Students Points of Pride

• Biology major Amy Moorhouse was among 282 students from across the nation selected to receive a $7,500 award from the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. She was selected from a field of 1,123 mathematics, science and engineering scholars, and is the ninth MSUM student in the past 11 years to receive a Goldwater Scholarship.


• The team of Shouvik Bhattacharya, Mathematics and Physics; and Murshid Saqlain and Pragalv Karki, both Physics; received honorable mention in the 2012 Mathematical Contest in Modeling organized by COMAP. The contest engaged 3,697 teams from 16 countries: Canada, China, Finland, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Mexico, Malaysia, Palestine, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, and U.S.


• Construction Management students placed second at the 2012 Construction Management Quiz Bowl held at the Dunwoody College of Technology in Minneapolis.The team of Darren Dell, Danny Hawkins, Dan Watkins and Myles Anderson competed against seven teams from the University of Minnesota, North Hennepin Community College, MSU Mankato and University of Wisconsin-Stout.


• BFA student Amanda Heidt is doing a summer internship at the Robert Blackburn Print Making Workshop, a renowned print studio in Manhattan that provides printmaking services to some of the most celebrated artists in the world.


• The graduating seniors in Construction Management at both MSUM and North Hennepin locations passed and exceeded the national average on the Associate Constructor exam, a national exam comparing them to students across the nation. The seniors scored 221 (MSUM campus) and 218 (North Hennepin), while the national average is 210.


• Andrew Dornbusch and Nick Berthelson were winners of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) poster competition during the 7th Annual Undergraduate Research in the Molecular Sciences (URMS) meeting for their poster, “Determining the effects RSK and ROCK phosphorylation sites have on the regulation of NHE1.”


• Campus News, MSUM’s student-produced television newscast, won a Student Television Award for Excellence in the newscast category at the National Academy of Arts and Sciences Upper Midwest Chapter awards gala. MSUM picked up more awards than any other school. 


• Biochemistry and Biotechnology undergraduates Andy McCoy, Justin Voog, Jennifer Taves-Patterson, Nicole Korpi-Steiner, and Tony Nguyen are published in the October 2011 Journal of Cellular Biochemistry. The article is titled, “a1 –Adrenergic receptor-induced cytoskeletal organization and cell motility in CCL39 fibroblasts requires phospholipase D.” 


• The team of Sam Sussman, Andrew Dahl and Dustin Ernst placed in the top 12% at the ACM North Central Collegiate Programming Contest. Two hundred-twenty teams from universities in Michigan to North Dakota and Kansas to Manitoba competed at 16 sites across the region. 


• Melinda Thompson, a senior in the baccalaureate nursing program, attended the National Gerontological Nursing Association (NGNA) Convention in Louisville, Ky., where she was one of two students in the country to receive the Student Leadership Award.


• Twenty-four students attended the 2012 Arrowhead Model United Nations Conference. Collectively, MSUM received more awards than any other university at the conference. 


• The team of Dustin Ernst, Steven Ruckdashel, and Samuel Sussman placed third out of 52 teams from a five-state area in a programming contest held during the Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium.


• Graduate student Sarah Dronen (Counseling and Student Affairs Program) was chosen as a scholarship semifinalist for the 2011 NBCC (National Board for Certified Counselors) Foundation Military Scholarship.


• 2012 Economics graduate Tanner McCarty will receive a renewable tuition waiver and assistantship valued at more than $40,000 to attend Purdue University to study natural resource economics this fall. Kegan Reiswig will receive a similar renewable assistantship for graduate study at the University of Illinois in natural resource economics. In the past three years, six economics majors have been offered major financial awards from Big Ten Universities, including the University of Minnesota School of Law.


• Finance major Nick Enger received one of only three competitive finance internships from State Farm Insurance Company’s regional office in Greeley, Colo. The ten-week internship will take place this summer


• Loren Houle, graduate student in school psychology, was named the 2012 North Dakota Chapter of ASPIRE TRIO Achiever.


• Biology undergraduates Justin Olson, Jenae Olson and Rachel Walsh have had their research findings receive final acceptance for publication by the North American Journal of Fisheries Management. Their paper is titled, “A Method to Train Groups of Predator-Naïve Fish to Recognize and Respond to Predators When Released into the Natural Environment.” 


• Jamee Larson, MFA student and Sigma Tau Delta president, received a $2,000 scholarship from Sigma Tau Delta, at the international level, at this year’s conference in New Orleans.


• Recent graduates Chris Franz and Logan Werlinger, both mass communication majors, have been accepted to graduate school at the School of Visual Communications Ohio University, Athens Ohio. They’ve each been offered a graduate assistantship scholarship worth about $18,000 for out-of-state students over the course of the three-semester program.


• Eight students representing Dragon Entertainment Group won the Outstanding Delegation Award at the 2012 National Association for Campus Activities Northern Plains Conference, where more than 900 students attended from Montana, Wyoming, Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and the Canadian Provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and western Ontario.


• Mass communications students and alumni from The Advocate, Campus News and Horizonlines.org received awards at the Society of Professional Journalists conference in Bloomington. The Advocate brought home 4 awards; Campus News-6 awards; and Horizonlines.org-3 awards. Horizonlines.org won first place in the student website category in the Northwest Broadcast News Association’s (NBNA) Eric Sevareid Awards. This is the second year in a row that Horizonlines has won first place in that competition. The NBNA region includes universities located in the states of Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Nebraska. Two members of The Advocate staff received awards at the 2012 Associated Collegiate Press Best of the Midwest conference in Minneapolis.


• MSUM students submitted advertising work for judging in 16 student categories of the AAF-ND Addy Awards. MSUM’s art and design and mass communications students took home awards in every category, ranging from editorial design to mixed media campaigns. Graphic design majors Katie Hamness and Amber Power were announced co-winners of the “Student Best of Show.”


• Campus News reporter Lane Zyvoloski was named a national finalist in the College Broadcasters Inc. National Student Production Contest.