students

Name: Derek Blumke
Current city: Washington, D.C.

1. What was your college experience like after coming back from serving in the Air Force in Afghanistan?

My college experience coming home from military service was difficult, because I did not have the sense of camaraderie, teamwork and sense of purpose I did while serving. I felt isolated because I did not feel like a "peer" with many of my classmates. While my friendships with the people I graduated from college with will last forever, it was the connection to other veterans on campus that made my college experience what it was.

2. How do you think the needs of Iraq and Afghanistan generation veterans are different than those of past generations?

The needs of this generation of veterans vary greatly from those of our past. The veterans who came home from World War II transformed higher education for the better and made themselves into the "Greatest Generation," and continued to transform our country to be what it is today. Other generations after that were not given the recognition, support and resources they deserved, and as result many veterans from the Vietnam War struggled in ways they did not deserve. They should have been thanked for their service, but instead they were degraded and dishonored for their sacrifices to our country. Today, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are being recognized, thanked and commended for their sacrifices, but they are still disconnected as result of the gap between those who wear the uniform and those who do not. Only 1% of the population serve in the United States military and many of those who have not, have difficulties understanding the life of military service - as much as they may like to.

3. How did you manage to expand Student Veterans of America with your co-founders to more than 300 chapters while still in school at the University of Michigan?

Teamwork. Student Veterans of America was founded not as result of the efforts of one individual, but instead came out of a universal need by student veteran leaders across the country. While I made significant sacrifices making SVA what it is today, so did countless others help in building a nationwide network of support for our returning warriors.

4. How has technology played a role in assisting your chapters and members? And for members supporting each other?

Facebook. Student Veterans of America chapters were initially connected through Facebook. It allowed us to find veterans on college campuses across the country and gave us the ability to help each other transition to college and succeed in growing a support network that helps tens of thousands of veterans successfully transition to college, and attain college degrees.

5. What has been one of your favorite moments since starting SVA?

While helping to pass the Post 9/11 GI Bill through Congress and watching it be signed into law was incredibly rewarding, the most significant moments for me are when I hear young student veterans thank SVA leaders, and myself, for giving them the opportunity to have a new mission,  which is helping yesterday’s warriors become today’s scholars and tomorrow’s leaders.

For more information about Student Veterans of America, please visit www.studentveterans.org

Last week PopTech, always a place for interesting innovators and exploding-the-box thinkers, launched Spark to inspire interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) among young people. Spark and its Facebook companion site are home to interactive content, videos, fun STEM activities and local event information all meant to encourage young people to explore how they can change the world through careers in math and science. PopTech chose five diverse STEM innovators to help demonstrate the exciting possibilities in the field through videos and activities. The innovators include:

• Katie Salen is a game designer, professor at Parsons the New School for Design, and executive director at Institute of Play, which uses games to promote learning, innovation and change. 
• Award-winning digital artist Zach Lieberman created a toolkit called OpenFrameworks, which helps enable creative computer coding.  
• Entrepreneur, researcher and science education advocate Hayat Sindi founded Diagnostics for All, a biotech nonprofit that develops diagnostic devices for the developing world.  
• Named one of Time magazine's "Time 100" most influential people this year, Will Allen runs Growing Power, a sustainable urban farming initiative that helps people gain access to affordable, healthy food with training, outreach and assistance.
• Marine Biologist Tierney Thys has been studying the giant ocean sunfish for the last decade. She was named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer in 2004 and has served as an adviser for media initiatives to increase understanding of ocean conservation and research initiatives. 

Since Millennials are prone to working outside of hierarchy and tend to want to get get their hands dirty, PopTech wisely decided not to limit Spark to a resource where young people could draw information from experts. In an effort to fully integrate the Millennial perspective in the initiative, PopTech tapped four impressive Millennial social citizens to serve as Spark Connectors. These youth ambassadors are leaders in their schools and communities and also have an interest in pursuing degrees and careers in STEM subjects. Each of them attended the PopTech conference last week where they spent time with the innovators, and they shared their experiences through blog posts and videos posted on the Spark site. They will continue to use social media to engage their peers in STEM subjects and activities throughout the year as they participate in additional events with the innovators.

