marketing students take the "Onramp to Adventure"

Students in Bill Machanic's Marketing Workshop are getting a headstart applying their business knowledge to the "real world." They've developed their own marketing agency, Enginuity Marketing, and are doing things all the professionals do to land a campaign.

Seventeen classmates-turned-co-workers are now spending hours each week developing their marketing pitch and planning to put it into action as they set to their task of repositioning the target market of the Ford Focus from Generation X to Generation Y: the college student.

Enginuity is participating in the Ford Focus College Marketing Program, a competition sponsored by local Ford dealers and EdVenture Partners. EdVenture Partners is an educational company that sponsors hands-on learning experiences, such as this program, that provides the opportunity for students to build their own marketing agency.

The Whittemore School of Business and Economics Marketing Department was contacted by EdVenture to participate in the program, and the students were given a $2,500 budget to manage and use for their marketing plan.

-Meghan Carey

residents give Gables construction mixed reviews

The expansion of The Gables apartment complex finally started last week, beginning with the temporary displacement of 116 parking spots for Gables residents due to construction. While some students are excited about the expansion of The Gables community, many others are upset with the changes that go along with it.

Over the next 18 months, two new buildings will be added to The Gables community, providing residency for up to 400 students with an opening scheduled just in time for the fall 2006 semester. One of the new buildings, the soon-to-be Gables North, will occupy a section of the current Gables parking lot, which means that 116 residents with Gables parking permits are relocated to Section 4 of Lot A from March 31 until the end of the semester. Commuters are no longer able to park in Section 4 of Lot A, and visitors are no longer able to park in the visitor's section of the Gables parking lot. A new parking lot located behind the current Gables parking lot will be built and ready for use starting September 2005, which will add at least 200 additional parking spots to the existing lot. The Campus Connector bus stop at the Gables has also moved.

While students agree that the overall changes will be beneficial, many are having mixed feelings about the upcoming hassles of parking shortages and loud construction work.

Jacqui Bailey, a sophomore and Gables resident, is glad that Gables residents are getting more parking, but is wondering why UNH hasn't made more parking available to commuters. "It's not fair for the commuters to have to go around where Gables residents will now be parking and for the Gables residents to have to go around the construction," Bailey said.

Two UNH commuter students, Joshua Denn, a senior at Thompson School, and Jenna Barbary, a sophomore, said that the commuter lots have been noticeably more crowded since the construction began last week. "Lot A is now full by 9 a.m.," Barbary said.

Some students think that they weren't warned early enough of the construction and the lack of parking.

Mann said that some of her friends didn't know about the construction until the week it began, and many had no idea that they had to move their cars out of certain spots until the night before the construction began. "No one seemed to really know what was going on," Mann said.

Meghan Walkama, a graduate student and Gables resident, said that e-mails were sent out to people who had Gables parking permits warning them a few days in advance of the new parking situation. She went on to say that out of four people she knows with Gables parking permits, only two of them actually received the e-mail.

A project-specific Web site is set up at http://facilities-dc.sr.unh.edu/.

-Kelsey Brimmer

who knew terrorism could fulfill a gen-ed?

Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics Bruce Lindsay has taught at UNH for 29 years. This year, he decided to create a course that would analyze the effects of natural and non-natural disasters and terrorism in the modern world.

"So many of these issues are dominating the media today," Lindsay said. "I wanted to look at these events from an academic point of view."

Lindsay's class analyzes "real world catastrophes." He mentions the recent tsunami in Southeast Asia as an example. "We analyze how aid is distributed to those countries affected, and the effectiveness of the distribution." Students also learn to acknowledge the influential powers of the media in describing major catastrophic events and terrorist acts and how unreliable published data on such events can be.

The current "Catastrophe and Terrorism" class is made up of close to 30 students, representing a wide array of academic disciplines.

-Laura Plummer

Officials note increasing heroin use in the Granite State

Although heroin use is on the increase around the globe, according to the UNH Police Department, heroin use does not appear to be an epidemic at UNH, but they suspect its use. Paul Dean, deputy chief of the UNH Police Department, said that the "UNH Police Department has not arrested anyone for possession of heroin as of yet. We know that Portsmouth and Dover have, and we suspect it is here as well."

Junior Zach Zoulias said at a party in a fraternity house he overheard people talking about their roommate "shooting up" in their room. Zoulias, an avid partygoer said, "other than that one time, I have not experienced anything to do with heroin. It's not very common." Many other students have said they have never encountered heroin on campus and do not believe there is a strong presence.

-Adam L'Italien

All the news from The New Hampshire, the student-run newspaper of the University of New Hampshire, can be found at www.tnhonline.com.