On Oct. 27, upwards of 150 people, consisting of individuals from the Linfield community and surrounding area, joined together and set out to serve the greater community, taking part in the annual Make a Difference Day—the national day of helping in the U.S. that was created by USA Weekend Magazine.

“Make A Difference Day is the most encompassing national day of helping others. It is a celebration of neighbors helping neighbors,” said Monique Ellefson, VISTA student engagement coordinator.

After an 8 a.m. check in, the event began with a kick-off in the Fred Meyer Lounge.

Once in their volunteer groups, the participants traveled to their project sites around Yamhill County to serve at a number of different organizations and agencies, such as Salvation Army, McMinnville Senior Center, Habitat for Humanity Restore, YCAP and the McMinnville coat drive to name a few.

“This year we have a bunch of new sites that we’re very excited about, and a great deal of families and groups signed up,” said sophomore Andra Kovacs, director of communication and publicity for Change Corps, in an email. “We are just now beginning to build solid sustainable partnerships with, for example, Hearthland Sanctuary and the McMinnville Center for Community Subsistence.”

According to Kovacs, the already strong support for Make a Difference Day in the Linfield community is continuing to grow.

“We continue to see more and more interest in service at Linfield, and with the past two service days, we have had more people registered than we have spots,” Kovacs said. “In Change Corps, we’re continually looking to improve, and so far we have really harnessed that goal.”

One volunteer group that made that goal possible, including junior Kristen Ursino, member of  MEChA with LCLA/MEChA, served Miller Woods.

“There were about 20 of us to help out in the green house and clean up Miller Woods. We helped fill containers to plant acorns, which would become oak trees, planted plants native to the Pacific Northwest and helped to recycle soil, ” Ursino said. “Overall, it was a great experience because I was able to get off campus to help out in the community.”

“Engaging with your community is such an essential part of life and can really change a persons’ college experience in a positive and beautiful way,” Kovacs said.

For more information about Make a Difference Day and getting involved, contact Monique Ellefson at mellefso@linfield.edu.

Chrissy Shane

Features editor

Guest speaker Dave Straube shared his book, “Someday is Not a Plan,” with students and faculty Oct. 25 in Nicholson Library’s Reading Room, revealing financial advice geared toward people in their 20s.

“Someday is Not a Plan” provides financial advice in a “no graphs, no charts” manner, while following a conversation between 20-something Larry and his Uncle Roger.

“It’s supposed to be an easy read,” Straube said. “In a nutshell, it’s a financial coming-of-age story.”

After experiencing his own financial blunders as a young adult, Straube was inspired to write “Someday is Not a Plan” when he realized that his children, now in their 20s, had limited knowledge of finance, just as he once had.

“Because of that lack of education, I made every mistake in money that could be made,” Straube said. “Part of the lessons in my book are from my own life.”

Straube’s “tongue-in-cheek and serious talk” stressed the importance of starting financial awareness immediately.

“The longer you wait, the more it’s going to hurt you in the long run,” Straube said. “People focus too much on the short term and need to focus on the long term.”

Straube explained his “Seven Rules of Financial Success,” emphasizing the importance of thinking ahead, with “Take the Long View” being his first rule.

“You have to get in the game early and be aware of what you’re doing financially,” Straube said.

Straube talk also included five ways to build wealth. He shared tips that helped him become financially aware.

“Ask successful people questions,” Straube said. “In our culture, people aren’t comfortable sharing their financial information, but are willing to share their financial knowledge.”

Additionally, Straube encouraged audience members to strive to educate themselves.

“I read one finance article per week,” Straube said.

He also encouraged the audience to read two financial books a year.

“Be a financial student for life,” Straube said.

For more information on Dave Straube and his book, “Someday is Not a Plan,” visit somedayisnotaplan.com

Chrissy Shane

A war veteran and wilderness-lover shared his stories of grizzly bears and Vietnam with a book reading Oct. 23 and a lecture Oct. 24. Through his tales, Doug Peacock presented an urgent message about conserving the Earth.

