Author: The UTD Mercury

Repeatedly raped by an uncle when a child, Jaron Benjamin copes by telling his story. Benjamin spoke to 154 students, staff and faculty in the Student Union Galaxy Room as part of Date Rape Awareness week Aug. 30 – Sept. 3. The UNT senior serves as the coordinator for UNT-based Men Against Violence (MAV). His…

While many UTD students take on multiple roles in addition to being a student, common sense tells them their lives will be stressful. But for some students like Adrian Cook, the stresses of school and everyday life can be too much to handle alone. An Arts & Humanities graduate student, Cook has added teaching, researching…

<strong>UTD No. 1 for CS degrees awarded</strong> According to a recent survey by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), UTD confers more computer science degrees than any other institution in the country. The survey indicated UTD’s Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science (ECS) awarded a combined 592 undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate degrees…

Standing room only ticket: $40. Dr. Pepper in a souvenir cup: $4.50 Discovering America’s pastime (and finding out that it’s actually not baseball): priceless. Now before I have you baseball purists calling for my head on a pike, let me explain how one pastime has supplanted baseball as America’s favorite. This pastime, of course, is…

The Olympics are over now. The athletes are home, glowing from their Olympic experience – or perhaps glittering gold. In corporate America, the sponsor companies like Home Depot, Visa and Monster.com (which supplies “official online career management” for athletes with aspirations beyond Home Depot shelf-stacking) are counting up the gold they spent on ads and…

Fifteen students stumble nervously into the nation’s capital, each one, at least symbolically, wearing the UT System bumper sticker for others to see. Of the 15, five come from UTD, the rest from UT Austin. These are the members of the fall 2004 class of the Bill Archer Fellowship Program – the UT System version…

Although more and more publications are finding their way onto computer screens, it’s nice to see the McDermott Library celebrating the acquisition of its one-millionth volume. True, “Flora Londinenis” will be digitized and made available to countless students and literary scholars in an electronic format, but the presence of one million actual, physical pieces in…

As a sign of goodwill between two international educational institutions, UTD officials from the Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies and the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education in Mexico (ITESM-Monterrey) have signed collaboration agreements promoting enhanced scholarship for faculty, staff and students at both universities. The first collaboration agreement involves the setup of an Internet…

Students lifting weights and shooting three-pointers aren’t the only activities occuring these days at the UTD Activity Center. Outside, construction has begun on the $3 million renovation and expansion project. “Completion is right on schedule and is going to be just before graduation in the spring,” UTD Athletic Director Chris Gage said. Once finished, the…

Were it a stand-alone feature, Renny Harlin’s “Exorcist: the Beginning” would merely be a sub-par campy horror movie. However, in the shadow of it’s lineage, the film falls flat on its face – a poor homage to “The Exorcist.” “EtB” focuses on Father Merrin of “The Exorcist” in his younger days. Details of an African…