Hey RU students — especially SUST majors and minors . . .
The annual Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) has literally hundreds of PAID summer research fellowships in the US that you can search for and apply to. These are well-compensated and you learn a ton doing one of these fellowships as a rising junior or senior.
If you’re wondering, “Have any recent SUST majors got one of these awesome fellowships?” — the answer is yes. Here’s a cool post by Kiera Carpenter (BA in SUST ’24) who completed one of these REUs at the Chgo Botanic Garden in the summer of 2023.
Remember, you can’t get one of these gigs unless you apply!
Scientists from Field Museum and around the world need your help! Join us in transcribing scientific label data from our collections and from field notes books using online and computer tools. Activities may also include hands-on curation with specimens. This event will be held daily from this Thur10/18 thru Sun 10/21, 2018 and is based at Field Museum.
You will be part of a global effort to digitize centuries of data about life on Earth. Organisms may include ferns, fungi, mosses, insects, and mammals. Participants will have an opportunity to meet Field Museum scientists and join in behind-the-scenes tours or talks about the significance of the scientific collections!
WeDigBio is ideally for teens aged 15+ and adults. Refreshments will be available, but you should feel free to bring lunch. Space is limited; please register in advance.
Details:
For those attending on-site activities, free admission to the museum will be available after the event.
Each day there is one session, including registration, the event and tours. Registration will open at 9:30am and the event will be held from 10:00am to 2:00pm.
This essay was published as an op-ed piece entitle “Mitchell’s Still Has Magic for Me” in the Joliet Herald-News, p14, on 30 December 2010. I offer it here five years later as a commentary on supporting local economies and celebrating the unique small businesses in our home towns. Gladly, business is still good!
Normally I utterly detest shopping. But a few days before Christmas when my wife noted we were running low on some staple food items, I seized the opportunity with gusto: “Great, honey! I’ll run to Mitchell’s.”
A small, nondescript building with a friendly 1960s-vintage lighted sign, Mitchell’s Food Mart on Raynor Avenue in Joliet is the epitome of the small neighborhood grocery store, one run by the same family since opening sixty years ago.
Walking inside is like a journey back in time. Customers carefully guide half-size shopping carts down four or five narrow aisles packed full with meticulously arranged inventory. Each item features a little orange price tag that has been applied by hand (no UPC scanning here). The one register for checkout features a friendly and efficient employee who actually knows how to bag groceries and make proper change, both of which are lost arts.
The utterly delightful candy section, strategically placed alongside the checkout line, reminds me of every corner drugstore’s sweets aisle from my childhood days. It’s got a little bit of everything, much of which (in keeping with the store’s small-is-beautiful theme) is available in minute quantities. My two girls go gaga picking out five-cent Tootsies as rewards for being cooperative sidekicks.
The heart and soul of Mitchell’s, though, is the butcher counter in the back, a supremely wonderful meat-eater’s paradise (vegetarians stop reading now). The first thing I do here is grab a number, because Mitchell’s has the wisdom to use this time-honored system that is sadly neglected at most supermarket delis.
Above the lunchmeat slicers are posted the current won-loss records of Chicago’s sports teams, adjusted seasonally and updated daily. I always check the scores, then pause to regard the squadron of white-aproned butchers expertly plying their trade behind the counter, a sight I find endlessly fascinating.
Here in the queue is where one best experiences the singular magic of Mitchell’s. As folks stand waiting for their portions of hand-cut bacon or tender rump roast to be wrapped up in neat white paper, they inevitably start chatting. Time and again, I’ve had wonderfully entertaining conversations there with total strangers, or mini-reunions with old acquaintances.
From the outside, it’s hard to imagine how a small-scale operation like Mitchell’s survives, even thrives, in this era of cavernous supermarkets with their national supply-chain economics and over-the-top product selection.
As Labor Day recedes sadly into the distance and we come to grips with the fact that, yes, another school year has officially begun, I can’t help reflecting on the pervasive and damaging myth within American educational culture that junior high is a terrible place to be —something to be survived, not enjoyed.
Sure, the sheer size of a big junior high school is intimidating at first. Yes, there are bullies, and they hit harder than they did in grade school. And there’s no doubt that adolescents can be obnoxious and hurtful, especially when it comes to teasing and tormenting their weaker, geekier, or more awkward peers.
