RETHINKING RECHARGING

It’s not like Mike Carpanzano ’03 doesn’t have enough to do. He’s the father of a three-year-old son; owns a small residential construction business, Sherman Building Designs, in Sherman, Connecticut; and is finishing up an MBA at Western Connecticut State. But as Carpanzano and I spoke on the phone recently as he drove to a job site, our focus wasn’t on any of the above, but on an invention that he’s hoping to develop into a marketable product.

It’s called “nuplug” and is, essentially, an extension plug equipped with a clamp to attach it to furniture, making it more convenient to plug in a smart device and keep on working. Carpanzano, who came up with the idea while talking with friends, isn’t under any illusion that nuplug rivals the light bulb as an inventor’s breakthrough, but cites the reality that consumers like convenience and are often willing to pay for it. He mentions the Snuggie, familiar from TV ads, and asks what’s the real difference between a Snuggie and a blanket? 

He does have a point, and watching his video for a recently launched Kickstarter campaign, one does come to see how it would create a neater, safer  situation with all the smart devices, hungry for power, that we all use for hours each day.  In prototype form, Carpanzano’s invention has garnered several awards for innovation. Though he studied entrepreneurship at UVM, Carpanzano says, “I’ve never put something into the market and profited from it. It’s a steep, uphill and slippery slope, but this has gotten a little traction and momentum and I’ve been able to take it further.”

Just a few days into the Kickstarter effort, Carpanzano had built nearly five hundred backers and more than $16,000 toward his goal of $75,000 that will enable him to put the product into production. Asked to dream down the road and consider whether he’d prefer to be running a nuplug company someday or sell the idea and move on to his next notion, Carpanzano says his business model is built around an in-house operation producing nuplug. And he’d prefer to keep it that way. “A lot of my blood, sweat, and tears have gone into this,” he says.

Learn more about nuplug and the Kickstarter effort. 

A BRIEF WONDROUS TALK BY JUNOT DIAZ

Gentle and profane, provocative and hilarious, Junot Diaz was his Pulitzer-winning, MacArthur Genius self during a Monday afternoon reading/talk on campus. The author’s fans packed the Davis Center’s Livak Ballroom for the English Department’s Writer’s Workshop Series event; and Diaz packed his hour-long presentation with a short reading and a generous round of questions and answers.

Slight and bespectacled, Diaz comes across as the coolest nerd, maybe the kindliest badass, you’ve ever met. His rapport with the audience was easy and immediate. He thanked the members of the local community who showed up—“Really? It’s so nice out”—and joked with the students who admitted to being there for a class assignment. Working the room like a stand-up comic, Diaz asked who was from his two favorite places on Earth—New Jersey or the Caribbean—and followed up with exchanges about the virtues of Montclair or the Oranges or Red Bank and quick conversations in Spanish.

Before delivering his reading, Diaz forewarned the crowd to start thinking on their questions. “Q and A is where a university shows its quality,” Diaz said, let the laughter die down, and added, “Deans say crap like that.” Then he asked someone in the front row to borrow a copy of his latest novel, This is How You Lose Her—“I left mine in the car,” he said—and offered a short reading from the book. Slow, halting and deliberate, Diaz’s delivery impelled listeners to take in the words not so much as they were read, but as they were written.

As for that Q and A, the questions from students and others did the university and its deans proud. Read on for a sense of what Junot Diaz had to say yesterday. (For a truer sense, season where appropriate with F-words, MF-words, and sundry descriptors.)

On his writing process:

Diaz said he typically writes for three or four hours in the morning, followed by an equal amount of time spent reading the work of others. Then he does his job, teaching creative writing at MIT. Writing is a slow process for him, Diaz said, noting that his last book took him sixteen years to write. “It’s absolutely OK to be good at something you find difficult… I find being a writer endlessly difficult.” He said that one of his strengths as an artist is “a stubborn insistence on sticking around.”

