The Rice Thresher, Vol. 88, No. 9, Ed. 1 Friday, October 13, 2000 Page: 3 of 24
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THE RICE THRESHER OPINION FRIDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2000
Poster girl with no poster
Taking care of your 'breast' friends
I remember it was a rainy and
unseasonably cold day in April of
1992. The sky was steel gray and a
chill hung around my shoulders like
a mantle.
It was the day my aunt
told me she had breast
cancer.
Cancer—the word lin-
gered in my mind like
thick, dark smoke.
She was going to have a
mastectomy in two weeks,
because her illness had
gone undetected for so
long.
1 remember putting
my arms around her in
disbelief. She was a vegetarian, she
jogged daily, she never smoked. She
was full of life. And cancer meant
death. Or, so 1 thought then.
looking back now, almost nine
years later, I see how her battle with
the disease — beginning with sur-
gery, then treatment and now the
daily process of recovery — brought
out the best in those around her,
and, I like to think, in me too. Still, I
never believed 1 had a way to help
her and other women — and men —
fight the disease. That is until this
past Saturday.
'ITie weather was much the same:
chilly and raining with gusting
winds. With other Rice students and
over 20,000 others around me, 1
jogged shivering toward the start-
ing line. Together we were on a 5-
kilometer journey as part of the Susan
G. Komen BreastCancer Foundation's
Race for the Cure, a yearly road race
held in cities around the nation to
raise both awareness of and money
for research into breast cancer.
Lizzie
Taishoff
All around me was a sea of pink
shirts and visors worn by women who
were survivors. A startling number of
women in the crowd showed the vis-
ible ravages of radiation
and chemotherapy: bald
heads and withered fig-
ures. Yet they were liter-
ally moving forward, with a
determination and a force
that would rival a hurri-
cane.
Families ran together,
men ran alone — for ill or
departed sisters, mothers
and wives — in pink shirts
personalized with heart-
wrenching messages on
the backs. And some men ran as sur-
vivors themselves.
Seeing those men made me stop
and think.
So often breast cancer is seen as
only a women's disease. And for good
reason. By the year 2010, almost 1.8
million women and 12,(XX) men will be
diagnosed with breast cancer, accord-
ing to the Komen Foundation. While
the figures are staggeringly higher
for women, 12,(XX) diagnoses for men
is hardly an easy figure to ignore.
Breast cancer is a disease that
can and does affect every kind of
person, every race, every culture,
every ethnicity. The risk factors and
early detection methods and inter-
ventions should be known by every-
one, but sadly many women go for
years without mammograms be-
cause they are seen as painful and
annoying hassles. Men are not edu-
cated about their risk for the disease
either and are thus particularly likely
to go undiagnosed longer. Addition-
ally, minorities and lower-income
women and men often do not have,
within their communities, the re-
sources needed to provide adequate
early detection and educational in-
formation.
What I saw last Saturday as I
crossed the finish line, soaking wet
and triumphant, was a celebration
of life all around me in the faces of
the other runners and the bystand-
ers. Before me was an acknowledg-
ment that there is no shame in con-
fronting the reality of a disease that,
with early detection and treatment,
can be beaten.
We have resources on campus
from Health Services and the Health
Fducation Office to the Women's
Resource Center that can provide
information to get us started learn-
ing the truth about breast cancer.
While college-aged women and men
are not the highest risk group for
developing breast cancer, starting
routine exams early creates personal
body awareness and builds good
habits of self-care for the future.
My aunt isn't lower-income, a
minority, in a high risk group or
even genetically disposed to the ill-
ness. Rather, she is a middle-aged,
suburban teacher, wife and mother
who missed two mammograms. And
she is only one case. Her story could
be that of your mother, father, aunt,
uncle, sister, brother, grandparent
or friend. It could be yours or mine.
So educate yourself and take care
of your body no matter who you are or
how little you believe your risk to be.
Do it as a celebration of life —
your life.
Lizzie Taishoff is features editor and
a Wiess College senior.
Guest column
Registrar and financial aid eventually fix glitches
I just finished reading Joan
Shreffler's guest column in last
week's Thresher ("Rice experience
neglects transfer students," Sept.