About the Spark Connectors:

• Anthony Morris is a senior at Brooklyn Community Arts and Media High School, where he is the captain of the basketball team and a peer leader in a program called College Corner, which helps other students with college admissions. After high school, he is interested in exploring dentistry or technical engineering.
• Keziah Green is also a senior at Brooklyn Community Arts and Media High School. She is interested in studying psychology and human behavior and thinks of herself as a trendsetter.
• Molly White, a senior at Camden Hills Regional High School in Rockport, Maine, is considering studying electrical or computer engineering next year in college. She is involved in the arts program at her school, where she works on stage lighting design for the club's production.
• Sarina Chawla is a senior at Appleton East High School and Tesla Engineering Charter School is active in the robotics and debate clubs. She loves talking to people and hopes to be a patent lawyer.

We're looking forward to seeing what these young social citizens will share this year.

After seeing young social entrepreneur William Kamkwamba speak recently, I wrote a post wondering how we can find and encourage young people in remote areas who have the potential to change the world. While I'm not sure this question has been fully answered, there are some exciting campaigns, programs and organizations working to capture the entrepreneurial spirit for good. Today is Social Enterprise Day, and this week (November 16-22) in 85 countries including Rwanda, Lebanon, and Bangladesh, efforts as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week are meant to inspire young people to create innovative solutions to social problems. Last year, the first Global Entrepreneurship Week included almost 25,000 events in 77 countries and included more than 3 million attendees.

GEW is an opportunity for idea exchange, mentorship, collaboration and competitions meant to spur innovation among students, like the Global Innovation Tournament, which gives students a week to come up with a solution to a problem (this year, to make saving money fun) and post their results in a YouTube video. Other events this week include business pitch competitions, workshops on how to succeed in a struggling economy or take ideas to scale, speed networking events, and clean technology contests. Initiatives like GEW are encouraging because they provide additional access to young aspiring entrepreneurs and show that the entrepreneurship boom of my generation will be a social entrepreneurship boom. For more reasons why GEW matters, check out Nathaniel Whittemore's post on Change.org. Social Edge, from the Skoll Foundation, which has been promoting social entrepreneurship for years, also has a list of current opportunities for young people around the world. 

For Millennials interested in getting a social enterprise-focused graduate degree, the options are growing as well. A few years ago I would never have thought of getting an MBA. I remember talking to one of my mentors about various graduate school programs, and he practically begged me not to get a Masters in Social Work. He said that while a degree in Social Work was admirable and helpful, it wasn't the only option if I wanted to make a difference. Business school, he said, was not just for investment bankers; it could help me run an efficient nonprofit or manage a government agency. Business skills can, and should, be used to help people. Not help them realize that Coke is better than Pepsi or help them decide they need another pair of kicks, but actually help them. Now after working with small nonprofit and entrepreneurial projects in Ethiopia and promoting sustainable economic development in the West Bank, I am fully convinced he was right. As Colleen Dilenschneider wrote recently, especially for our generation, social change is sector agnostic. The kind of sustainable change we want to see will be achieved through a mashup of the public, private and independent sectors, and I want to be prepared to craft that mix. Being profitable and doing good are not two opposing options; rather, they can be achieved at the same time, by the same initiatives.

And as I've been looking into it, I'm encouraged to see that business schools seem to believe the same because there are lots of great programs with a social edge. A few of the programs, many of which have emerged or restructured in the last decade, are below.

• The Center for Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke’s Fuqua School promotes the entrepreneurial pursuit of social impact by teaching students to apply business skills to global problems. Founded in 2002, CASE offers social enterprise-focused coursework, career planning, internships and financial assistance.
• Yale School of Management’s entire MBA program encourages students to think creatively and take risks to improve the world.
• At the University of Michigan's Ross School, a partnership with UM’s School of Social Work and School of Public Policy created the Nonprofit and Public Management Center, which provides opportunities for students to serve on nonprofit boards, take special courses and participate in nonprofit consulting internships.
• Stanford Graduate School of Business lists two of its four key areas as Global Awareness and Social Innovation, recognizing both the far-reaching impacts of globalization and the social impact and responsibilities of businesses.
• Columbia Business School has a Social Enterprise program, which helps students align their personal and professional values in careers that result in social benefits to a broader community. The program's focus areas include Public and Nonprofit Management, International Development and Emerging Markets, Social Entrepreneurship, and Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability. 
• The Haas School of Business at UC-Berkeley focuses on teaching students to lead through innovation by challenging conventional wisdom, being creative and collaborative and discovering how to seize opportunities. Students who plan to play in the public or nonprofit sectors can take advantage of the Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership.
• In 2005, the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern launched the Social Enterprise at Kellogg (SEEK) program to meet the needs of students who want to do well and do good.

