Goodbye, strangers.

Well, faithful readers, my time at the UT Tyler Students Communications Center has come to an end. I can honestly say that this has been an amazing opportunity.  I have so much enjoyed interacting with the people in the office and also those who we speak to that are interested in the University of Texas at Tyler.  I also wanted to thank all of you that have shown support in comments or simply through your views of the blogs.  It really does mean a lot to the entire team when we responses from you all. I could write a book with what I have learned and experienced during my tenure here, but I will keep it short and sweet.

I started at this office approximately 1 year and 3 months ago and I am so happy that I found this particular position.  It has given me an opportunity to talk to people who I, ordnarily, would never even know about.  It has also made me think creatively as I wrote posts for you to view.

I would like to thank Amelia Harrel, our former boss, who put enough faith in me to give me my first real job. Her strength while at UT Tyler was an inspiration.  I also would like to thank our current manager Roger Sims, who has really made our transition from manager to manager as smooth as possible.  Between changing call programs to changing offices, Roger has been such an asset to our team, and we couldn't have done it without him.  Really, though.  We could not have been here without Roger because he is the one who assigns our call lists and stuff.

Don't worry about me, though.  I have brighter things ahead in my future.  I will be moving on to work at the Literacy Council of Tyler to help students obtain a GED and to assist those who speak English as a second language also get their GED.  This new job will help me tremendously with teaching in the future.

While I am sad to leave, I am also excited to start a new project and to help more people.  I have enjoyed my time here, but it is time to go.  If you would like to check out some pictures of my time here, check out Keerin's most recent blog post. Goodbye, strangers.

Back to School Laptop Shopping at UT Tyler

It now seems that technology rules everything that we do.  From communicating with friends to working on
documents for work and school, the use of a computer is now required for success.  Unfortunately, computers come in hundreds of brands, with thousands of potential differences in them, and sometimes you will not get what you pay for.  In fact, my 2 year old laptop recently shorted out on me and I was forced to purchase a new computer, as I have to have one for school and debate.  So, how do you know what to buy? Well, hopefully I can help make some suggestions!

Tuition rises, but cost of living falls at UT Tyler

As most college students understand, saving money is everything.  College expenses will eat up 90% or more of one’s typical monthly income.  Be sure to buy the cheapest of every item while shopping for groceries.  However, according to recent information published by the US Department of Education, college tuition may be rising at a mostly steady rate, but the cost of living is actually starting to decline.

How Carver Elects to Spend his Summers at UT Tyler

Finals of the TSDC
end of camp tournament

Summer is an exciting time for students.  School lets out, and all obligations are abandoned.  Most college
students take some time to get caught up on sleep or start getting caught up on TV shows and books that they have been putting off because of school work.  Me? I go and work at Debate Camps across East Texas. While the hours are often long and grueling, the reward is invaluable.

Celebrating the Fourth of July at UT Tyler

Today is July the second, which means that in two days fireworks will light the night sky during a national celebration of Independence Day.  Most people will host grand parties with plenty of food and obviously a lot of fireworks.  Do you have any plans? If not, then perhaps I can help. If you have already started planning your celebration, then maybe I can help you along the way!  If you are interested in throwing an amazing fourth of July celebration without paying an absurd price, then read on!

Representing UT Tyler at the NSDA National Debate Tournament

With the UT Tyler Debate team's season ending over three months ago, members of the team often find high schools that are looking for assistance with their tournaments or for consulting on how to improve their performance.  The members of the team will often volunteer their services to help those schools improve. Last week marked the end of the high school speech and debate season.  I had the pleasure of attending the week long tournament and judging many rounds of humurous, dramatic, and duo interpretation, and 12 debate
 rounds. It was a pleasure to watch so many excellent performances and
witness the future of speech and debate.

This was the where the finals rounds were held.
The auditorium held 4000 people!

Thousands of high school speakers and debaters converged on Kansas City, Kansas last Monday to begin their competition.  Students began competing at 8 AM on Monday morning, and some did not finish competing until late on Thursday or Friday evening. During the first two days, students competed in their main events: Humorous Interpretation, Dramatic Interpretation, Duo Interpretation, Original Oratory, Congressional Debate, Public Forum Debate, Lincoln Douglas Debate, and Policy Debate. Through 6 preliminary rounds of competition, the top 60

This is how elimination roudns were
announced.  If your "code" was on the
paper, then you had advanced to
the next round!

advanced to the next two elimination rounds.  After an additional 2 rounds of competition, the top 30 in each event were advanced, and so on until only 6 or 7 were left in each event. For debate events, competition continued until only 2 teams remained.

