The University is closed through January 1st, so we’re featuring some of the best pictures from Wake Forest from the fall semester.  Enjoy these glimpses of campus, and we hope you and your family are having a wonderful winter break!

This photo is from the Lighting of the Quad.

Many thanks to all our faithful readers of the Daily Deac.  It’s our pleasure to bring you a glimpse of life on campus each weekday.

Our colleagues who work on the technical side of all the WFU websites have been doing server migrations on various WFU web pages, and it’s our turn to move The Parents’ Page.  Because of the need to migrate all our website as cleanly as possible, we need to take a temporary hiatus from December 19-21 so the tech folks can do their thing.  Accordingly, we’ll have no new Daily Deacs, new parent news, etc. until our part of the migration is finished, which we’re told will be December 21st.  (Of course, if any urgent news happened, be assured that our tech team would update the site so you are informed.)  You should not notice any major changes to our site; most of the work being done is all on the back end, tech side.

What we normally would have blogged about during those days would be how quiet campus is without your students!  It always seems so empty without them, though I must confess parking is a lot more plentiful.  We’d probably also speculate that your students arrived at home with a mountain of laundry, the appetite of an offensive line, and a need for 15 hours of uninterrupted sleep upon arrival.

One final reminder: the University is closed for all faculty and staff from December 24 through January 31.  For those of you who wish to make gifts to the parents’ campaign of the Wake Forest Fund (please do! we need your support!), gifts can be made online at our secure web site; please check the box for parents’ campaign.  Please give as generously as you are able – your gifts directly benefit your students’ experience!

Your students are home now, we hope safely and happily tucked into their beds and sleeping off the residual stress from finals.  The first day without them on campus for an extended period of time always feels a bit strange, but today it seems even stranger than ever because of the horrific nature of Friday’s attack at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut.

It is a somber day for everyone.

Friday, as my colleagues and I heard the terrible news from Connecticut, there were pinched faces and misty eyes and tears.  Many of the people in my building have children, and all of us collectively are working at a place that educates children (albeit older ones).  This is everyone’s worst nightmare, to have grand-scale harm come to a school.

We are very fortunate at Wake Forest to have a Crisis Management Team that meets regularly and plans and runs exercises to prepare for the unexpected.  We just did a drill a couple of weeks ago and I posted some of the takeaways for parents about what you should be talking to your students about should an emergency arise.  This is a competent, capable, highly functioning team of caring individuals.  I would trust them with the safety of my own child as well as your children.

Our hearts and prayers are with those in Connecticut today, and in the coming days, weeks, and months which will bring them all the stages of grief.   We know there are Wake Forest alumni and parents in the Newtown area, but we do not yet know if any of them have been directly affected.  We pray they are not.

Today our office will be holding a moment of silence at 9:30 am for the victims.  It is a small gesture, but one of solidarity.  And if ever there was a good day to do something nice for someone else (whether that is paying the toll of the next guy behind you on the toll road or buying the Starbucks for the person behind you at the drive thru window), today may be the day to do it.

“Despite everything, I believe that people really are good at heart.” – Anne Frank

As Finals Week is wrapping up, we are seeing more and more students hauling out suitcases and duffle bags and leaving campus.  They look tired, and are dressed more in sweats and workout clothes than their normal (read cutest) clothes.  Campus always begins to feel a little strange, because as the bulk of students leave, the stragglers who remain for the last exams look and seem a bit like the Last Men (or Women) Standing.

Treat them gently when they get home.  They are going to be tired and weary and it might take a couple of days of extra sleep and laziness before they perk up to their ordinary selves.  There are other students – particularly first years – who have been homesick and are going to be SO excited to see their families again and be in their own beds.

Faculty members are due to turn in grades to the Registrar’s office on December 19th, so then (or shortly after), your students will be able to log into WIN and see how they have done.  If you are the parent of a first-year student, you should know that very often the first semester’s grades are lower than what the student will do in subsequent semesters.  Brace your reaction to their grades accordingly.  For first-year students, this semester has been all about trying to figure out what is expected and learning the ropes.  Your first-years have had tremendous adjustments in terms of the level and pace of work, and how to balance that with total independence.  It is a lot to manage at 18.