By no means exhaustive, this list is exciting just as a demonstration that some of the country's most well-respected schools are investing in leadership for social change, but even at schools which are not yet championing social good in their taglines and focus areas, Net Impact's more than 200 chapters provide business students with resources and networks to seek social and environmental sustainability. And most of these schools are also putting their money where their mouths are. They offer various loan forgiveness or repayment assistance programs, which provide funds to help MBA graduates who are earning relatively lower salaries (i.e. $80,000 or less) working at nonprofit organization or local, state or federal agency.

What other opportunities have you seen for budding social entrepreneurs? What kinds of opportunities are still missing?

Guest blogger Brannon Cullum is a graduate intern at the Case Foundation, working on a Masters in Communication, Culture and Technology at Georgetown University. Her post is part of a series we have been doing on some intersections of social media and the college experience.

Despite reports earlier this summer indicating that young people were not using Twitter, market research firm comScore released new data last week revealing that younger age groups are “flooding the fastest” as the demographics for Twitter users begins to shift. The shift comes at the same time many young adults are heading back to college. So, beyond following their favorite celebrities and athletes, or finding out what’s for breakfast in the dorm cafeteria, how can Millennials use Twitter on campus?

One first step is to see if your college or university has jumped on the bandwagon and created a Twitter account. There are official institutional feeds, as well as specific accounts for various areas of university life. I’ve come across Twitter feeds for admissions, athletics, arts, campus life, libraries, academic departments, campus newspapers, and other student groups. Check out onlineschool.org’s list of the Top 100 Twitterers in Academia for a broad list.

GlobalQuad.com is a new website that aggregates both official university tweets and personal tweets from student, staff, or faculty and allows you to filter results by college or university. There are nearly sixty colleges and universities currently featured on the site, which is edited by Natan Edelsburg, an NYU undergraduate. This site seems very useful if you want to locate all of the different people or departments tweeting at your school.

Are you tweeting in class? There is a growing movement of professors using Twitter in the classroom as a way to liven up the traditional lecture and help students feel more engaged with course content. Some professors are using Twitter to share information, links, and news related to course content with students; others have designated specific hashtags for a course to organize and aggregate tweets. If you don’t have time for office hours and your professor has a Twitter account, sending him or her a direct message is a quick and easy way to connect.

Monica Rankin, a History professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, experimented with Twitter during the spring 2009 semester, using it as a tool to organize class comments and questions. Students were encouraged to “live tweet” during class and the feed was projected on a large screen in the classroom. In her reflections on the experiment, Rankin notes that by using Twitter she was able to engage some students who otherwise would not have participated in class discussion.

Perhaps many Millennials did not rush to join Twitter earlier because they saw tweeting as the same thing as posting a Facebook status update. While Facebook updates are limited to a person’s friends, tweets can be read by anyone. For college students who are interested in networking or publicizing a student group or event, Twitter can be quite useful.

Looking for a job or internship? Twitter is a great place to start. Georgetown University’s Career Services is offering a webinar to its students to learn how to “tweet yourself to a job.” It is one of many university career centers using Twitter to share information with students. If you have a particular career in mind, start building a network of people on Twitter that are in your specific field. This will make it a lot easier to connect with professionals once you graduate and need advice or are looking for employment.

If you want to start tweeting, Megan Jones has a useful list of the top 25 tips for college students using Twitter. Advertising professor Samuel Bradley has an extremely helpful guide as well. We Follow, a directory of Twitter users, has listings for Millennial Tweeters, too. What Twitter trends are you seeing on campus? Do you think Twitter has a place in the classroom?

As Millennials everywhere head back to school over the next few weeks, we are going to be thinking and talking about some intersections of social media and the college experience.

Today is the first day of school for many students across the country. After a few months of beach vacations, summer jobs, and lounging around the house, it's time to get back into the swing of going to class, writing papers and taking tests. With its increasing popularity, social media is bridging both worlds - in the classroom and out - and people have begun to study what all this social media is really doing to our brains.