But junior high also can be a place for kids to have fun, to mature into their new minds and bodies, to make new friends, and to relish that time of innocence before the reality of working a part-time job or sweating over college applications. Junior high is, in fact, the last sweet time of true childhood — a realization that occurs to me now as a middle-aged parent.
I suppose that my rosy view of junior high is somewhat colored by my own mostly positive experiences growing up in Joliet, where I attended Hufford several, um, decades ago. As a short kid who wore goofy-looking glasses, favored brown corduroys, sported hair that refused to “feather” properly by late 1970s standards, and was universally known as a bookworm, the odds of my fitting in and avoiding physical trauma weren’t exactly favorable. So how was it that I actually enjoyed my junior high school years, let alone survived them with all of my teeth intact?
Here’s the secret.
Early on in sixth grade, I joined the school’s long established and much-ballyhooed Drama Club, which convened during school hours just like band, orchestra, or choir. Every day thereafter, I lived for tenth period, when our teachers Jack Prendergast and John Nordmark brought us into what to me seemed like an entirely different and wonderful place: the World of the Stage.
Sixth through eighth graders worked, learned, and joked together in this alternate world. We practiced monologues and scenes; competed in speech contest every fall; tried to one-up each other at every audition; and put on a fall play and a full-blown spring musical each school year. In the process, we honed our oratory and acting skills and . . . perhaps most importantly . . . learned how to mount the stage with confidence, take risks, and deal with failure.
To this day, I have had few tests of personal courage that matched that of having to kiss the leading lady in our Spring 1981 production of “Bye, Bye, Birdie” in my eighth grade year, while 400 screeching and hooting adolescents raised the roof of Hufford’s auditorium in hormone-fueled delight at the spectacle.
So here is my advice to all the junior high schoolers out there, assuming you’re precocious readers of this blog:
(1) Join something. Band, orchestra, choir, drama, scholastic bowl, chess club, basketball, volleyball, cross country — whatever it is, try it out and see if it suits you. This is a good way to make some friends outside of the hot lunch line.
(2) Be yourself. Just because you join a group doesn’t mean you have to become a sheep. Hey, America is all about celebrating the individual! So I say, go gonzo with that Mohawk.
(3) Don’t take any crap from bullies. Even if you’re small. Remember, little guys are dangerous, especially if they’re smart enough to make big/older friends. (See #1 above.)
(4) Enjoy your time there. I’m sad to report it’ll be over in a blink of the eye. And when you get old like me, you just might miss it.
I am a 1981 graduate of Hufford Junior High School, where I first learned to diagram a sentence, bake a cake, operate a jig saw, draft designs for a building, give a speech, solve algebra equations, and square dance. A version of this essay will appear on 15 Sept 2013 as my regular op-ed column intheJoliet Herald-News.
Today in Joliet, while picking up a prescription after dropping my daughter off at school, I ran into a friend from my Jr. High days. Lori and I both worked at Plainfield Road Pharmacy back in the 1980s, when the late Don Reiter was the head pharmacist. It got us both thinking of the “old days” of working for Don at a quintessential neighborhood drugstore in the age when every part of town still had one. This article appeared as an op-ed in the Joliet Herald-News in July 2009.
Donald Reiter, my former boss, seemingly knew everyone in town. A Joliet native and longtime pharmacist who co-founded Joliet Prescriptions Shops, Don worked up until the last two weeks of his life and had a personality to match his boundless energy. Tough, funny, demanding, and fair, he was a good man to work for.
Back in the early 1960s, he hired my father fresh out of pharmacy school, and with several others they formed a business partnership that would last decades. When I was in high school, Don employed me at Plainfield Road Pharmacy stocking shelves, running the register, making deliveries, even pulling weeds around the building. It was a job in which you had to do pretty much everything (except fill the actual prescriptions), and do it right quick.
One Sunday morning during my senior year, I was scheduled to open the store. It was my duty on Sundays to arrive early to stuff newspapers with the inserts so they’d be ready for our crack-of-dawn regulars. But that day, I inexplicably overslept.
Around 8:15am, my mother received a terse phone call from Don, who asked her “where Michael was” in saltier language than I can reproduce here. Instantly alert and nerves jangling, I tore down Dawes Avenue on my bike to the store, where I found all the newspapers neatly stacked inside. Don had done my job, of course, and as I slunk back to the pharmacy counter to apologize, he fixed me with a unsmiling gaze.
