Shelly Vitanza:
Welcome to the LU Moment. Thank you for listening. I’m Shelly Vitanza, the Director of Public Affairs at Lamar University. Each week, we showcase the great events, activities, programs, projects, and people at Lamar University. As far as our students are concerned, our campus is closed. The resident students will begin filtering back to campus January 16th and classes resume the day after Martin Luther King Day on January the 19th. And we’ll have new faces and programs once students get back on campus. Dr. Daniel Brown who’s joined Lamar University as the new Associate Provost for Academic and Faculty Affairs. Prior to joining LU, Brown was the Dean of the University College at Texas State University, so we’re really glad to have Dr.
Brown with us in this important role and glad he’s become a cardinal. Also new and exciting at Lamar University beginning in the Spring, Lamar University Department of Earth and Space Science and Lamar University’s geospatial center will offer a Master of Science degree in geospatial sciences. The program will include a 30-credit hour thesis-based option or a 36-credit hour non-thesis option. And the program is designed to train individuals to work in any sector of the geospatial sciences.
You know, it’s estimated that geospatial sciences occupations are expected to grow in Texas by almost 29% between now and 2026 and in Southeast Texas, the mean wages of someone in the GIS field range are between $75,000 and almost $104,000, so this is one of the unique programs at Lamar University that is really preparing students for the future. We’ve discussed on this show before, last semester, Lamar University launched the bachelor’s degree in computer game development. So, like the GIS degree, the computer development degree mirrors the need in the workforce.
We’re preparing cardinals for those jobs of the future. Pretty exciting. What else is in our future? We’ve got football and basketball and homecoming. We’re going to do a virtual homecoming on February 6th. It’s going to be a lot of fun and safe of course, so we’ll know more about that in the coming weeks. We’ll invite guests who can tell us about our virtual homecoming. But let’s talk about now what’s really on everyone’s mind and that is coming back to campus safely.
We’ve done this before. We came back after the summer of 2020, we came back for the fall semester during the pandemic, mid-pandemic. In fact, I’m proud to announce that Lamar University has not had one incident of COVID-19 on the Lamar University campus that was caused from classroom instruction. So, that really reflects a huge commitment on the part of the Lamar University faculty, staff and the students to take caution and continue efforts to ensure safety and health for everyone, so that’s something that we can really be proud of. We’ve had COVID-19 cases, but they have not been as a result of instruction on campus and we’ve done most of our classes online or hybrid and face to face. One of the leaders on our campus really helping us ensure safety and continued health is Marie Murray and she’s the assistant director of health education services for our student health center.
I invited Marie to be our guest today to talk about coming back to campus safely: the COVID vaccine and the best ways to stay not only physically safe but mentally and emotionally healthy during the coming months which we talk a lot about the physical, but the emotional and mental toll during this pandemic nationwide has really been high. Marie, thanks for joining us. I appreciate you coming on the first part of the year especially since it’s still kind of slow on campus, so I appreciate you.
Marie Murray:
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here!
Shelly Vitanza:
Great! Let me ask what everyone is thinking and is wanting to know about. Is Lamar University going to have the COVID-19 vaccine and will it be administered to our faculty, staff, students? What’s happening there? Can you give us an update?
Marie Murray:
So, right now we have sent in the application. It actually goes through the Texas Department of State Health Services and we’re in that process, we’ve submitted our application. There’s actually phases. Right now, they’re still on phase 1, so we have their application in and we’re hoping to get vaccines but as of right now, that’s as much as we know. There still trying to hit that at-risk populations, right? There trying to hit the healthcare workers, and they’re also trying to hit the 65 and above or people with underlying conditions, and so where the University sits is at tier two and about tier one A, just maybe getting into tier one B. It’s still going to be a little bit, but we’re happy to say that this is something that the student health center is doing is working to provide the community.
Especially the students just because they are the ones that still get into (and we haven’t had cases like that in the classrooms, like you said) but they are in groups sometimes, we’re trying to do activities, so they still can have a college experience, so that is something that is being worked on.
Shelly Vitanza:
Perfect! But we are doing COVID-19 testing correct? Can someone get tested at the student health center?
Marie Murray:
Yes, so the student health center is working very hard to meet the needs for students to do COVID-19 testing. This is something that we offer at the student health center, we actually offer the rapid antigen testing, so students can come in and have results within fifteen minutes. So, it’s not going to be the three to five-day wait. I don’t know if you’ve had to have your COVID-19 test yet, so it’s going to be a little bit of a different process, but it’s really nice because students get their results pretty quickly as well.
Shelly Vitanza:
That’s great. We took a lot of precautions. We’ve really learned how to do this moving in and moving out thing safely. Everything is on a schedule and you get your time, and you can move in the dorm or move out of the dorm, you that kind of thing, what were some of the other precautions that students need to take as their returning to campus. I think there’s a lot of anxiety, because we’ve all been out there, we’ve been with our family, we’ve been with friends. We don’t know where people have been and so there’s a lot of anxiety around coming back together. Can you talk to us about how we can do this safely and maintain sanity at the same time?