“He’s close friends with some of my heroes, and he’s one of my own heroes,” said David Sumner, assistant professor of English, before introducing Peacock.

Peacock is a nationally known author and environmental crusader. He has written several memoirs about his experiences in the wild and at war. He is also a strong advocate for preserving the environment, saying his legacy is the wilderness and importance of conserving it. Peacock calls the environmental issues today the real war of the world.

“No one is talking in these election days about the things I think are important: the health and economy of the planet,” Peacock said. “This underlies all human activities and what supports it. We’re not taking a good look at what lies in the survival of our species: our planet, which is really in peril.”

Peacock quit college multiple times after every semester because he felt uncomfortable out of the wild. He wasn’t married or a full-time student, so after dodging the draft three times, he finally decided to enlist. He enjoyed the Central Highlands, which he describes as the most beautiful mountain range in Vietnam, but he looked at his map of Yellowstone almost every night.

“The war wasn’t always terrible. I loved the country, I loved the people,” Peacock said.

After returning from the Vietnam War, where he served as a Green Beret Medic for two years, Peacock found solace in the wilderness where he belonged. He headed back to the western wild, frequenting the Rocky Mountains and Yellowstone.

“I came back feeling out of sorts, and I couldn’t be around people,” Peacock said.

Peacock took his refuge camping in the Yellowstone wilderness, where he witnessed his first mother grizzly bear.

He was soaking in a hot spring and trying to break a fever when he saw the bear and her cubs standing a mere 250 feet away. He tried to escape and blacked out from the severe temperature change, smacking his head. He came to, climbed a tree and waited for them to go away, hoping they wouldn’t notice him, bleeding and freezing in the tree.

“So I started hanging out with the grizzlies,” Peacock said.

In 1968, he tracked an alpha grizzly for months. He became an advocate for the grizzlies when they were in trouble in Yellowstone.

He filmed the bears and wrote about them, making their plight known to the public. He appeared on many national television shows and even took Arnold Schwarzenegger to see the bears, all in attempts to save them.

Author Edward Abbey, Peacock’s longtime friend and fellow environmentalist, has said, “Now, more than ever before, the only thing I can see worth saving is wilderness.”

Abbey and Peacock spent months together in the wilderness. Peacock was the inspiration for Abbey’s character George Washington Hayduke in his book “The Monkey Wrench Gang.” Abbey described Peacock as a “determined and crazy Vietnam vet.”

When Abbey died, Peacock and a few other friends buried him in the Southwest Arizona desert in an illegal grave. After digging it, Peacock laid in the grave to determine if it was right. He decided it was meant to be when he saw Abbey’s spirit animal, the vulture, circling overhead.

“The lines between life and death had blurred for me,” Peacock said. “The real Hayduke was buried.”

Kelsey Sutton

Managing editor

Approximately 5,000 people turned out for Canada’s “Defend our Coast” protests against tar sands, pipelines and tankers Oct. 22, including two Linfield students.

After reading about the event and hearing of others going, sophomore Andra Kovacs and junior Amanda Maxwell drove 11 hours Oct. 21 to Victoria, British Columbia, with another student from the University of Oregon to protest against the tar sands, which is something that Kovacs feels fervently about.

“This issue is something that I feel incredibly passionate about doing whatever is in my power to stop it,” Kovacs said. “It was absolutely phenomenal to see so many people turn out for that.”

The three students first attended training Oct. 21, in which they were designated to be marshals, a job that involved crowd control and dealing with the police and media. They chose this job as to not risk getting arrested while in another country, Kovacs said.

Tar sands are a way of extracting oil that creates large deposits of oil that are damaging to the environment, Kovacs said. The extracting is happening in Canada on lands belonging to the first-nations people, which was the driving force of the protest that took place last week.

The Defend our Coast action was one of the biggest peaceful civil disobediences that Canada has ever seen, according to Kovacs.