My own personal experience, and the pattern I have seen with years and years of having my own academic advisees, is that the first semester grades were the worst ones, and the GPA typically gets better as time goes by, as long as students put academics first and do what they know it takes to succeed.  So if you see Bs or Cs (or lower) where you always saw straight As in high school, don’t panic.  Believe me, your students are nervous to share their grades for fear of disappointing you.   The question I always wanted my parents to say on the subject of a [less than perfect] grade was “Did you do everything you could do to succeed, and did you try your hardest?  If the answer is yes, then that’s all I can expect.”

And just as Finals Week is ending, we need to have a big finish for our Internet Meme week.  One of the best and most prolific memes in recent years has been with movie star Ryan Gosling, whose combination of good looks and romantic movie roles make most of your daughters (and some of their mothers too, I suspect) weak at the knees.  He won a lot of hearts with his role in The Notebook, and some enterprising person decided to start a meme with him that always begins with a picture of him saying “Hey girl,” and then adding some very sensitive and woman-pleasing kind of line. Such as this one (who would say no to more foot massages?)

There are many iterations of the Hey Girl meme, including Feminist Ryan Gosling (where all his sayings are about feminist philosophy), a librarian version.  Google it and you’ll see tons of variations on this theme.

An extremely witty person(s) on campus created a Tumblr blog called ZSRyanGosling, and the entries are about WFU. ZSRyanGosling is on Twitter as well.  ZSRRyanGosling evidently follows the Daily Deac’s Meme Week coverage and called us out on Twitter the other day with the following:

@WFUParents hey girl, you keep leaving out everyone’s favorite meme.

Not to worry, we replied: @ZSRyanGosling Perhaps we’re saving the best for last!

@WFUParents hey girl, you’re wiser than I gave you credit for …

So today’s meme goes out to @ZSRyanGosling.  By way of background, Wake Forest has a series of tunnels that run under the campus buildings.  Some had been open in the past (such at the tunnel that connects Bostwick and Johnson residence halls) and others had been closed for ages, but it was a campus rite of passage to go “tunneling” and see what was down there.  The tunnels are closed now for safety reasons and students are prohibited from going down there.

Hey girl, it’s Ryan’s turn to tunnel.

Only three more days of exams left and then your students can look forward to a lengthy Winter Break.  Our good friends at the ZSR Library are doing their part to help students by hosting the ever popular Wake the Library – which offers free coffee round the clock (bring your own mug), snacks at midnight, and lots of kind and comforting staff there to help you find a citation for the final paper you are writing or just to offer you a smile in the midst of palpable stress levels.

ZSR has a good sense of humor, too.  They are also on the idea of Meme Week, having posted this nice gem which is a takeoff on the popular young adult novel The Hunger Games and Effie Trinket’s favorite phrase “May the odds be ever in your favor.”  Even if you haven’t read it, your students likely have (or have seen the movie).

The Daily Deac WFU meme week continues, and like ZSR we are on the subject of luck and finals.  Some of you may have seen this poor fellow about the internet.  His name is Bad Luck Brian, and he’s become a famous internet meme representing a humiliating middle school (or early high school?) class picture, with captions that describe a variety of embarrassing and tragic occurrences.

Here are a couple of examples of Bad Luck Brian (boat ride and prank call).  If you Google “Bad Luck Brian,” you can see a lot of examples, in varying degrees of propriety (some are risque, so know that before you Google!)

Our WFU version of Bad Luck Brian is about exams.  We hope your students have much better luck than this poor fellow.

And may the odds be ever in their favor.

To quote the old holiday song, “Baby, it’s cold outside.”  This week has been gray and cold and that seems really fitting given the fact that students are immersed in the joy that is final exams.  Once they get all their finals finished, it will be time to think about packing up for the semester and going home.  There are some important to-dos for both parking and residence hall checkout, so once your students are at a point where they can think about some of those types of practicalities, be sure to remind them to take care of business properly before they leave.