On the differences in approach for short stories versus novels:

“The short story is an exercise in exclusion; the novel is an exercise in integration. The challenge of the short story is that it invites perfection and the challenge of a novel is that it can never be perfect.”

On advice to young writers:

“The biggest harm we’ve done to young artists is we’ve professionalized the arts,” Diaz said. He advised any undergrad writers in the audience not to spend their college years “worrying about being an artist. This is four years to learn everything you can. Don’t take creative writing classes; read everything you can.” He also counseled writers against going straight from their undergraduate degree to an MFA program, noting how many of his undergrads are “absolutely terrified” of the world and eager to stay in the academic environment. “Here’s my one tiny opinion that no one agrees with,” Diaz said. “The only reason art has survived and the only reason we need art is that artists bring us news of the world.” (My friend Laban nudges me and notes the William Carlos Williams reference. I look it up later: “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” Indeed.)

On his biggest regret:

Diaz copped to having many regrets, not really comprehending those who advised living without regret, but he quickly landed on his biggest one: not doing study abroad in college. “Guys, you’ve got to get out of this place.”

On twenty-first century distraction and writing serious fiction against the odds:

Diaz lamented the technology/media/societal barrage that is dwarfing the modern attention span. A writer such as Toni Morrison, he said, simply would not be able to have a career today. Yet he encouraged his audience to work that muscle that enables keeping your eyes on the pages of one book for four hours. “Let’s get together for four hours and never look at our phones. I believe in us,” Diaz said. “I still have a deep belief in the ability of nerds and people who love art to regenerate our civilization.”

FOUND LITERATURE

I find Jacques Paul Marton, Davis Center custodian, on his lunch break in the wide-open space of the building’s atrium. It’s a bustling campus crossroad lined with tables offering bake sales and plant sales; music plays as salsa dance club members show off their moves to recruit new students from the ranks walking past. Though JP, as he’s known to most, has a prime comfy chair and people-watching spot, he’s someplace entirely different—in the Caucasus Mountains of Russia, imagination immersed in a second-hand copy of Leo Tolstoy’s The Cossacks.

Marton, a sturdy guy wearing clear sport-shield glasses, is a lover of reading. More specifically, he’s a lover of books, the printed word. Better yet, a well-worn book with a few miles on it. But he doesn’t mind being interrupted from his Tolstoy. He’s thrilled, actually, to leave comrades Lukasha and Olenin, even the enchanting peasant girl Marishka, behind and jump up out of his chair to talk about another of his book-related passions—sharing them.

JP Marton talks with alumnus author Douglas Smith ’85 as he signs a copy of his latest work, “Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy,” for The Book Nook collection.

Marton, who joined the Davis Center staff in 2007, is the man behind “The Book Nook,” a quiet corner of Brennan’s Pub on the DC’s first floor. About three years ago a small set of shelves appeared near the pub’s stage. Seeing them empty day after day, Marton took it upon himself to start filling the lonely shelves up with books from his own home library. A lifelong reader, his interests trace through his own academic pursuits in sociology at The New School for Social Research decades ago. He vividly recalls walking into the used bookstores on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan—“it was like looking for treasure.”

The Book Nook concept is simple—leave a book or take one, no charge, no checkout, no due date, no need to even return it. For the most part, Marton has stocked the shelves with his books from home, Bailey/Howe Library giveaways, and the odd books that one invariably finds around college campuses as semesters end or faculty office libraries are thinned. Marton has posted a passage from Herman Melville’s White Jacket on top of one of the shelves: “…the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much.”

Standing in Brennan’s, JP Marton tells me about the volumes of Shakespeare he salvaged from the recycling bin. As he shows off the current Book Nook collection, there’s hardly a title or author that doesn’t grab his attention: Tolkien, W.B Yeats (“one of my favorites!”), Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Joyce Carol Oates (“her books fly off the shelf”), Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Mann, Yukio Mishima. He shows me a slim, red volume, a Bailey/Howe discard, the cover is worn to illegibility, but Marton has re-written the title and author in Sharpie: “The Educational Situation” by John Dewey.

