NC State’s Summer Adventures – Staff
Members of the NC State community spent the summer making an impact on campus and around the world. From teaching and conducting research to engaging in acts of service and even a little relaxation, staff made the most of the season. Here are a few of their stories.
Dean’s Office Staff
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Members of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences dean’s office staff spent a day of their summer building a Habitat for Humanity home. The photo shows Dean Jeff Braden and Associate Dean Deanna Dannels up on the roof of the house. We hammered, painted, swept, laughed, sweated and represented the Pack.
Jeff Blessinger
Lean Six Sigma Program Manager
College of Textiles, Zeis Textiles Extension Education for Economic Development
Latoya Giles
Lean Six Sigma Program Coordinator
College of Textiles, Zeis Textiles Extension Education for Economic Development
This summer my program coordinator, Latoya Giles and I held the first ever Lean Six Sigma Junior Green Belt Academy. The new program introduces high school students and an adult mentor to Lean Six Sigma, problem-solving and project management. Not only do the students have to complete online training and one week of in-person classroom training. They must also complete an improvement project at their school.
While participating in the camp the students were able to tour various labs within the College of Textiles and were exposed to some campus life. Our goal is to provide as many high school students with a skill set that distinguishes them from their peers. The first group of student teams will present the results of their projects this October. The next academy will be held in July 2019.
Mary Hauser
Registrar and Associate Director
Gregg Museum of Art & Design
This summer was full with three great trips. The first was a week in El Carrizo, Honduras, chaperoning eight college students through a local non-profit, Sharefish, and my church, FBC Raleigh. We worked with the community to build a playground for the children who attend a preschool program at the community center. It was a pleasure to visit this community again, especially to see the vibrant center we helped lay the foundation for four years ago.
The following month, I spanned the state visiting the mountains and the coast. At the Presbyterian Association of Musician’s Worship and Music week at Montreat (outside of Black Mountains), North Carolina, I rang handbells two hours each day, sang with a choir of more than 400, walked the beautiful campus each day, and learned how to tell stories through drumming. This was my fourth time attending the conference, and I always find it both exhausting and invigorating.
My summer travels concluded with a week at Frisco on Hatteras Island with family. We spent endless hours on the beach floating in the clear water and building sandcastles, observed wildlife from deer in the dunes to flounder and zebrafish in the surf, and completed seven puzzles in seven days! It was a relaxing escape from the everyday.
Neal Hutcheson
Video Producer
Department of English, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
This summer I traveled to the Teotihuacán Valley of Mexico to help produce an ethnographic documentary film. The project is a collaboration with Penn State supported by the Language and Life Project at NC State, and was conceived by anthropologist Kirk French. My role was to assist French and producer Elijah Jude in re-making a landmark film made there in 1961 called ‘Land and Water,’ in order to highlight the dramatic environmental and social changes in the valley over the past sixty years.
The original film was also re-mastered, translated into Spanish and re-narrated in order to do a series of public screenings in pueblos around the valley. The people there had never had an opportunity to view the film and were able to see how their valley looked nearly sixty years ago. Many of them recognized the campesinos in the original film, or were even related to them in some cases. I also began research there on Nahuatl, the Aztec language, for a potential world languages documentary series from the Language and Life Project at NC State.
Rachel Kasten
University Program Associate
Center for Geospatial Analytics, College of Natural Resources
I spent my summer as a theatre producer! As part of the Women’s Theatre Festival, I led the creative team of These Shining Lives, about the radium dial painters of the 1920s. I did a deep dive into researching this true story, speaking with children and grandchildren of those involved in the court case, recreating fake versions of real radium products, and doing a press tour with Kate Moore, author of The Radium Girls. This was my first time producing a show of this scale, and it was a critical and financial success!