“Nice of you to make it,” he said sarcastically. He didn’t lecture me, though, probably because he realized I was already thoroughly humiliated.
Later that week while working on a college scholarship application, I discovered ruefully that it required a recommendation from my current employer (Don, of course). On my next scheduled day it took me a couple of hours to screw up the courage to approach him. Without a word, he took the form I proffered, and I hastily resumed my menial labors.
That evening as we closed up, Don muttered, “Oh, got something for you here,” and slipped me a letter. Later than night, I read it: full of praise, it was an eloquent one-page masterpiece on pharmacy letterhead banged out on his old typewriter. He’d done it on the spot, in between filling prescriptions, while I had toiled uneasily wondering about my fate.
Yes, I got the scholarship — though in retrospect that seems trivial. What I remember now is that letter, and what it said about the man who wrote it.
The great poet and critic T. S. Eliot once wrote “April is the cruelest month.” I’m unsure what he had in mind exactly. But it quite possibly could have been an elementary school science fair.
As a professional educator, former biology major, and avowed science geek, I admit the following with considerable guilt and associated feelings of hypocrisy: I am so, so glad that my daughter’s science fair project is done.
Jr. Scientist Lily gathers survey information from a human subject for her study, “Are you Left- or Right-Handed?”
Moreover, I fervently hope that no other take-home project of similar magnitude is on the horizon for either of our kids the remainder of the school year. Because if there is, either my wife or I — or possibly even both of us — surely will perish from educational anxiety and physical exhaustion.
(Yes, I’m sure there are many parents out there who cook delicious and healthy meals five nights a week, maintain their homes in a clean and well-decorated state, get to sleep by 10pm each night, and have diligent children who complete their science fair projects during daylight hours on a single weekend. I’m also certain that I truly despise such people.)
Displaying the poster at Eisenhower Academy
These science fair undertakings aren’t for academic wimps. At Eisenhower Academy here in Joliet, each kid must research a topic, write a formal paper, design an experiment, assemble materials for their procedure, collect and analyze data, and present their results on a colorful three-panel poster complete with typed text, pictures, data tables, graphs, and a bibliography. Oh, yes — and give an oral report, too.
That’s a lot of work for ten-year-olds, most of whom would rather be climbing a tree or yelling loudly during their precious after-school time, instead of toiling in the service of science.
We adults are in on the fun, too, for there is no way most kids can pull off such an involved and complex research project on their own. Consequently, parental help is guided and encouraged by Eisenhower’s teachers, who helpfully provide research guides, assignment checklists, grading rubrics, sample data graphs — even a required parent-student orientation session two months before the final project is due.
Testing the eye for “sidedness” in a human subject (Youth Category)
This means that parents have to navigate the tricky line between not providing enough help and doing too much of the project ourselves. Somewhere between these two extremes is a demilitarized zone of Appropriate Parental Assistance — and trying to stay in that zone without going crazy may well be one of the key science fair learning outcomes for each family.
So am I sorry that my older daughter had to do a science project this year here in Joliet’s District 86?
Hmm. No, I guess I’m not, when you really get down to it. Despite all the work involved and all the stress it can create, the project is a good thing on the whole.
Which ear does a subject cup when listening to low sounds?
I know this because of what my daughter said to me over breakfast the day before her poster was due. We had been working late the night before, importing our data tables and graphs from an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document for final printing (yes, fifth graders do such things these days), and as she ate her food before catching the bus, I asked her if she felt the science fair project was worthwhile.
“Oh, sure!” she enthused, between giant mouthfuls of noisy cereal. “My topic is awesome. And we learn how to design an experiment, and collect data, and make cool graphs. You know, Dad, the jobs of the future will be STEM-related, so the more science we get early on, the better.”
My jaw fell open and I spilled coffee on my shoe. She’s invoking STEM education and career development in breakfast conversation now? (That’s Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math for those unfamiliar with the acronym.)
“Besides,” she continued after noticing my stunned silence, “doing the experiment is super fun!” (Munch, munch, munch.) “Hey, these Atomic Crunchers are good. Can we get a bigger box next week?”
After that job you did on your science fair project, kid? You bet.
This is an expanded version of my monthly op-ed column for the Joliet Herald-News that will appear later this month.
Today’s the last day of winter here in 2013. Not a bad opportunity to go outside and look around, if I can carve out some time in between helping the kids with homework after school, running errands, grading papers, and making dinner. But it’s worth trying!