Having that book by a UVM alumnus, arguably the most notable mind the university has produced, in the Nook means a lot to Marton. He says his library project is inspired by and all about students, faculty, staff, and alumni. As The Book Nook evolves, he’d love to see all of the above—particularly faculty and alumni—donate a book that has influenced them, or one they’ve written themselves, to the Book Nook, preferably inscribed with a note about what the book meant to them.

As we talk, Marton holds out a paperback collection of Emily Dickinson’s poems and waits for me to take it. “It’s all about this here,” he says, “to the younger generations on and on and on, passing knowledge not just monitor to monitor, but hand to hand.”

Books can be donated directly to the drop-off box at The Book Nook or mailed to The Book Nook, C/O Student Life, Dudley H. Davis Center, 310, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405

I DECLARED

Somewhere between “what do you want to be when you grow up?” and “what do you do for a living?” many of us come to grips with that core question of college life: “What’s you major?” While some have the good fortune to be zeroed in on a major and what lies beyond from the day they fill out a college application, many more are on a search through an overwhelming range of areas of study that, gulp, lead to the possibilities awaiting after graduation day. It’s the source of a fair amount of hand-wringing among first-year students and sophomores. 

Decisions, decisions. Yesterday, posters all over the Davis Center led the way to the ballroom where staff and faculty had set up a sort of “one stop shop” to help the undecided, the undeclared, and the just plain bewildered better find their academic paths. The event is one of those great ideas that requires plenty of cooperation across the university to make happen. That job fell to Dani Comey, head of programming for first-year students, who coordinated with Pam Gardner at Career Services, student services staff in deans offices throughout the university, and academic departments to create the inaugural event.

Erin Monahan, a transfer student who started her college years at the University of Delaware, sat at a table in the DC ballroom with her friend Dani Esenler. While Dani, a major in biology/pre-med, was trying to sort out options for minors and concentrations, Erin was taking on more fundamental questions. Currently undeclared, she was studying options in economics, international relations, community development. “I’m generally an indecisive person,” she admitted, but added that once she had that clear goal it would help her focus in on the work at hand. The major fair was all about helping students like her push that decision forward.

In the first twenty minutes of yesterday’s event, Gardner and colleagues already had a healthy line in front of the Career Services table. Gardner noted that they can help ease a typical roadblock in making that academic declaration—the daunting sense that choosing a major is choosing what a student is going to do with the rest of his/her life. While there’s some truth to that, every psychology major is not going to become a psychologist. “With every major there are a set of core competencies, it’s not purely the subject that you are studying,” she says. Gardner has set up a matching game in which students try to pair up examples of college majors and eventual careers from real-life UVM alumni. The paths and the way that majors have informed them are not always so simple.

I imagine there were some anxieties eased yesterday as students may have pinned on one of the “I Declared: Major Fair 2013″ buttons and headed down the stairs or even if they just left better informed about their options and still pondering college, department, major, minor, concentration, and, you know, life.

“This normalizes that search,” Gardner says. “Students can walk in here and see that they aren’t the only one.”

GOVERNOR DOUGLAS TALKS 3 R’S

Yesterday’s guest speaker for the Mark L. Rosen Lecture Series in political science didn’t have to travel far. Jim Douglas, Vermont’s former governor who is currently teaching at Middlebury College, his alma mater, just made the quick drive up Rt. 7. “GOP RIP?  How the Republican Party Can Connect with Mainstream America” was Douglas’s focus, a subject that drew a capacity crowd of students, faculty, and community members to the Livak Ballroom on the top floor of the Davis Center.