Marie Murray:
Yes I can! So, the big thing is, a lot of what we learn in the fall semester, we practice. We still want to keep doing that, right? So, the vaccine is just getting rolled out there. COVID is still an issue. I know that Jefferson county numbers specifically have been rising, so we want people to still be vigilant and what that means is making sure that there taking stock of what’s going on in their bodies. How they are feeling. Making sure we’re still checking for fever. Even if we just feel feverish, it could just be I drank an energy drink and I’m feeling a little hot. Like make sure, you’re paying attention to what your body is telling you: If you’re feeling sick, if you’re starting to get a cough and you have shortness of breath. I know COVID-19 has made us more aware of sneezing and coughing and getting all the symptoms and we want to stay on top of thatow
The big thing is still having the hand sanitizer, right? Practicing washing your hands every time. I personally suggest if you can get ahold of some, have wipes on you at all times. That’s one of the personal things that I like to do. So, you’re really trying to keep the healthy practices. One of the things we’ve seen is that this flu season has not been bad with the emphasis on these healthy practices, we haven’t seen a bad flu season this year and I think that can be attributed to this so I think that goes to show is that if we continue to wear our masks properly, we wash our hands, we can really do a lot to keep those positive tests down and prevent COVID-19.
Shelly Vitanza:
Very good. Yeah, some of these things we’ve learned can become habits for the future, maybe we’ll all be healthier as a result long-term. Let’s talk about, like I said, we talk about the physical health of individuals, but the mental and emotional health is also important, and these students are under pressure to take classes online, they’re isolated in their dorms. They don’t have a lot of socialization like they have had in the past and activities altered. Some of them are even limited. How do you mentally and emotionally cope as we go into the second year of this pandemic?
Marie Murray:
Yes. This is a big topic right now. I think the big thing to point out is that how people cope is going to be tailored to them specifically. A couple of things that I suggest to people is sometimes with COVID and quarantine, we get stuck indoors right and we don’t really take care of ourselves. The first thing is actually still making sure that we are taking care of ourselves physically because how we feel physically can actually impact our mental and emotional health.
So, if I say I’m going to sleep in until noon everyday and we don’t get any exercise and you know, we order out all our meals or eating pizza all the time. We kind of throw out some of that normal exercise and getting good sleep and you know, eating well. SoM.E.times we throw that out and that can actually impact us mentally.
So, that’s that big foundation that we want to make sure that we are keeping up with and then I think the big thing with people right now is how do I find connection with other people? We have to get a little creative and I actually did a virtual Christmas party over break and that sounds really weird and we tried all sorts of new technology to do this and they had a camera set up, so we baked cookies together and they had a camera to show them baking the cookies.
It was really interesting, but I think part of it is get creative with how you connect with people right? Sometimes we don’t have to reinvent the wheel but get on Snapchat or get on Facebook Messenger and actually do a video chat with somebody and make it fun. They’ve got filters. I can’t tell you how many of those chats I get in and people are messing with filters and it’s just fun. We forget that it’s virtual in that sense and we’re not necessarily sitting next to the person or we’re connected with them. You get creative and make it fun and still connect with others because we forget that we’re all attached to cell phones these days and so it’s still easy to stay connected with other people. Call somebody that maybe you haven’t talked to in a while, like a friend from high school especially you know people that travel far to come to Lamar.
Talk to somebody from high school or your family that you maybe haven’t spoken to in a while. I highly suggest finding ways you can still stay connected and the thing about that is also find ways to stay connected so if you’re somebody that did a lot of volunteer time, there’s still organizations that are still looking for volunteers and that’s not necessarily something that has to be in person. There’s ways that we can connect and we can help people virtually. Sometimes it’s just helping an organization make phone calls and help them solicit donations. There so many things that we can do and it doesn’t necessarily have to be in person because there’s just so much anxiety about getting COVID-19. There are people that are stuck indoors and really suffering from that and so finding those ways to connect. The last one is: I highly suggest, not even trying something new, but maybe connecting with a hobby that you’ve done in the past, maybe it fell by the wayside.
If you’ve got a little bit more free time because you’re at home. Take up an old hobby or a new hobby. I tried something new this fall and it’s helped me because it’s something my husband really liked and so, it’s actually brought our relationship closer together. You’d be surprised at how, you know trying something new maybe with a friend that you can do virtually or picking up an old hobby can kind of really reinvigorate you. Those are just a few ways people can kind of cope and tailor it to themselves too.
Shelly Vitanza:
I love it. Those are great suggestions, and you forget. You kind of get down and you lose that creativity and that innovation, but these are good reminders of what we can do and what you can do. We’ve really only got one-minute left, but I want you to, if you can, Marie just give us a summary of what the health center does because it’s really a full-service clinic here on the Lamar University campus. Can you do that? You’ve got about a minute.
Marie Murray:
Yes! I can do that in a minute! So, the big thing since we just talked about mental health is just we do have counseling services and these counseling services as well as medical services, you’re coming in to see us or not, they are both offered by zoom. If you’re that person still kind of worried about coming in person, those medical and counseling services are both offered. We talked about COVID-19 testing because that’s the big thing right now, but you can still come in and get like a well-woman visit or just your regular basically what you’d go to see your primary care physician, you can come see us for. We’re here in person, but we’re also online. People have zoom, so we’re providing those services for students. We’ve got four amazing counselors that are really trying to stay on top of students’ emotional and mental health, so I can’t emphasize enough how important they are even if it’s just you need somebody to talk to, it’s confidential, they’re here for you.
Shelly Vitanza:
That’s great and you can find the student health center online at lamar.edu and get all the information you need. Marie, you are great! I appreciate it. Happy new year. Thank you for joining us and YOU, thanks for listening. Our listeners, we really appreciate you. I’m Shelly Vitanza, the Director of Public Affairs at Lamar University, the pride of southeast Texas.