Here’s a short essay, my second contribution to the City Creatures blog project, that riffs on the value of kids, urban nature, and everyday encounters with the wild in our yards, alleys, and neighborhoods. I like the ending the best, for it features a poem by my 5th-grade daughter, Lily.
When we entered Azteca de Oro banquet and dance hall, though, I sensed instantly that it would be a memorable evening. Friendly greeters directed us to a comfortable table right next to the dance floor, which thrilled my two girls. A boisterous Mariachi band was in full voice from the stage at one end of the hall, while at the other end happy folks mingled and laughed at a well-stocked bar.
And the food! Long buffet tables full of stewed chicken, sautéed beef and vegetables, rice, refried beans, tortillas, salads, and sweet treats beckoned, and I’ll admit we weren’t shy about asking for seconds.
But the best part of the evening was the music and dancing, of which there was a glorious abundance. Musical acts of all stripes and colors entertained the swelling crowd, including the inspiring gospel of the Mt. Zion Tabernacle Choir, the witty folk/pop/rock stylings of singer-guitarist Dan Droogan, and the hot salsa of the Sangre Latina dance band.
This joyous music from musicians black, white, and brown filled the hall as dozens of children took to the dance floor to run, skip, chase each other, play hide and seek, and make new friends. Soon the hall’s lights came on in their full resplendence, and the adults joined the kids in what became one of the most festive scenes I’ve witnessed in a long time.
The shuttered Joliet Correctional Center, July 2011. State Sen. A.J. Wilhelmi led a tour to revive interest in the facility (Photo: Matthew Grotto, Chicago Sun-Times)
But the spoken word, both Spanish and English, was part of the program, too. Local politicians, including Will County Board members Reed Bible of Plainfield and Denise Winfrey of Joliet, and community organizers took the stage to decry the prospect of an immigrant prison here in Joliet. As I contemplated their message of critique and concern, I reflected on the irony of our location. Just a stone’s throw from us on Collins Street was Illinois’ ultimate penal icon: the Old Joliet Prison, decommissioned and deteriorating since 2002.
Yes, Joliet might someday make some money from its undeniably long prison legacy, though that civic identity has always been problematic for us. But not, I hope, through the construction of a for-profit immigrant “detention center” that is dedicated to the pocketbooks of its potential owners (in this case, Corrections Corporation of America) rather than the welfare of its detainees — most of whom will be our Hispanic brothers and sisters.
No, folks — we don’t need another prison here. Certainly not one focused on pieces of silver rather than social justice. Joliet’s ongoing flirtation with such a prospect should be closely monitored and vociferously protested by all people of conscience.
A shorter version of this article on Sunday, 18 march 2013. Also see this 20 March 2013 op-ed piece, “Make Joliet a City of Jobs, Not Jails,” by Mark Meinster of Warehouse Workers of America.
Without Caterpillar Corporation, I probably wouldn’t exist.
Once upon a time, a Kansas farm boy (my grandfather) moved to central Illinois with some of his brothers to find work. He eventually caught on at Caterpillar in Peoria, where he became a union machinist — what he always called a “tool and die man.” He worked hard, got married, and started a family. Then around 1951, he was transferred to the brand-new Joliet hydraulics plant and moved here with his wife and two kids.
One of those children was my mother, then nine years old, who years later met and married my father — and just a few years afterward, I arrived on the scene. Hence my very existence depended upon, among others things, Grandpa getting that job at Cat.
I relate this family anecdote because when it comes to grappling with the meaning and significance of the current union strike at the Caterpillar plant in Joliet, now well into its fourth excruciating month, history matters. Personal connections matter.
Cat workers on the picket line (photo: Fox Valley Labor News)
In a working class town like this, where people from all walks of life have deep and sometimes tangled histories with the Joliet’s industrial past, labor disputes resonate. They’re not just abstract stories in the news about someone else somewhere else. They’re about us: our aspirations, our values, our prejudices, our sense of community.
As an Illinois citizen, I have a vested interest in Caterpillar remaining strong and vibrant. Its very identity is built from equal parts technological innovation, engineering expertise, and good old-fashioned hard work. Cat’s products and the myriad of jobs the company provides are important to Illinois’ economic vitality.
