The Word of Chaos

It’s another late night thing again. I’m sitting around listening to music and letting my mind wander. I figure I’ll spill some random thoughts on here and get a few more comments about how amusing I am. I can do that if I like. This IS my personal blog after all. Most of what I have to say tonight involves my school. I’m tired, so if parts of this end up being incoherent please forgive me.

I’m hearing from a couple sources, including Eye himself, that a few folks in Old Main think that I am the mysterious journalist known as Eye. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for that compliment.

I highly doubt that they like what they’re seeing on Tech In Check as well. I’m not a big fan of focusing on negativity, but I think that some stories need to be told to the outside world in order for the school to survive. Businesses that screw over their customers do not survive. If a college is a business as my professors tell me, then the same rule applies.

I’m also very amazed that our administration is concerned with that site when random posts such as this litter the internet.

http://www.topix.net/city/montgomery-wv/2007/01/higher-enrollment-prompts-wvu-tech-to-add-majors-renovate-dorms

Obviously, this fellow may be a little bit racist, but I’ve heard stories like several times before. I’m sure that a story such as this will appear on Tech In Check in due time. I’m sure things like this happen at other institutions. Unfortunately, we’re not concerned with those other institutions. We’re concerned with our own.

Why have some of us resorted to using Tech In Check to be heard? I can’t speak for the other authors or for Eye. My own reason is that I don’t think that WVU Tech’s administration listens to students. Allow me to cite an example of this.

During my freshman year, the Department of Computer Science had a visiting professor by the name of Dr. Svidersky. Dr. Svidersky was a wonderful professor. I wasn’t particularly fond of his ability to teach math, but I was astounded by his knowledge of Computer Science. I can honestly say that he taught me a better programmer. My guess is that quite a few of my friends will fill the comments of this post with a few amens. None of us forgot what we learned in Linux our freshman year. Thanks for kicking us into shape Oleg! I mean that from the bottom of my heart! *Awwwwwwwwwwww*

When the time came to hire a professor to permanently fill the position, Oleg interviewed against several other candidates. Dr. Svidersky was EASILY the best candidate during the lecture portion. The students liked Oleg so much that they gave a 100% recommendation to the department. No students argued against Oleg being hired.

Sadly, Oleg wasn’t hired for reasons that were never entirely clear to me. The position was given to another candidate. This candidate left WVU Tech after one year, which didn’t hurt my feelings. This professor didn’t clearly explain lectures, did not answer questions in a satisfactory manner, and ripped most homework assignments from Google. That’s right. We could Google the EXACT question and find the same sheet from another school’s website.

Congratulations to whoever made that final decision to hire this person. It certainly requires some balls to ignore the recommendation of the students AND the department just to end up with a disappointing hire who will leave in a year.

That’s one example of many. I’ll post more later. I certainly don’t want to tell all of my stories at once.

Why do I care? I’m a senior! I’m graduating this year. Why should I honestly care? There’s an easy answer for this.

I love West Virginia. While the state does have it’s problems, I think that it is moving in a promising direction. Most people see a dying state; I see opportunity. I’m not the kind of person to pass up opportunity. Besides, we can’t improve the state if we all move away.

I’m a Mercer County native. Mercer County is an interesting place. I gather that neither West Virginia nor Virginia really wants us since we voted on which state we wanted to be part of a few years back. We seem to get the shaft on any development that occurs in the state that ISN’T an interstate. Princeton’s Chamber of Commerce bases their opinion of their growing economy on the fact we recently got an Outback Steakhouse. I still don’t know if that makes me proud or just hungry. Either way, I don’t consider another fast food restaurant  to be a sign of a flourishing economy. I consider that to be a sign of an economy that is standing on a single strong leg, which can be destroyed.

Despite all of this, I have two state colleges in my backyard: Concord University and Bluefield State College. Both colleges have their strong points. Unfortunately for me, neither school has strong engineering programs. Bluefield State has engineering technology programs, but that wasn’t what I wanted.

There are only two schools in the state of West Virginia with engineering programs: WVU Tech and WVU. Being at WVU Tech allows me to stay close to my family and still follow my dreams. My only other option is to start an engineering school in Princeton. If Tech shuts down or stays in it’s current condition, I might have to do that with the x million dollars I have lying around. Yeah…

I think I’ll end this post here for tonight. Parts of this may end up appearing on Tech In Check if I get some positive feedback in the comments. Have a nice night people!