My mom used to tell my brother that video games were going to turn his brain to mush. Many studies now dispute this, showing that gaming can actually improve perception, sharpen thinking and increase patience. Point for my brother. (Unfortunately, I lost interest in video games after they moved beyond the original Nintendo.) Similarly, some have speculated and worried lately that all of this social media use by today's young people is ruining their ability to write. At the very least, they say, Facebook and Twitter leads to time wasted talking about yourself to no one in particular.

And with all our ROTFLs BRBs TTYLs RTs, HTs, and other abbrevs, I can see how our teachers might be concerned that proper spelling, capitalization, sentence structure, and good old fashioned grammar have gone by the wayside. But could it be that our constant texting, tweeting, blogging and facebook posting are actually just as helpful as summer reading and flash cards?

Yes and no. Tracy Alloway, a psychologist in Scotland, recently studied the impact of social media on working memory. She claims that Facebook helps enhance our intelligence because keeping up with so many friends is like a workout routine for our memories, but she warns that other types of social media might not be so helpful. Twitter's character limits, along with the brevity of text messaging and YouTube videos, shrink our attention spans and fail to engage our brains because we don't have to process the endless stream of information come at us. 

So social media's effects on memory seem to be split. What about other skills? The social web has turned us all into content producers, rather than just consumers. In addition to giving us an opportunity to share what we think and voice our love, hate or indifference on all manner of subjects, it also gives us the valuable opportunity to practice writing.

Andrea Lunsford of Stanford University says that her study shows that technology and social media are improving students' ability to write. Like we've always been told, practice makes perfect, and thanks to our habits of constant online communication, this generation of students is getting more writing practice than any group of students ever before. This is because Millennial students are not just writing in the classroom; they are writing throughout the day. Clive Thompson points out that this is a huge paradigm shift - in generations before us, essays were written in class, and that was it. And it is more persuasive writing because they feel they are always writing for an audience.

Not only do they write more, but today's students are also adept at using appropriate tone and style for their audience. Because of the interactive nature of social media, users are more aware of their various audiences. Rather than just writing for one professor, they are writing for friends and peers with whom they have varying types relationships and shared interests. They know not to use the same writing style in a research paper as they do posting birthday well wishes on a friend's wall. Likewise, it's often occurred to me that Twitter helps me to practice a more concise style of writing - a habit which can be difficult to form.

Are you convinced? Is social media the best thing that's happened to the classroom since the overhead projector, or are you still waiting for our brains to turn to mush?

As Millennials everywhere head back to school over the next few weeks, we are going to be thinking and talking about some intersections of social media and the college experience.

We introduced you to community and arts causes at Columbia U yesterday. Now we're playing to the left side of your brain by featuring student group Engineers Without Borders (flickr pics here!).

The Columbia U chapter of Engineers Without Borders addresses the problems facing people locally and globally by pulling together students from engineering and arts backgrounds to work on creative, sustainable, engineering solutions. In a great example of looking beyond campus walls, they are currently working on three programs in Ghana, India, and Uganda.

Hear one young engineer's wish for how service legislation can help his cause.

Sooo, remember that time I conducted a bunch of interviews with students before the ServiceNation candidates' forum and promised to post them? Probably not, because I promised it three weeks ago, and we all have memory spans attuned to a fleeting digital age. :)

That said, there's no better time for a reminder about all the ways Millennials are serving on- and off-campus, particularly as the ServiceNation event hoopla dies down, and the real work of a movement begins. And Social Citizens is doing its part by featuring a series of posts this week that highlight the students, organizations, and causes they dig at Columbia University.

I recorded these on-the-go mini-sessions on Sept. 11 while on the prowl through the student activity fair near Low Library. I did my best to hit on a wide array of missions, program structures, ethnicities, political orientations, and religious views in my interviews.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy recently posted information about the Department of Education’s request for feedback on proposed regulations regarding implementation of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007.

Come again?

Basically, this new law forgives the remaining debt of student loan recipients who have worked as full-time “public service employees” for a period of 10 consecutive years while making their payments. In other words, you graduate, land a solid gig at a nonprofit, government agency, or other still-to-be-defined “public service” employer, and you won’t have to pay any more monthly debt owed after 10 years working there or remaining in the sector.

Students in a University of Central Florida were in for a surprise when their professor challenged them to see if they could survive completely “unplugged” for one week (actually it was five days).

Students in a University of Central Florida class were in for a surprise when their professor challenged them to see if they could survive completely “unplugged” for one week (actually it was five days).