Harry Potter fans will enjoy taking Mamta Accapadi's freshman course on Finding Your Patronus.

– Harry Potter’s first day at Hogwarts was exciting, confusing and a little bit scary – emotions that are not all that different than those experienced by many new college students nationwide.

At Oregon State University, however, freshmen have an opportunity to take special courses designed to help them get oriented to campus – using themes that include pop culture and social media. These “U-Engage” courses fill up fast. They are taught by a variety of administrators and faculty members, and include such themes as “Is Facebook a Noun or a Verb?” and “Exploring the Biology of Pandora.”

While the courses may have a catchy slant, they include important information, including practicing critical analysis, identifying campus resources, developing a sense of belonging and contributing to a diverse community – skills that will help them deal with future college courses and life on campus.

OSU Dean of Students Mamta Accapadi, a fervent Harry Potter fan, identifies strongly with the plucky, fiercely intellectual yet socially ostracized Hermione Granger. Accapadi is stepping into a teaching role this fall when she leads a special freshmen-only course called “Finding Your Patronus.” For Accapadi, the medium of Harry Potter is perfect for teaching students how to deal with a range of professorial personalities.

“You may even encounter a (Severus) Snape on campus,” she said – a reference to a classroom tyrant in the Harry Potter films.

“I’m hoping that I have a lot of Harry Potter fans in the room, so that everyone will start out having something in common,” Accapadi said. “I feel like that will minimize barriers and the class will gel way more quickly.”

Kris Winter, director of New Student Programs and Family Outreach at OSU, said they’ve asked the faculty and administrators teaching the courses to come up with themes that are in their area of interest.
“They focus on something they love and want to explore further,” Winter said. “It’s not every term you’re asked ‘What do you want to teach?’”

The classes may range in topic, but they all include a capstone assignment, reflecting writing and a fireside chat with various administrators to lessen the distance between incoming students and top level administrators.

Not all of the instructors are professors. Many, like Accapadi, have some teaching experience but have a different professional focus. U-Engage instructors have plenty of support as they prepare for their fall courses, including syllabus workshops and brown bag training sessions.

Laurie Bridges, for example, is the business and economics librarian with OSU libraries. She is taking part in the U-Engage program because it allows her to teach a subject she’s passionate about, social media. Bridges’ course, “A Life Lived Online: Social Media” will look at how communities are being created online, and how students interact with the digital world.

“As a librarian I know that the information landscape is drastically changing,” Bridges said. She’s going to be looking at how social media tools like Twitter and Facebook are altering how society is functioning, and how it might shape the future of careers and family.

No matter if students are exploring the complexities of Facebook or deciding that their leadership style is more Hufflepuff than Slytherin, they’ll hopefully emerge from fall term with a better sense of what it means to be a college student, and maybe, how to face those Snapes of the world with a little more courage.

For a full list of U-Engage courses, see http://oregonstate.edu/newstudents/u-engage/index.php.

~ Theresa Hogue

Eric Dickey spent a year "tweeting" short poems every day. (photo: Theresa Hogue)

My voice sings the song of the Scrub Jay. My Nightingale heart. The Oak tree my home, my belly full, sun in my feathers, my chicks sleeping.

Poetry may not be something Eric Dickey will ever make a living at, but it’s something that makes him feel alive. No matter how distracted he is by work duties or family obligations, he manages to find a creative outlet, even if it’s only 140 characters.

Dickey, who works for Oregon Sea Grant as an administrative program specialist, has been writing a poem on Twitter every day, Monday through Friday, for the last year. For those who aren’t familiar with the social media service, Twitter messages (“tweets”) are limited to 140 characters each, meaning Dickey had to make his poems extremely succinct.

Dickey graduated from Oregon State in 1998 with an honors degree in English, with a minor in philosophy, but didn’t end up getting into a graduate program. Instead, he began working as a grant writer, and eventually got a job at his alma mater, first in the department of economics, and later with Sea Grant. A lifelong poet, Dickey decided it wasn’t likely that he was ever going to live on poems alone, especially after getting married and having children, but he continued to get some of his works published, and was determined to always make room for poetry.

I run out of my office, down the stairs, out the sliding doors, up the sidewalk, across the street, and fall on the grass in a warm embrace.

When OSU began offering a masters degree in fine arts with an emphasis in poetry, Dickey took the opportunity to finally pursue his degree, but did it for his own gratification, rather than with the intent to switch his career path.

“Poetry is not a very lucrative business to get into,” he said.

But even writing for fun can be a chore, especially with a full time job, two children and outside projects like book reviews and poetry translations, and occasionally Dickey found himself in need of a literary jumpstart.

“It’s exhausting being creative 100 percent of the time,” he said.

That’s where his idea for a year-long Twitter project started. By pledging to write in a public space, he forced himself to be creative for at least five minutes every morning, and by keeping the poems to Tweet length, it didn’t become too burdensome of a process.

Standing at the edge of a line, waiting for the words to run, I start to shove lowercase letters. A verb looks at me askance, throws a fist.

Many of his poems are infused with observations about nature and Dickey’s surroundings. Others focus on his life as a young father, a topic he said is relatively unexplored by modern male poets. While writing about motherhood has been a staple of many female poets throughout the ages, he said explorations of the masculine in poetry rarely include children in the mix.

And while he admires the avant-garde, cutting edge work coming from today’s most popular poets, his approach is much more accessible and down-to-earth.

“Lately the topics have been about interpersonal relationships,” he said. “I try not to be too didactic.”

While Dickey focused on Twitter because he figured short poems wouldn’t take up too much of his time, he’s found the format to be challenging.

“Tweeting has allowed me to focus, but it’s very difficult to be evocative in so few words,” he said. “What I do in Twitter has also influenced my larger poems. You have to use very succinct language.”

A slate gray sky threatens rain and glares down at us blankly, not flinching, out-staring us like the snake we don’t see hiding in the rush.

He’s had some of his Twitter poems published in the poetry journal “Four and Twenty,” which prints only short poems, and one day he would like to gather a year’s worth of the tweets in a chapbook. Meanwhile, he took a month hiatus this summer from Twitter, but has started writing poems again this week.

This time, Dickey hasn’t set a time limit for his Twitter poems, but he will continue to use them as a creative outlet. More of his time in the next few months will be spent working on a collection of poems called “The Book of James,” about his brother, who died suddenly in 2008. He’s also trying to get a book published that he wrote exploring ideas about masculinity tied with cars and driving, called “Freeway.” It’s an updated version of his master’s thesis. His Twitter poems, however, more often feature another favored vehicle, his bicycle.

Night time bike ride, my headlight tells a story through darkness. Small raindrops pit and pat my jacket and land on my tissue paper cheeks.

To read Dickey’s poems on Twitter, see http://twitter.com/MePoet

~ Theresa Hogue