29), and 1 loved it. 1 am not
a transfer student myself,
but the Registrar's Office
experiences she described
were similar to my own.
1 began the year with a
correct schedule (with
"You are registered"
printed on it in bold let-
ters) from the office.
When I went to the office
later to add and drop some
classes, I was informed
that 1 was not registered
at all because of a "billing hold." My
parents owed an extra $625 because
a scholarship payment had gone
awry, and while they were working
it out with the financial aid office, 1
couldn't officially register.
Solving this problem took over a
week and involved sitting around
for an hour waiting to be helped and
speaking to several people in the
Registrar's Office, financial aid of-
fice and Cashier's Office. My par-
ents talked to Director of Student
Financial Services Carl Buck at least
twice over the phone. By the time the
ordeal was halfway over, I was tally
pissed off.
Then I started thinking that
maybe 1 felt that way more because
of stress than anything else. Hie
semester had just started, and I have
to admit I kind of enjoyed the self-
righteous venting even though I knew
we'd eventually solve the problem.
1 realize now, though, that what
matters is for each student to be
registered in all the right classes by
the end of the semester for grades
and credits to be properly recorded.
Who cares if it's right from day one?
You can attend whatever classes you
want in the meantime. As long as
you keep copies of registration forms
and add/drop slips, the people in the
Registrar's Office will recognize that
the mistake was theirs and will not
charge you for fixing your schedule.
Besides, think about it — Rice
Jessica
Dunn
students' schedules to arrange, but
then, there isn't an army working in
the Registrar's Office and the finan-
cial aid office. There are so many
pieces of paper to keep
track of and so many stu-
dents to help that it has to
be a frustrating job at
times. Some students
change their entire sched-
ules at the beginning of
the semester. Also, I have
always appreciated the fact
that students get to sit
down and watch someone
enter their add/drop
changes into the computer
system. 'ITie alternative
would be to just drop off the slip and
wait for a week or two to find out if the
changes were made correctly.
Transfer and Advanced Place-
ment credit, of course, is another
issue altogether, and I completely
understand why Shreffler was so
frustrated. Here again, keeping acopy
of scores to be transferred is easy to
do and can prevent all kinds of hassles
later. I came to Rice with 43 hours of
AP credit, and, sure enough, there
were some mistakes the first time
they were entered. All I had to do to
get it fixed was present a copy of my
scores to the Registrar's Office.
My next comment even surprises
me: Hie financial aid office has actu-
ally impressed me on one or two occa-
sions. (Feel free to rip me apart on this
one if they've completely screwed you
over, but my interactions with them
have been pretty good.) I received a
total of seven or eight scholarships,
mostly very small ones, for my fresh-
man year. Even 1 had trouble remem-
bering the exact amount and duration
of each one, but the financial aid office
handled it just fine.
What happened this year,
though, was a truly pleasant sur-
prise. I have a National Merit Schol-
arship from Rice, and thanks to the
word "merit" in the name, my par-
ents and I completely forgot that the
amount of the scholarship is based
at least partially on need. Because
we did not receive other need-based
not to fill out the FAFSA last spring.
Earlier this September, Buck re-
quested a meeting with me to dis-
cuss this scholarship, which had
been reduced for the semester and
had caused a billing hold on my
account. Buck worked with my par-
ents to resolve the issue, and 1 ended
up receiving the full amount.
1 am now officially registered with
a correct schedule. This was the
kind of personal attention 1 hoped to
receive when 1 came to Rice. Sure,
everybody has had at least one irri-
tating registration or financial aid
experience, some worse than my
own, but try to give them a little
credit. Most of the time it's not a big
deal.
Jessica Dunn is a Sid Richardson
College sophomore.
Are they laughing with me or at me?
LPAP does not enrich the
lives of varsity athletes
I went to the Registrar's Office
the other day just to make sure
that I was actually going to gradu-
ate next semester. As I ran my
finger down the re-
quirement column on
the audit, everything
appeared to be in or-
der. Then I got to the
bottom. The LPAP sec-
tion had a big "FAIL"
next to it.
So, next semester,
I get to take two Life-
time Physical Activity
Program courses.
