisiana, observations have not been limited to New Orleans. As the Jackson Clarion Ledger reports in its expansive, Mississippi-focused Katrina +2 section, problems institutional, political and social persist in the state despite a good deal of tangible progress towards recovery.

Gulf Coast colleges are still feeling a pinch in enrollment, their futures uncertain, as a number of campuses face long-term challenges of not just restoration, but wholesale relocation. As LaRaye Brown reports, state and community colleges in particular have been forced to absorb major losses, and readjust their recovery and growth goals, as they hunt for and seek to fund new homes. Schools like the University of Southern Mississippi and William Carey University, Brown suggests, are on the path to breaking ground on new sites.

For others, including the Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College system, the estimated time to restoring pre-Katrina numbers and operations keeps stretching outward. With enrollment still down nearly 12%, state funding will decline by over $3.6 million, president Willis Lott said in the report. As a result, Lott estimated, the school enrollment numbers would not reach pre-Katrina numbers until 2014, rather than 2010 as originally projected.

Meanwhile, the AP's Sheila Byrd reports on a study by the Southern Education Foundation, finding "that thousands of Gulf Coast students are still displaced...and millions of dollars worth of school reconstruction projects remain unfunded," and that a "new response" by federal government is needed to address the needs of educational institutions including K-12 level as well as colleges.

Among the study's key findings:

Displaced students re-enrolled in schools in 49 states, but a lack of adequate federal funding meant that schools with the greatest number of displaced students had insufficient classrooms, staff and supplies to support them. The report found that as many as 15,000 K-12 public school students and 35,000 college students in Louisiana and Mississippi missed school last year because of lingering problems associated with Katrina.

Only 2 percent of the federal government's hurricane-related funding went toward education recovery. While the costs of hurricane destruction in K-12 and higher education were estimated at $6.2 billion, only $1.2 billion in federal funding had been committed to restoring physical structures and property -- inadequate even with the addition of some local government and insurance funding.

Another problem observed by the Clarion Ledger's editors is more social and political, and insidious. In Immigrants feel fallout on Coast, reporter Julie Goodman describes how "gratititude has turned to spite" targeting the Coast's immigrant population, those who were on-hand to "brave storm-ravaged homes, working among the corpses of dogs, cats and humans and cleaning rotten food from refrigerators..." and now, having contributed so much to the recovery work, and put down roots with homes, schools and businesses, say they're "stared at in public, singled out by law enforcement and targeted by politicians on the campaign trail."

See the special section for more extensive coverage and commentary related to the Katrina anniversary in Mississippi.

Around Town: How some students plan to commemorate Katrina

While roving about the city to assess how involved local collegians are in the commemoration of Katrina, I found that many students are simply “Katrina’ed-out.”

“I don’t know if it’s 2005 or 2007 because you can’t tell the difference in some places," said Quentin Chevalier, a pharmacy student at Xavier University. "If you walk down some streets, it looks like Katrina happened yesterday."

Some students said they feel that regardless of how slow progress is after Katrina, it's important to remember what happened to New Orleans two years ago.

One collegian at an area school, who wished to remain anonymous, said she was trying to get her professors to cancel classes this Wednesday so students could take part in the events happening across the city.

Meanwhile, Autrail Manning said he was going to commemorate the event by acknowledging the losses many suffered during and after Hurricane Katrina.

“I lived on the Westbank (of New Orleans) so my home only suffered wind damage,” said Manning a sophomore at Dillard University. “But I understand that some people lost everything, so I plan to take a ride through the 9th ward and remember them.”

Faren Pitts, also a Dillard student, said she plans to commemorate the anniversary by attending the public policy forum being hosted by the university.

“Other than that, I’ll probably purchase a Katrina Bell to ring on (the anniversary),” Pitts said.

The ceremonial bells, which will be rung throughout the city on August 29th, signify the levee breaches that occurred throughout the city. Bells will ring for two minutes starting at 9:38 a.m. as city officials lay wreaths throughout the city.

Author of "Breach of Faith" meets incoming LSU Freshmen

From The Daily Reveille at Louisiana State University:

Incoming students were greeted this week by Jed Horne, author of "Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City," who told the class of 2011 they have a great opportunity for applied learning through service during the reconstruction of New Orleans, as the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall on Wednesday approaches.

The author urged students to "Shake yourself alive, study Katrina, make it part of your life, try to understand the deeper politics, try to understand the underlying aesthetics [and] the underlying ethics of life in Katrina. If the book is helpful in this process, terrific. If not, keep reading."

Horne's book was selected as required reading for incoming freshmen for the Summer Reading Program, Friday morning during the Academic Convocation.