After a student was eliminated from their main event, they had the option to register for a supplemental and cancellation events.  These consisted of Storytelling, Expository Speaking, Prose Reading, Impromptu Speaking, Poetry Reading, Commentary Speaking, and Extemporaneous Debate. I had the pleasure of judging 2 rounds of Humorous Interpretation, 2 rounds of Duo Interpretation, and 4 rounds of Extemporaneous Debate.  It was awesome to see what students had been working on all year in preparation for this tournament.  The future is bright for the National Speech and Debate Association.

Beating the heat at UT Tyler

Summer is rapidly approaching us here at the University of Texas at Tyler.  The past couple of weeks have seen temperatures as high as 95 degree already! Some people love the warmth of summer, but I cannot stand the heat and humidity.  Rather than embrace the heat, I prefer to find other things to do things that will avoid the boiling temperatures.  If you are like me, keep reading to get some new ideas on what to do during the summer to have fun while still avoiding the heat!

The Best of Netflix at UT Tyler

It's that time of year here at UT Tyler where, for most of us, the stress of class obligations and assignments is on hiatus.  While most of us do have plans, there will be times where we are looking for something to do.  But have no fear, Netflix is always there to provide you a good break from reality with its thousands of shows available.  Not sure what to watch? No worries, I have compiled a list of my personal favorite shows on Netflix. 

Summertime at UT Tyler

We did it! This school year at UT Tyler has finally drawn to an end, and not a moment too soon.  So, now that you are finally not stressing about school, how are you going to spend your summer? Are you going to just sit back and watch the next three months fly by, or are you going to get out and be productive? If you are the considering the latter, then read on! 

UT Tyler Baseball Team Defeats Concordia 4-1

To finish off Patriot Days last week, the blogging team sent Dallas and I to a baseball game between our UT Tyler Patriots and Concordia University.  I was a lot of fun to get to see our team win against a great rival of the University.  The final score was 4-1.

How to not procrastinate at UT Tyler

The great Walt Disney once said that “the way to get started is to quit talking and start doing.”

Procrastination is something that every college student has to deal with. I know that it affects me every day.  For example, I would much rather watch Game of Thrones, play video games, read, swim, watch grass grow, and pretty much anything else than write my 20 page research paper that’s due in less than a week now.  Ironically, as I continue to put off my paper, I am writing this very blog about how to stop procrastinating. 

This is an extremely popular topic – one that both Dallas and Emmy wrote on.  However, that does that not mean that occasional reminders do not help.  Hopefully, with this post I can help bring to light some old and new ideas on how to stop putting things off and starting getting things done. Let's stop talking and start doing!

UT Tyler Debate Ranks Top 20 in Nation

From March 16th to the 18th, 3 teams from the University of Texas at Tyler competed among the top 58 Parliamentary Debate teams in the country at the 2014 National Parliamentary Tournament of Excellence. Dallas Flick and Carver Hodgkiss (UT Tyler HF), Stephen Hullum and Kaleb Drake (UT Tyler HD), and Sam Cook and Kaitlin Bull (UT Tyler BC) competed against the best of the best, ranking among the top 20 in the country.

Debunking Debate: UT Tyler Competes at the NPDA Championship Tournament

On Thursday, March 13th, the UT Tyler Parliamentary Debate Team traveled to Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, for our national tournaments: the National Parliamentary Tournament of Excellence, and the National Parliamentary Debate Association Championship Tournament.  The trip lasted 11 days, consisting of 6 days of competition over both tournaments. Carver will be writing about the NPTE later this week, and I will be writing about the NPDA Championship Tournament.

The NPDA is often called "The People's Tournament," primarily stemming from it's sheer entry size and the propensity for underdogs to go very far in elimination rounds. The tournament consisted of over 150 teams from 52 different schools. There were eight preliminary rounds, followed by six elimination rounds, consisting of teams that had at least a 5-3 record in their prelim rounds.

UT Tyler FH

UT Tyler had three teams competing in the NPDA this year: UT Tyler FH (Dallas Flick and Carver Hodgkiss), UT Tyler DH (Kaleb Drake and Steven Hullum), and UT Tyler BC (Caitlin Bull and Sam Cook). UT Tyler FH is a junior-sophomore team, DH is a freshman-freshman team, and BC is a sophomore-freshman team.