But as the grandson of a tool and die man, I also feel solidarity with the hundreds of striking machinists out on Route 6. In their rejection of Cat management’s offers of a new long-term work contract, Local 851 union members hardly are asking for the moon. What they’re putting themselves on the line for, rather, is the preservation of good blue-collar jobs within America’s embattled middle class.
Caterpillar management’s latest offer to the workers (up for a vote today) would freeze wages, double health care expenses, and cut into pension benefits. One shouldn’t forget that Cat has had a longstanding multi-tier pay schedule in place for union machinists, with those hired after May 2nd, 2005, getting significantly lower wages than older “Tier 1” workers. So-called “supplemental” machinists get paid even less than the Tier 2 folks. See a pattern?
Meanwhile, Caterpillar achieved record sales, revenues, and profits in 2011 — and its second quarter profits in 2012 are the highest in company history. Yet with labor contract talks at fits and starts, Cat is playing hardball by advertising for and hiring replacement workers, thereby taking advantage of high local unemployment conditions in which any job seems like a good job.
The Caterpillar labor dispute is thus a microcosm of the growing cultural conflict between the exaltation of corporate greed and self-interest (the market rules best) and the long-term viability of America’s working class (the people matter most).
Most folks agree that our country needs good manufacturing jobs with decent wages and benefits, that companies should play fair, and that employees should work hard. But how do we put those common values into practice? We’ll soon find out here in Joliet.*
* On Friday, just a few hours after this article appeared in the 17 August 2012 edition of the Joliet Herald-News, the striking machinists’ union voted to approve Caterpillar’s most recent contract offer, as reported here in the Chicago Tribune and other sources. Details about the vote totals were not released, but apparently it was close. Early analysis indicates that the union conceded on several key issues, including the doubling of health care premiums, the elimination of pensions, and a reduction in seniority rights.
This summer my family and I took our annual vacation to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where we camp out at the Bryson family cabin — a fairly humble one-room cottage in Hiawatha National Forest on the shores of little Crooked Lake (a lovely place to canoe and observe wildlife, among other woodsy pursuits). There’s no bathroom or hot water: just a hand pump in the cabin and an outhouse twenty yards out into the woods. The nearest little town of any note is about 12 miles up the road. Still, with a roof over our heads and electricity in the cabin, staying there feels rather more deluxe than, say, camping out in a tent.
After a week or so in the UP, we drove back roads through Wisconsin to Baraboo, where we spent a few days exploring the countryside and doing fun stuff with the kids. The Baraboo area is home to many delightful natural areas and sites of interest, including the much visited Devil’s Lake State Park; the beautiful though overly commercialized Wisconsin Dells; and the International Crane Foundation, a remarkable wildlife conservation facility. After our visit to the Crane Foundation north of Baraboo, we drove one of Wisconsin’s beautiful “rustic roads” that parallels a levee along the south bank of the Wisconsin River, and pulled off the road once we came to an unmarked turnoff in the middle of the woods.
Here I took a few minutes to hike a sandy road into a clearing not quite visible from the road. This is the site of “The Shack” — Aldo Leopold’s weekend retreat on the farm he purchased in the early 1930s as a family getaway and place where he could put into practice the conservation principles and restoration techniques he and others were developing in the early to mid-20th century.
Once a chicken coop that Leopold converted into a family cabin, the shack is a tiny structure by today’s standards. I realized as a walked around it, dwelling in its quiet presence, that it was significantly smaller than the 20×24-foot cabin we use in the UP — by comparison, our summer home is a roomy palace. Yet this humble shack looms large in American conservation and literary history, given its inspiration for Leopold’s classic 1949 work of environmental literature, A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There. Though I spent a mere twenty minutes or so at the site — listening to the wind filtering through the tree canopy, and wondering about the current of the Wisconsin River, flowing just to the north of the Leopold farmstead — it was impossible not to feel the power of this particular place. I left reluctantly.
As we drove east on Levee Road, we pulled off again to scale the grassy levee, which was topped by a profusion of wildflowers — and enjoyed a commanding view of the Wisconsin River, here a wide and fast-flowing stream with many sandbars and heavily-wooded shorelines. Further on up the road, my wife spotted a family of wild turkeys, which scuttled up over the levee at the noise of our passing. We stopped to take a look at them, and watched mesmerized as the male set ran off first in one direction, toward the river, while the female led her young away at a different angle, toward a copse of trees. An exciting and special moment, one I was glad to have on the heels of finally seeing Leopold’s cabin after many years of simply reading about it.