Professor Frank Bryan, who will retire at spring semester’s end, handled the honors of introducing Douglas. “Jim is the consummate politician,” Bryan said. “When we shook hands just now, he said, ‘Go easy.’” Bryan ticked off the many political offices Douglas held in his long career in Vermont politics, which started scarcely after his college graduation. Part of his success, Bryan offered, is “a profound example of how we value civility in Vermont.”

True to form, Douglas’s talk was a highly civil discourse, delivered with the careful enunciation of the radio man he once was, and lightened here and there with humor. The former governor gave his audience a fast-forward through a couple of centuries of United States and Vermont political history as parties and ideologies have shifted across time. The table set for the title of his talk, Douglas then described the current political weather for the Republican party, and, no surprise to anyone, the forecast isn’t sunny. “There are a lot of souls being searched,” he said.

Suggesting his recent role as a teacher may have something to do with the packaging of his message, Douglas described a potential plan of action for the GOP that would work from “the three R’s.” Telling the audience that all of the steps would be difficult to achieve, Douglas said they are essential to reinvigorating the party.

Respect: Within the Republican ranks, party members must come to respect a diversity of opinion.

Reach Out: Noting the lack of support from African-American and Hispanic voters and other demographic challenges, Douglas said, “We must embrace more Americans and encourage them to join our ranks.”

Relevant: “We need to be discussing jobs, economic issues and not focusing on social issues where people should be able to have diverse opinions.”

Also, speaking to the American public’s frustration with Congress, Douglas suggested two key reforms. First, the former governor said that how districts are drawn and redrawn, gerrymandering, needed to be addressed and made more equitable. Second, Douglas said that though he has long opposed the idea of term limits for senators and congressmen, he thought the time had come to end the advantages of incumbency and refresh a system that has too many legislators “breathing the stale air of the Capitol” for too long.

“When surveys show that the American people are more comfortable with a colonoscopy or head lice than they are with the U.S. Congress, it’s time we tried something different,” Douglas said, drawing a laugh from the crowd.

TWO FOR THE ROAD

Julian Levy is keenly aware he isn’t the first recent college grad to check the brakes and fluids on the nine-year-old family Toyota, then set off in search of America. Like so many before him, the idea of an extended road trip in that glimmering between school and “life as a contributing member of society” (his words) has long had a hold on Levy’s imagination.

But as he and road companion Nils Anderson, a recent grad of Minnesota’s Gustavus Adolphus College, set off this week in the red Matrix, nicknamed “The Raspberry,” their trip isn’t solely a footloose interlude. To push a road analogy, let’s call it a bridge with one stanchion in his UVM years and another grounded in the life he hopes to create in those contributing member of society decades on the other side.

True for many aspects of Levy’s life, the backstory of this journey is rooted in his love of being active and outdoors. The Essex, Vermont native spent his first three semesters of college at Temple University before coming to terms with just how far North Philadelphia was from the places he really wanted to be. Back in Vermont at his state university, enrolled in the parks, recreation, and tourism major in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, Levy quickly found his way to the UVM Outing Club and its Wilderness Instructor Leadership Development program.

His academic experience and co-curricular pursuits have both shaped Levy, he says. David Kaufman’s class on entrepreneurship has fit well with his independent nature, and the OC experience has continued to build the sense of confidence and self-reliance he’s found in National Outdoor Leadership experiences and a semester of study abroad based in Belem, Brazil at the mouth of the Amazon River. (Levy met his like-minded travel partner Anderson during that semester.)

“I’ve never been one who likes to follow a path,” Levy says. “Not only in a metaphorical sense, but also literally. If I’m walking through the woods, I just like to go off the trail. You see a lot more; you learn a lot more.”

A call to the Outing Club offices one day from Rail Riders, an outdoor clothing company, provided the initial spark that started to turn Levy and Anderson’s post-graduation ramble into something more purposeful. Rail Riders, which primarily makes clothing for sailing, was looking to reach a younger demographic for a new production line and sought to connect with UVM OC students to wear their clothes and spread the word via photos and video.