Andrew Matthews
Senior Web Developer
University Communications
This summer, I traveled with the band I’m in — Nikol — to play two music festivals. The first was the INKcarceration festival in Mansfield, Ohio. The tattoo and music festival was held at the Historic Ohio State Reformatory, where The Shawshank Redemption was filmed. After playing on Saturday, we got a guided tour of the prison and saw many familiar spots from the movie. During setup, we met a couple of the members of Living Colour, best remembered for their 1988 single “Cult of Personality.”
The second music festival was the Vans Warped Tour in Charlotte at the end of July. The Warped Tour is a national traveling rock show that has been touring annually each summer since 1995. With this being the last run of the tour, we were especially excited to be able to play. We were lucky to get our set in before a summer downpour that had everybody scrambling for shelter. I’ve been playing electric guitar in Nikol since January of this year. For faculty and staff who have ever thought of being in a band, I would highly recommend getting involved in one to start making connections. You’ll be surprised at what opportunities present themselves.
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Janice Sitzes
Associate Director of Marketing
Continuing and Professional Education, McKimmon Center for Extension and Continuing Education
During the last week of July, I rode my bicycle across the state of Iowa in RAGBRAI XLVI. RAGBRAI stands for Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. This was my tenth consecutive summer participating in this weeklong event that attracts over 10,000 cyclists. The route changes every year, but always rides west to east. You start by dipping your tires in the Missouri River at the start of the ride, and finish by dipping your tires in the Mississippi River one week later.
This year’s 432-mile route went from Onawa to Davenport, with overnights in Denison, Jefferson, Ames, Newton, Sigourney and Iowa City. The ride is a huge economic boost to the pass-through and overnight communities, as the cyclists purchase their food from local organizations. The funds they raise enable them to buy a jaws-of-life, put a new roof on their church, send an athletic team to an out-of-state competition, or purchase new band uniforms (among many other worthwhile causes).
Although a physically tiring vacation, this is one of the most enjoyable endeavors and something I look forward to all year long — from the moment I dip my tires at the end of the current ride. It is so rewarding meeting the other cyclists and the welcoming people of Iowa, and learning about the culture and history of the towns we spend time in. Two highlights from this year’s ride include meeting Lance Armstrong (who was riding) and doing a victory lap around the inside of Iowa State University’s Jack Trice Stadium. And, no, Iowa is NOT flat.
Nancy Whelchel
Director for Survey Research
Office of Institutional Research and Planning
This year I got a jump start on my summer “vacation,” joining my son Riley, his wife Jenny, and a few more 25-ish-year-old medical students for part of their 3,300 mile bicycle Ride For World Health trek across the country. While they hit the road in San Diego, California, I joined up with them in St. Louis, Missouri, to drive the sag wagon for 10 days, and then In Columbus, Ohio. I pulled on my padded shorts to bike with them to the finish line in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware — close to 500 miles of peddling in six days. While many people at NC State know that I regularly ride my bike (with fenders, two baskets, and a cup holder) to and from work and all over campus, this never-been-done-before adventure was a far outside my comfort zone. Biking between 80 and 115 miles a day for up to eight hours in the saddle, keeping up a very brisk pace (on my new road bike, sans baskets and fenders), and climbing a total of about 10,000 feet — all while spending the nights on church basement floors and living primarily on granola bars and pasta — did not meet my usual criteria for a vacation. Why then, would I ever do this?
Ride For World Health (R4WH) is a nonprofit organization started by fourth-year medical students at The Ohio State University College of Medicine in 2006. Their three-fold mission focuses on education through informing the American public about healthcare disparities; political advocacy through empowering the people they reach out to along the way to make tangible changes to their health and to become informed and active global citizens; and fundraising. With the goal of having each biker raise $1 per mile they ride, over the past 12 years R4WH has raised nearly $800,000 for various national and global health charities. This past year we were biking to raise money for the Pure Water Access Project, dedicated to ending clean water crises around the world, and the Greif Neonatal Survival Program, which works to improve neonatal survival in low-income regions of the world by educating community health care workers. I am honored to have been able to contribute to such efforts (although next time I might find something a little less exhausting and painful!). If you’re interesting in making a donation, it’s never too late!
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