It involved going to the legislative building in Victoria, British Columbia, and filling the lawn in front of the building with protesters, a stage and black tarps that were approximately 770 feet long. They represented the tankers that were used to transport the oil from the tar sands. Tankers are also a large threat to the environment because they take a large amount of excess energy to transport the tar sands.

“The possibility of the tankers leaking or something going wrong with them is huge,” Kovacs said.

Protesters then proceeded to write messages on the tarp, a majority of them targeting two specific legislatures believed to have a large amount of power over what’s happening with the tar sands and to be abusing this power.

After setting up the protest, those who had turned out sat in solidarity around the legislative building in front of the tarp “tanker” and listened to speakers while the day progressed.

“It was hugely successful. Everything went flawlessly,” Kovacs said. “Seeing how well organized it was was incredible—it was really inspiring.”

Although police showed up for the protest, in the end there were no arrests made. They helped the protestors block off the main street in front of the legislative building with the tarp and handed out candy throughout the event.

“It was amazing, there were no problems whatsoever,” Kovacs said. “I’ve never gotten to be a part of such a huge-scale direct action before, and being able to do that for the first time with something that I feel so passionately about. It was absolutely phenomenal.”

In addition to being involved with the tar sands protests, Kovacs is also involved on campus as the service and sustainability coordinator, director of communications and publicity for Change Corps, member of Greenfield, member of the Advisory Committee for Environment and Sustainability, and coordinator of the TAP That campaign.

Outside of Linfield, Kovacs also has recently become involved with the Sierra Student Coalition, which had helped her become more involved in environmental issues on a national level.

“It was a really unique experience to get to see environmental activism taking place internationally and getting to see that perspective too,” Kovacs said. “The empowering energy that I got from that made me so inspired, so alive and so ready to really create change here at Linfield.”

Samantha Sigler

News editor

“Experience brings learning,” Michael Vande Berg said, encouraging students during a study abroad presentation Oct. 25 in Ice Auditorium.

As a speaker and trainer, Vande Berg encouraged students to acknowledge frames and spoke about how to handle ambiguity while abroad in the future in order to get the most out of their study abroad experiences.

“Simply going abroad is not a guarantee that students will gain those skills,” said Violeta Ramsay, associate professor of Modern Language-Spanish Language and Literature, via email. “They need to be fully prepared before departure. They should know how they can effectively gain those desired skills.”

Through a series of activities, Vande Berg provided students with the opportunity to prepare themselves with the necessary skills for studying abroad, including a better understanding of frames.

“[Frames are] ways that we perceive and organize the world,” Vande Berg said. “Those frames contain in them the emotional feeling, the certainty that the way that we perceive is the right way. And that conviction is very powerful.”

“Frames are not only a mental thing, but hugely emotional and behavioral,” Vande Berg said. “Coming into awareness and developing the capacity to frame shift offers us choices, it liberates us. The truth is, when we aren’t aware of this, we are locked into a way of thinking, a way of feeling, a way of acting.”

Vande Berg believes that in order to gain the most extraordinary studying abroad experience, students must know how to recognize and react by frame-shifting. He conveyed this message through three interactive activities.

“A common theme among the activities was introducing you to the experience of what we as human beings do all the time, which is frame,” Vande Berg said. “[By] introducing this as a possibility, we can frame- shift if we want to and know that this action is in our control.

“You’ve heard that people who are intercultural are really good at tolerating ambiguity,” Vande Berg said. “What [these activities] did was present us with ambiguity. The way we act in situations of ambiguity tells us a lot about who we are.”

Having an understanding of frames will lead to a more rewarding study abroad experience, Vande Berg emphasized.

During his presentation, he provided a lot of information to audience members but there were a few main points he hoped students took away from the 90-minute presentation.

“At least an increased awareness that we as human beings frame, that’s the first thing,” he said. “The second thing, the idea that frame- shifting is possible and in [one’s] control.”