We’re trying to keep some laughter and lightness during finals week, so we’re recreating some of the best Internet Memes this week, but themed for Wake Forest.  One of my personal favorites is the “First World Problems” meme, where someone is despairing over a problem that is very trivial relative to all the issues in less fortunate parts of the world – and usually quite fixable if they would just take steps to fix it.   (Here are a two of my personal favorites that are not WFU-related: the cookie and the hotdog dilemma).

Today’s WFU First World Problem is about South Residence Hall.  Widely viewed by first-year students as the best dorm to be assigned to because it is the newest, South is a coup for a lot of people.  There is one problem with the ergonomics of the rooms – doors won’t stay propped open.  So enjoy the First World Problem of South.

It’s the second day of finals, and Starbucks at 8:30 am was already reasonably populated with students who were caffeineing-up for the morning.  Some of my colleagues in the ZSR Library have said that the stress level is palpable there.  The first couple of days are always hard, because there is a lot of anticipation of exams to come, and for students who have two in one day that makes it especially trying.

We’re continuing “Internet Meme Week” here at the Daily Deac and featuring a WFU-related version of popular memes.  With “The Hobbit” opening this Friday, this meme goes out to all the Tolkien fans out there.  It’s the “One does not simply” meme, which is used to express the impossibility of a situation.  In The Fellowship of the Ring, the task is to take the One Ring and destroy it in the fires of Mordor.  To get there is to face many obstacles, each seeming impossible to overcome. The character Boromir points out “One does not simply walk into Mordor.”

And so the Wake Forest version…enjoy!

Finals Week is here.  This week will be especially hard for our first-year students just because they have not taken college level finals before and don’t really know what to expect.  Once they’ve gone through one set of finals, though, they will have a point of reference and will likely be less nervous going forward.  On Friday morning, Starbucks was jammed with students studying, and I suspect that continued throughout the weekend.

Late Night Breakfast was held last night in the Pit.  This had been a longstanding tradition that one of our faculty members started ages ago.  The idea is that breakfast is served to students by faculty and staff.  There’s music, fun, and festivity – and a lot of good comfort food to help power the students up for studying.  For those of you on Facebook, you ought to be following Wake Forest Campus Life.  They have a hilarious video from the Late Night Breakfast of the Deacon dancing in the Pit.

Because most of campus will be involved in Finals, end of year residence hall closing, or end of calendar year procedures, it might be a bit of a light news week here at the Daily Deac.  So we thought we’d do some WFU Finals Themed internet memes for you.  Today’s is from the Condescening Willy Wonka meme, which has been used very widely on the internet.  This one gently pokes fun at this generation’s belief (certainty?) that college now is a lot harder than it was in their parents’ days : )

Today is the last day of classes.  Which means our students are kicking it into high gear to get ready for final exams and for departing for the Winter break.  What are some things they should be thinking about and doing?

- Turning in all final papers and projects (on time) – or communicating with professors if something is not going to be turned in on time.

- Making a plan to study for finals, using good time management strategies.  Is cramming for 12 straight hours the best strategy?  Or should you study 3 hours a day for the following 4 days just so you don’t burn out?  Students have to make the right choice for themselves.

- Using common sense when studying in public places such as the library.  The library posted this on their Facebook page yesterday, but it applies to any public space: “During this heavy use time PLEASE do not leave your valuables unattended around the library. Thefts tend to go up in the last two weeks of the semester. Now would NOT be a good time to have your phone, textbooks or laptop stolen.”

- Getting enough sleep and eating well.  Many students won’t, but they really need to be sure to be properly rested and to be sure to eat healthily (and regularly) to keep their bodies and minds nourished adequately.  And in cold and flu season, it is wise to frequently wash your hands, use hand sanitizer, etc.

- Ensuring they know (and comply with) any requirements for leaving their residence hall rooms for Winter Break.

- Finding ways to responsibly manage any stress they feel.  Here are some tips from our Intern C, but know that the staff of the Counseling Center, Chaplain’s Office, and RAs are there to assist as well.

- Remembering to do their very best – and then let it go.  If your students study as hard as they can and prepare as productively as possible, that’s all they can ask of themselves.