The idea percolated for a time until Levy landed on connecting it with his travels. Things moved rapidly from there. Rail Riders was on board with clothing and some financial support. Levy and Anderson branded their trip as “Coastal Connections” and got busy creating an itinerary, a Facebook page, a video promoting the project, a blog, essentially gearing up for an on-the-road internship in guerilla marketing and the brave newish world of social media promotion.

The loop they’ve mapped is an ambitious one—13,685 miles—essentially running the bases around the entire nation from Mt. Desert Island, Maine, to Key West to Los Angeles to Seattle and then some. Their plans include both bright lights and backpacking, but Levy stresses the trip is as much about the people they’ll meet as the things they’ll see.

Thinking broadly, he and Anderson are eager to earn a firsthand sense of the mindset and tenor of the nation, particularly among young people. Thinking professionally, Levy hopes to scope out places he might want to live, start to build a career network, and further define his goals. Thinking like a social media marketer, if some Facebook followers notice that he and Nils look styling in their Rail Riders gear… well, all good.

Though Julian Levy formally graduated in December, he plans to be back in Burlington by May 19 to robe up and walk at UVM commencement on the Green, several months and many miles away.

TALKING TEACHING

“If you’re looking at your lap and smiling, I know that you’re texting,” is a bit of advice that Jeremy Sibold shares with the students in his classes at the start of each semester. That pearl of wisdom got a good laugh from twenty-or-so gathered in UVM’s Center for Teaching and Learning yesterday to hear a panel discussion with Sibold and his fellow recipients of the 2012 Kroepsch-Maurice Award for Excellence in Teaching. Sibold, assistant professor in Rehab & Movement Science, was joined by faculty colleagues Dryver Huston, School of Engineering; Lisa Holmes, Political Science; and Angela Patten, English.

While teaching is about inspiration, sharing knowledge and a passion for learning, in reality it’s also about students who can’t understand why 85 out of 100 would be a B and not an A+ and those folks in the back row looking at their laps and smiling. As this circle of some of UVM’s top teachers got together yesterday to talk shop, the focus ranged from the lofty to the mundane.

A few nuggets from the notebook:

Angela Patten spoke to the challenge of making poetry relevant in a world of dwindling poetry readers—particularly in an introductory class with students from diverse majors. “How do I keep it relevant and interesting with out resorting to just playing the latest slam poetry?” One tactic: Grab students with the authentic, literal voice of great poetry. Patten packs her iPod, playlists including Dylan Thomas and other poets reading their work, to class.

Dryver Huston was the senior member of the bunch. Though not as old school as some of his retired engineering colleagues, whom he recalls would lock the door during class or toss students out for wearing hats, he did speak to more general issues of helping students with self-improvement beyond the subject matter at hand. Huston recalled lessons he once learned on study habits, “how to organize a three-ring notebook” and such. Huston regularly requires term papers and lets his students know that grammar matters, even in an engineering class. He wants his students to embrace the idea that “all the work you hand in is a reflection of yourself.”

Lisa Holmes spoke to setting clear expectations and a hard line early in the semester. She admitted that it took her a long time to realize that “it’s OK if not every student likes you. That is incredibly important. It’s hard to internalize, but really powerful.” Holmes’ sense of expectation carries over to individual students. If she notices that a student performs well on assignments and tests, but is timid about participating in class, she’ll shoot them an encouraging email to make their voice heard. Holmes favors that gentler approach to calling on them in class.

Sibold also talked to creating an environment in his classroom where it’s “safe to fail, safe to have a voice. I’m working to making them feel that we’re equal partners in the conversation.” He spoke about the importance of those moments when students fail, those moments when the important part of his response isn’t “you’re wrong” but what follows—”it’s because…” In teaching future physical therapists and athletic trainers, Sibold says he’d much prefer that students struggle in the lab than with their first real-world patient.