Sophomore Cody Purchase, who plans to study abroad in Japan next fall, felt that he had especially benefited from the presentation. He has previously been to Japan, Jordan and Costa Rica. He was able to reflect on his past experiences while considering the new information Vande Berg presented.

“The presentation was awesome,” Purchase said. “It gave me ways to recognize my own behavior and better it, as well as things to consider. It organized all the things I had felt before into a concept I can remember and hope to utilize.

“In Japan, I had noticed a sort of polite restraint or lack of opening up among many of the people I met,” Purchase said. “It was not impolite but it did make me a little hesitant, making me wonder if I had perhaps said something offensive or there had been a miscommunication of sorts. I eventually found out it is just a cultural norm. As more time went by, I was able to talk about more in-depth things and we became friendlier together. At first they were simply honoring me as their guest, but later on, as I wanted it to happen, I became more of a part of the family.”

Purchase understands the importance of frame-shifting from his own firsthand experiences and encourages his fellow students to take note on Vande Berg’s expertise.

“One important point of this presentation was the power of the human brain,” he said. “Not only can it pick up on such minute differences and apply them to its own “frame” of life, but it can also (with time, patience and practice) become a more globally-minded brain, one able to shift more lucidly from frame to frame in the context of different cultures. Once you are able to truly accept a culture in this way, you will learn more than you would ever be able to by seeing the temples, ancient ruins [and so on].”

At the end of the night, students like Purchase were glad they attended the presentation.

Vande Berg trained students in such a way that would help them have the most fun and best learning experience possible while abroad.

“[With the ability to frame-shift] you will come as close as you can get to actually being an embodiment of the culture,” Purchase said. “Maybe even be able to feel the culture from within, rather than just seeing it from the outside.”

Sarah Mason

Staff writer

For students like Luis Figueroa-Mota, who works full-time to support a family, earning a bachelor’s degree is not only important to him but possible  thanks to Linfield’s Adult Degree Program online.

Rising in popularity for students in similar situations to Figueroa’s, Linfield’s online program experienced a 12 percent increase in enrollment this fall.

One reason Linfield’s program is so popular is because the school offers the “real” Linfield degree, whether students take courses on-campus or online. There is no distinction between the two methods of education or quality of the degree, said Janet Gifford, associate director of the Adult Degree Program.

In fact, one out of four Linfield students completes their education through the Adult Degree Program, Gifford added.

“The benefits of online learning are up to the individual student to evaluate for themselves. In my case, online classes are maybe even better because I am able to do the research and the learning without distraction,” Figueroa said via email.

Figueroa is majoring in marketing, the newest major in the Adult Degree Program.

The program offers bachelor’s degrees in management, marketing, accounting, nursing, international business, and social and behavioral sciences. It also offers two post-baccalaureate certificates in accounting and human resource management.

Gifford said that enrollment increases are taking place in the majors that are related to family-wage jobs in those fields.

The increase in online learning is becoming a national trend.

“Adults know they need a college degree in order to get ahead,” Gifford said. “Students come into the program already knowing what they want to major in. They are more career-focused.”

The average age for students going through the Adult Degree Program is 38. The majority of these students already have jobs and family obligations, Gifford said.

Apart from offering the same quality of degrees to online students, Linfield also offers each student his or her own academic adviser. This adviser helps in mapping out the best approach in pursuing a degree, Gifford said.

“Linfield has taken the best of what it is known for and provides the same services to students online,” Gifford said. “Advisers take the time and attention to support students.”

Students also have access to e-tutoring, library services and career services.

Some students even go abroad. For instance, more students working toward their Registered Nurse degrees are doing clinicals internationally, in places like Africa, Central America and Asia.

Typically, students take about eight credits per semester, participate in a January Term course, which runs for five weeks, and continue classes through the Summer Term.

“Most students think of their education as 12 months a year,” Gifford said. “The students who choose Linfield’s program want to excel. They have a higher level of expectations for the courses.”

Jessica Prokop

Editor-in-chief