After a rigorous set of preliminary rounds for all three teams, FH finished 6-2 to take the 18th seed in elimination rounds, BC finished 5-3 to take the 29th seed, and DH finished 5-3 to take the 33rd seed. It was a fantastic accomplishment to have all three teams break to elimination rounds, given the massive amount of competition at the tournament, as well as the relatively young nature of the teams that were competing for UT Tyler.

In the first elimination round, triple octo-finals, the resolution was "The United States Federal Government should significantly reduce its corporate tax rate." FH was affirmative against Texas Tech RR, BC was negative against Lewis & Clark GP, and DH was negative against Northern Arizona University RS. FH won their round on a 3-0, BC won on a 2-1, and DH lost in a very close round on a 2-1 decision. Carver and I are especially proud of Steven Hullum and Kaleb Drake for their performance at this tournament, seeing as they were two freshman who only debated together for three tournaments, including both national tournaments.

The second elimination round, double octo-finals, had the resolution "The United States Federal Government should significantly increase restrictions on domestic use of unpiloted aerial vehicles in U.S. airspace." FH was negative against Washburn KM, and BC was affirmative against Western Washington HT. Both teams were eliminated in this round: FH on a 3-2 loss, and BC on a 4-1.

NPDA National Champions
from SIU, Josh Rivera and Ben Campbell

Despite losing in elimination rounds sooner than desired, all three teams competed very well at one of the toughest tournaments of the year. The team took 11th overall in tournament sweepstakes for the NPDA National Championship, and Caitlin Bull and Sam Cook won 10th and 7th Top Speaker Awards for the tournament, respectively. The tournament champions were Josh Rivera and Ben Campbell from Southern Illinois University, the school who won both the NPDA and NPTE championships in the 2012-2013 season.

Next year will be even better for UT Tyler Debate! If you want to have a better look at how the tournament played out over the three days of competition, you can see individual round results and cumulative results at parlitournament.com. There will also be videos uploaded on net-benefits.net from individual rounds in the NPTE and NPDA tournaments very soon. Support the UT Tyler Parliamentary Team in the 2014-2015 season!

UT Tyler Debate Team Holds Demonstration Debate

Interested in seeing what the UT Tyler Debate team spends so much time doing? On March 5^th, a demonstration debate featuring the team was held at 5 PM in the administration building to give any interested parties a look at what the team spends time preparing for. 

UT Tyler Debate to compete at NPDA National Tournament

While sports teams have their playoffs that drag out for several weeks at a time, debate teams only have one big culmination of their entire year.  For UT Tyler, we compete at two separate national tournaments that offer us a chance to win big against other colleges across the country.  From March 21^st until March 23^rd, UT Tyler Debaters Dallas Flick, Carver Hodgkiss, Steven Hullum, Kaleb Drake, Samuel Cook, and Kaitlyn Bull will compete against over 150 other teams at the National ParliamentaryDebate Association’s (NPDA) National Tournament hosted by Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Prior to competing at NPDA, the team will compete at the National Parliamentary Tournament of Excellence (NPTE), also hosted by NAU.  You will be able to find Dallas’s blog explaining that tournament soon if it is not already available.

There are a couple of differences between the two tournaments.  The first is the topics that are debated. At the NPTE, every single topic of debate is announced beforehand.  In fact, we are already deep into research and preparation for those topics as we speak.  At NPDA, we have no clue what topics we will be debating and we will not find out the given topic for each round until 20 minutes before the scheduled start time. 

The second difference is the structure of the tournament.  At the NPTE, there are 6 preliminary rounds in which 2 judges will make a decision about the round.  The goal for each team is to win as many individual ballots from judges as they can in the first 6 rounds.  For example, if you win your round on a 2 to 0 decision, then you have acquired 2 ballots.  If you win your round on a 1 to 1 decision, then you only have 1 ballot.  A team has to have at least 6 ballots to advance to elimination rounds. 

After the prelim rounds, the tournament then enters into a double elimination style, where you can only lose 2 elimination rounds until you are eliminated from the tournament.  This will continue until there are only two teams left in competition.

At NPDA, there are 8 preliminary rounds with only one judge per round, so it is similar to the other tournaments that the team has attended this year.  After the 8 preliminary rounds, half of the field will advance to a partial-triple-octafinal round.  NPDA elimination rounds are single elimination, so if you lose once, then you are out of the tournament. 

The team hopes to achieve success, as we have been working hard since July to hone skills, garner knowledge, and improve as debaters. Want to monitor the teams progress at the NPTE? You can watch for UT Tyler FH, UT Tyler DH, and UT Tyler BC on each individual round to see how we are doing!