Horne commended students at the University and around the nation for their volunteer work in Katrina-effected areas in Louisiana."There were 10,000 students at spring break last year effectively doing the work of a dysfunctional government and at the same time galvanizing the situation to service and teaching a generation about the responsibilities we, as individuals, have," Horne said.

At the same time, the Reveille article also acknowledges the difficulty of getting students engaged in volunteerism, and reported that more faculty than students participated in follow-up discussions about Katrina. For those who had been on-hand during the storm or right after, a kind of Katrina-fatigue can set in. Horne understands this.

"The thing to remember about a disaster - the thing I have to remind myself in moments of great frustration - is by definition a disaster takes time to recover," Horne said.

He encouraged the new freshmen to show leadership and "recognize that your time here coincides with an extraordinary, but deeply troubling, moment in American history."

See the full report

Far-off Wheeling WV Jesuit University Marks Katrina Anniversary

Of interest from Huntington News, an impressive story, "Wheeling Jesuit University Marks 2nd Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with Events Open to the Public," reporting how one campus in far-off West Virginia is planning a full and serious program of events to help make sense of what's going on.

It came to our attention, as an excellent example of how those outside the Gulf can not only show a symbolic solidarity with their southern neighbors, but can take the opportunity for good, substantive exploration of the topic for educational and self-reflexive purposes. In this case, the formal programming seems, a little surprisingly, to exceed even that planned at some New Orleans schools for this week. Just a sample:

"Talk at 11:15 a.m. Tuesday, Aug 28, “The State of the Heart: Rebuilding
New Orleans.” Held in the student Rathskeller (Ratt), located in Swint Hall,
students and staff will begin the week by speaking out and describing their
experiences in the Gulf Coast as they address the question: “Why are we still
rebuilding two years later and why are people still displaced?” Presenters
include: Josh Elek, Chris McPherson, Amanda Smider and M.J. Supan, students and staff who traveled to New Orleans recently on relief trips.

"Later Tuesday there will be a 6 p.m. program called “Sweet Tea and Spike
Lee.” This informal showing of the first two acts of the Spike Lee documentary, When the Levees Broke, will also be held at the Ratt and everyone is
invited. The film was released in Dec. 2006 and looks at the U.S. government’s
response Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans."

Our hats are off to Wheeling Jesuit for their effort, compassion and interest, which we hope to see replicated elsewhere. See the full report.

More than 1,000 Tulane students to volunteer 9/1

New Orleans' City Business Magazine reports that more than 1,000 students from Tulane University, along with faculty, alumni, and staff, plan to participate in the university's Outreach Tulane community service day on Saturday...

"Activities will include painting public schools, cleaning and yard work, cutting fabric squares to make beds for animals, socializing with elderly residents, sorting and packaging food and other donations, building a Habitat for Humanity home and picking up trash and debris.

""This is the largest single day of community service for our students, faculty and staff," said Vincent Ilustre, director of Tulane's Center for Public Service."

Volunteers will gather at Saturday 9/1 at 8 a.m. on Newcomb Quad of the uptown campus and be bused to sites across the city.

The Outreach Tulane effort is an annual, one-day volunteer community service event for incoming and returning Tulane students, as well as faculty, staff and their families, according to the Tulane website.In its 15th year, this event hosts around 1,000 participants in the opening weekend of the Fall semester.

The program is coordinated by CACTUS-the Community Action Council of Tulane University Students and the Office of Student Programs at Tulane University. This year, the Outreach Tulane partners include Hands On New Orleans, Padua Pediatric, LASPCA, Second Harvest, Malta Park, Habitat for Humanity, Project Lazarus, Green Project, ARC of GNO, City Park, Beacon of Hope, Communities in Schools, Esperanza School.

Contact James Singleton at jsingle@tulane.edu for more information and check out the list of projects where volunteers are needed, and what you should know when volunteering.

Also of Interest: Video: New Orleans: A Labor of Love - several good reasons for students to volunteer, wherever they are

Video: New Orleans: A Labor of Love

>


New Orleans: A Labor of Love, is a documentary that follows 18 Los Angeles Valley College students during their Spring Break volunteering experience. The film is a component of the New Orleans: A Labor of Love public awareness campaign to get 5,000 student volunteers to rebuild in the Gulf Coast during 2008. The grassroots, web-based project is housed at www.nolaboroflove.com, where it also operates as a clearinghouse to connect volunteers for the Gulf Coast relief effort with volunteer opportunities and resources.


"I am one private citizen who has been so moved by the neglect and abuse of poor people in the Gulf Coast that I must do something. I’m pooling my skillsets in filmmaking, photography, multi-media and public relations to form a committed public awareness campaign that will keep this issue on our hearts and minds until our work in the Gulf Coast is done."
- Katina Parker, visual artist