Some Cool Stuff

RC, one of our tourguides who is pictured above, is a freshman Music Business major from Portsmouth, NH. He's a great kid. Anyway, RC hosts a radio show on our radio station, 91.5 WUML. You can find WUML here:

http://www.wuml.org/

and here:

http://www.myspace.com/wuml.

You can also find a direct link to the show's own site here:

http://www.myspace.com/rockcandywuml.

The show is on Fridays from 4-6 p.m. As the blurb on the site says, "tune in for a little bit of jazz, folk, and indie! Expect to hear Minus the Beat, Sufjan Stevens, and Ampere."

RC is also very involved in the music business program and wants to take it to new heights. I fully support that. Anyway, check that out at your leisure.

In other news, the Baseball Research Center at UMass Lowell is a great place. They test bats and balls put into play in high school, college, and even MLB. It is a really interesting place, even for non-science majors. Below is the website for the center followed by the link to an article on wired.com that was posted very early in the morning.

UML Baseball Research Center:
http://m-5.eng.uml.edu/umlbrc/index.htm


Wired.com artilce:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.05/posts_baseball.html

Purple Cow.

Once concept we discuss semi-frequently in a Management class I attend at times is the concept of the Purple Cow. The Purple Cow is something that helps a business differentiate itself, or be noticed. I also always think of it as the thing that makes people stop and go, "What is that?" And now you have their attention. The analogy works like this - Let's say you're driving through the midwest or Vermont or something. You're driving through the country and you see cows. You are interested in them at first, but once you drive by farm after farm after farm you start to not see the brown cows, the white cows, and the spotted cows. What you would notice, however, is a purple cow. This is the goal of advertising; to stand out from competitors and be noticed.

The above pic is one of our tourguides, Phanny (pronounced Pah-nee like the Native American Tribe the Pawnee. Or, as her facebook page says, "Not FANNIE!") I just really liked the picture and wanted to post it because it has purple cow written all over it in that you can't look at the picture and not have a reaction. Bonus points go to the guy in the background for being so fired up. More bonus points go to Phanny for wearing a UML sweatshirt while getting this pic taken. Thanks, Phanny.

This week is April vacation for high school students in Massachusetts and our tours are gigantic. I'm going to try and snap a picture of them this afternoon. We love all the visitors, and we thank everyone for coming, but one thing we really like to stress here is that you will not feel like a number if you attend UMass Lowell. On most daily campus tours we give we make sure that people feel like they are given individual attention. With that said, given that our tours are five, six, or even seven times the size of our normal tours this week, we feel that a lot of the personal touch that you normally get with a daily tour is being lost. We understand that there are people who can only make visits during vacation. However, if you are going to be in the area again and want to make time to take another visit during a less busy time we would recommend that. We have daily campus tours at 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. Please give our office a call and schedule a tour at (978) 934-3931.

So Much For Keeping Up With The Blog

Jeez, it seems like every time I commit to keeping up with the blog I run out of stuff to talk about. We've been really busy since the last post, and it seems like there just isn't a lot of time to get the blog in. I have to make myself do it more I guess.



So what have we been up to? Well, a lot of events and travel, which is more time out of the office and away from the computer. I was down in Connecticut for a week trying to recruit some nutmeg staters. That was great. If you are ever in the Fairfield County area and want the best chicken parm sub you have ever tasted, go to Mike's in Fairfield. It's right downtown ironically abutting the plaza in which there is a domino's. Mike's is a Fairfield institution, as any Fairfield resident or Fairfield U. alum will gladly tell you.



We also recently hosted our two accepted student receptions. They seemed to go well, and the surveys we collected reflected that for the most part. Those days are some of the more gratifying days of the year as we get to see faces on campus rather than just names on applications. Seeing someone at one of those receptions after meeting them during the fall or during the spring of their junio year, well, that's why this job is fun.



Another really cool development that happened without any contribution from our office is a facebook page for the incoming UML class of 2011. We're happy to see people excited and forming a "community" even before they get to campus. That is just great stuff. Way to go guys and girls.



Anyway, that's about it for now. I would say I'm going to keep up with the blog, but that hasn't really worked out so well. Just to stay consistent, I'll post a random pic I took last year as I was driving through the North Campus. One of the cool things about our school is that the original buildings are still very heavily used, and a kind of living history is evident everywhere. Here's a great example:

Notice the "Lowell Textile Institute" engraving. I love that stuff.