UT Tyler FAFSA workshop!

Have you been making sure you turn in a FAFSA every year? If not, you may be losing valuable financial aid from the University of Texas at Tyler! Not sure how to fill one out? No problem! UT Tyler is holding a workshop to help you out!

Celebrating the Super Bowl at UT Tyler

Every year near the beginning of February, near 80,000 football fans crowd into a stadium in which the national championship game of the National Football League, or the Super Bowl, will be played.  In addition to those fans, over 100 million viewers will sit at a television and view the game.  However, not everyone watches the super bowl for the love of football.  Almost 23% of those who "watch" are only viewing the channel for the commercials shown during the game.

UT Tyler Debate Competes at the Mile High Swing

The University of Utah at
Salt Lake City, Utah

Last weekend, on January 18-20, the UT Tyler Parliamentary Debate team traveled to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah to compete at the Mile High Swing, a two-tournament weekend hosted by the University of Utah and Texas Tech University.  With over 90 teams in attendance, the tournament is considered to be the most challenging invitational of the competition season, and is a strong predictor for how individual teams perform at the national tournaments in March.

The tournament is called the “Mile High Swing” because it was originally hosted at the University of Denver for a number of years, but then became a traveling tournament. It was been hosted at venues such as Texas Tech University, Western Washington University, Colorado College, and most recently, the University of Utah.

The first tournament in the swing, hosted by Texas Tech University, was a topic area tournament.  Like the tournament held at Washburn University in November, controversy areas were previously announced for competitors to base their arguments around.  These were the areas debated in eleven rounds of competition over a day and a half:

The United States federal government should substantially reduce limitations on civil torts in the United States in one or more of the following areas: statute of limitations on filings, availability of class action lawsuits, caps on damages.

The United States federal government should substantially improve their relationship with the Republic of India in one or more of the following areas: immigration, trade, military sales, and/or minority relations.


The United States should adopt one or more of Robert McChesney’s proposals for mass media reform.


The United States federal government should substantially increase its oversight and/or restrictions on the National Security Administration and/or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.


The United States federal government should significantly increase regulations on securities and trades in the United States.

UT Tyler entered three teams in this tournament: UT Tyler FH (Dallas Flick and Carver Hodgkiss), UT Tyler DH (Kaleb Drake and Steven Hullum), and UT Tyler BC (Caitlun Bull and Sam Cook).  In the first half of the tournament, BC and DH broke to elimination rounds, both losing in the double octofinal round to Texas Tech University and Northern Arizona University, respectively.  In this tournament, the UT Tyler teams were able to best teams from notable universities such as UC Berkeley, Air Force Academy and the University of the Pacific.

The second half of the tournament was held in the conventional tournament format, with topics that are not previously disclosed, but instead based solely on current issues and events.  The same three teams entered, and all three broke to elimination rounds on the final day of competition.  DH and BC both were bested in the triple octofinal round by McKendree University and Point Loma University, respectively, on a topic regarding ownership recognition of the Senkaku Islands.  FH won that round against the University of Utah, and lost in the double octofinal round to William Jewell College on a topic regarding removing the tax exemption of religious institutions in the United States.  In this half of the tournament, UT Tyler conquered over teams from schools such as the University of Colorado Boulder, University of Puget Sound, and the University of Nevada at Reno.

Northern Arizona University at Flagstaff, Arizona

The next tournament for the entire team will be our national tournament at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona- the National Parliamentary Tournament of Excellence.  Tournament preparation will begin in late February, and the tournament begins on the last weekend of Spring Break.  Keep up with results at parlitournament.com, and check out npte.debateaddict.com to see who will be competing in the tournament.

College of Arts and Sciences Showcase!

On February 10^th until February 13^th, the University of Texas at Tyler will be holding a new event aimed at giving students an inside look into life at UT Tyler! On each day, one of four different colleges here on campus will have a day dedicated to showing off what they do here at the university. Did you miss Patriot Preview Day? No worries! College Showcase Week is even more exclusive than Preview Day!

Making New Year's Resolutions

Initially, everyone is excited

We all have goals and certain aspirations we wish to achieve.  We want to lose weight, we want to spend ^st.   Everyone gets a new year, and a new take on life to try and change some aspect of their lives.  We call these goals New Year’s Resolutions and according to the University Of Scranton Journal Of Psychology, about 45% of people make some form of resolution.

One week later, however...

less money, or we want to stop procrastinating.  We make these little goals for ourselves year round.  However, once a year everyone gets a fresh start on January 1