1 guess 1 should
have fulfilled these
physical education requirements
earlier, but 1 already felt like I
was getting enough exercise ev-
eryday as a varsity track and cross
country runner.
True, I'm not on the team this
year, so LPAP will be a good way
for me to stay in shape. But, there
are still a lot of people at Rice who
are varsity athletes. They also
will have to take two semesters
of LPAP at some point during
their Rice academic careers.
And that is a little ridiculous.
Michael
Nalepa
Can distance
runners truly
supplement
their training with
'Walk, Jog, Run?
If you are a basketball player,
why should you have to play
pickup games in gym class that
take away energy that you could
be spending in practice or a
game? Can distance runners truly
supplement their training with
"Walk, Jog, Run"? And what fun
would it really be to play a tennis
match with someone who won a
major intercollegiate tournament
the weekend before?
It would also be pretty sad to
have a Rice athlete sidelined from
an LPAP-related injury.
Most varsity teams at Rice
have large portions of the day
blocked out for practice, and this
obviously creates class conflicts
for athletes. LPAP just adds to
this.
It's true that everv student has
to find a way to fit in LPAP, but
this becomes harder when you
are already cramming your
classes into the mornings and
early afternoon so that
you can spend the rest
of the day on the field.
You could argue
that the same time
crunch exists for stu-
dents with labs, but
labs actually give you
credit and count to-
ward your major.
LPAP is worth a
whopping zero credit
hours.
Speaking of credit,
Advanced Placement tests and
International Baccalaureate di-
plomas allow students to receive
credit for Rice introductory
courses. If students can place out
of Chemistry 121, why can't var-
sity athletes place out of physical
education?
A good policy change might
be to have a semester as a varsity
athlete count as fulfilling a se-
mester of the LPAP requirement.
Varsity athletes account for
about 10 percent of the under-
graduate student body. Having
this many fewer students enrolled
in LPAP wouldn't really bring
about any big changes in the pro-
gram, since it would basically
mean that there would be about
two fewer students in each class
of 20.
Removing this requirement
for athletes would allow them to
take an extra class or two toward
their major or perhaps even for
enjoyment. They might have an
extra two hours a week to study,
or added free time to spend a
little extra time in their colleges
or with their friends.
Don't get me wrong, I agree
with LPAP in principle. Exercise
is a great stress reliever, not to
mention the fact that it helps you
look better, feel better and not
die as soon. LPAP encourages
students to pursue healthy hab-
its and to live a life that includes
exercise and good nutrition.
These are all good things.
But varsity athletes are al-
ready exercising a great deal.
Most of them train every day, all
year round.
Having them take LPAP is just
preaching to the choir.
Michael Nalepa is opinion editor
and a Lovett College senior.
may be a small university with fewer aid last year, my parents decided
the Rice Thresher
Brian Stoler
Editor in Chief .
Jos£ Luis Cubria, Mariel Tam
Managing Editors
NEWS
Elizabeth Jardina, Editor
Olivia Allison. Asst. Editor
I.iora Danan, Asst. Editor
Erin Mann, Page Designer
OPINION
Michael Nalepa. Editor
SPORTS
Chris (.arson, Editor
Jason Gershman, Aw/ Editor
FEATURES
Lizzie Taishoff. Editor
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Robert Reichle, Editor
Tim Crippen, Asst. Editor
PHOTOGRAPHY
Rob (iaddi, Editor
Megan Smith, Ass( Editor
Ajeet Pai
Business Manager
LIFESTYLES
Corey E. Devine, Editor
CALENDAR
Josh Taylor, Editor
BACKPAGE
Ben Johnson, Editor
Mark Ixwis, Editor
Sarah Pitre, Editor
COPY
I-eslie Liu, Editor
Mary Messiek, Asst Editor
David Chien, Illustrator
1 .ynlee Tanner, Ads Manager
Shannon Scott, Asst. Business Manager
Robert Ix>e, Classified Ads Manager
Carly Halvorson, Office Manager
Sol Villarreal, Distribution Manager
Adam Lazowska, Online Editor
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Stoler, Brian. The Rice Thresher, Vol. 88, No. 9, Ed. 1 Friday, October 13, 2000, newspaper, October 13, 2000; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth443149/m1/3/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.