- Finding moments of humor, peace, lightness, kindness.  It could be an act of service for someone in need (Angel Tree in Benson Center, etc.), it could be paying a student a compliment on this wonderful new Facebook page called Wake Forest Compliments, where students anonymously say something kind about each other – really a beautiful thing to see – or sharing a joke or funny photo to lighten the mood.  This one has been making its way across the internet.

And as parents and family members, you can support your students during Finals Week with small acts of kindness and love.  In your family that could be a card, or a text, or a phone call to encourage your student, or a kind and listening ear to hear them when they are stressed.  You’ll know the right thing to do.  But let your students know you love them and support them.  Most could use that reassurance right now.

Your students might have noticed a larger-than-usual number of police cars and EMT-type vehicles on campus yesterday.  That’s because from 8am-1 pm, the campus’ Crisis Management Team was running a simulation drill to help practice what we would do in the event of a campus emergency.  It’s a necessary – but daunting – task.

We get together as a full team once or twice a year to run through disaster simulations.  Within the large team, there are smaller sub-teams who are responsible for things like communications, planning, operations, security, and more.  Though the full team meets a couple of times a year, the smaller sub-teams meet more regularly to go over items on their group’s task list.

The Parent Programs office is represented on the Crisis Management Team, and there are a few takeaways from yesterday’s simulation that we want to share with you.

1) In the event of a campus emergency, students, faculty, and staff would be notified in a number of ways, including text messages, email messages, and/or an outdoor siren system.  The outdoor system is being test this Saturday – your students should not be alarmed; they will see/hear a message that this is a test.

2) If there were an actual emergency, there would be a large red bar across the top of the main Wake Forest page (www.wfu.edu) that would indicate there is some sort of emergency.  Click on that red bar to go to the Wake Alert web site, which is where all emergency information will be located.  During an emergency, that Wake Alert web site will be the primary source for news and updates.

3) Parents and students may wish to read and bookmark the Wake Alert web site now, so you can locate it easily in the event of a campus crisis.

4) Students (and parents) should also read and bookmark the Wake Ready web site, which is all about pre-crisis preparedness.  I would recommend they read it at the start of each semester to familiarize themselves (or refresh their memory) about what they should do in the event of an emergency.

5) One of the key components of the last two drills we have run as a Crisis Management Team has involved the concept of “Shelter in Place” or staying indoors in a safe place until told that the danger has passed.  You should ask your student if he/she knows what it means to shelter in place.  If he/she does not, please refer them to the Shelter in Place link.

6) During a campus emergency, we will be all hands on deck dealing with whatever the situation is at hand.  Because of this, people you may know on campus (such as the Parent Programs office) will likely not be able to field individual phone calls and emails.  This is not because we don’t want to be responsive, it is because we need to take care of the safety and security of your students first.  All information that is publicly available will go on the Wake Alert web site, so even if you called our office (and we were here) we would only be able to tell you what is posted on the Wake Alert web site, because that is all the information available at that time.  In the event of an emergency that goes on for some duration, we will try to post a new update on Wake Alert every 10-15 minutes – even if it just said the situation has not changed – just so you know we are on the case.

7) Students should follow whatever instructions are posted on the Wake Alert page or in campuswide emails.  If we tell students to shelter in place, that is because it is our best recommendation for their safety.  It is not a wise idea to disobey security recommendations.

8) Finally, and this one is meant solely to give you some peace of mind in a scary situation: my personal opinion is that there are no better people to be in that Crisis Management Team room if a disaster actually occurred.  This team is full of experts on all manners of campus life.  They know the campus in and out, they have the authority to get things done and they remain cool under pressure, and they are all smart.  If it can be done, this team will figure out how to do it.  They are selfless, they are brave.  And they want to do all they can for your children.

If you are the type to say your prayers at night, please always add one for the safety and security of not just your own student, but the entire campus at large.  But know that if trouble came, we have the best people on hand to work toward the safety and security of your students in an organized, calm, compassionate way.

If something bad were coming my way, I trust the members of this team completely.  That’s the highest compliment I can pay them.