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(10/31/06 5:00am)
Every other Friday, junior Nikki Bean gets a paycheck. And more often than not, Bean says, she spends it all by the end of the weekend.
For Bean, it feels like a "little victory" when she finds something she likes on a shopping trip, whether she's in a supermarket or a clothing store. Sometimes she makes a purchase just to avoid coming home empty-handed.
Having a credit card would be "catastrophic," Bean said. As it is, she often moves money from her savings account to her checking account to prepare for trips.
Spending makes her happy, she said.
"There's a quote by Tammy Faye Bakker that I really like," she said. "It goes, 'I always say that shopping is cheaper than a psychiatrist.'"
But shopping and psychiatry no longer might be so mutually exclusive, according to the first study on compulsive buying to use a large general population sample.
The study, published earlier this month in the American Journal of Psychiatry, used a random sample, national household telephone survey to gather information.
They found a 5.8 percent rate of compulsive buying - which could represent more than 17 million people in the U.S. population.
Compulsive buyers are preoccupied with shopping at times they don't want to be, said Lorrin Koran, a Stanford University professor who led the study. They might shop online when they should be working or get lost at the mall for hours on end when they should be home with their families.
"If you're a compulsive buyer, you're frequently buying things you don't need, don't use, don't care about after you buy and often can't afford," Koran said. "Plus, you have distress about this behavior."
Compulsive buying is not listed in the fourth and most recent edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, also known as the "bible" of mental disorders.
It's hard to predict if compulsive shopping will make an appearance in the next manual, which will probably be published toward the end of the decade, Koran said. The APA will convene committees to look at the evidence that's accumulated since the last edition before making its decision, he said.
When a disorder appears in the manual, "it becomes something people can get health insurance for, stimulates research so people can study the same thing in a sense and it partially destigmatizes it," Koran said.
"The person is no longer irresponsible for having a moral failure."
Compulsive buying was first described in the 1920s in a German psychiatric textbook, Koran said. But little still is known about its causes and possible risk factors.
"We do know the disorder usually begins around college age when people first get access to money and credit cards," Koran said.
While UNC's Counseling and Wellness Services sees patients with shopping issues in the context of other disorders like bipolar disorder, clinical social worker Beth McElhinny said she isn't aware of anyone coming in specifically for compulsive buying.
But she said she isn't surprised at the rate that Koran's study found.
"We're in a consumer-driven population," she said. "With college students especially, there's a pressure to be trendy."
Compulsive buying might not be something people seek treatment for, McElhinny said.
Jon Abramowitz, a psychology professor at UNC, treated patients with compulsive shopping behavior when he worked at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.
"One woman went out and bought eight backpacks for her kids," he said. "Things she just did not need."
Workers at the Streets at Southpoint said they often see familiar customer faces.
"Over and over, all the time, people coming back," said Elinor Cohen, who works at Hair Sensations, a kiosk at the mall.
Abramowitz had patients keep track of their purchases, a form of self-monitoring.
"We'd have them take a notebook with them when they went shopping," he said.
"We look for triggers of buying episodes," Abramowitz said. "And we also look for patterns in terms of consequences."
Compulsive buying should not be confused with obsessive compulsive disorder, Abramowitz said.
"I think the word 'compulsive' has lost its meaning in our society," he said. While compulsive behavior is designed to reduce fear, impulsive actions are based on a reward mechanism, he said.
However, many aspects of compulsive buying will remain a mystery until more studies are done.
"We don't know a lot about this problem," Abramowitz said.
While Bean acknowledged that shopping can be damaging to finances and relationships, for her it's about fun and relaxation.
"It's the idea of getting something, a little personal treasure."
Contact the Features Editor at features@unc.edu.
(10/16/06 4:00am)
It's Thursday night, and Brian Sharpe and Michael Hamilton are holding down the House.
The Robert B. House Undergraduate Library, that is.
As overnight supervisors at one of the busiest spots on campus, open 24 hours Monday through Thursday, they say they've seen it all - hookups, breakdowns and everything in between.
Last week was less busy than usual for midterm season, they said, but sometimes they are surprised when they go on their hourly head counts, which start at 12:30 a.m.
"There's a lot more people here than you'd ever expect," said Sharpe, a junior political science and economics major. "Sometimes it's 3 a.m. and there's like 80 people here."
Hamilton, 23, who works full time, said the most shocking late-night occurrence is definitely the streaking. "I wasn't ready for that."
Porn-viewing is also a more frequent occurrence than either said they had expected.
"They'll just be taking a little break from studying - it's so weird . right over there," said Sharpe, motioning to the computer station near the circulation desk.
A board behind the circulation desk is dedicated to the "Wall of Shame," where mug shots commemorate various trespassing incidents.
"This one lady used to come in here and raise hell. . She bashed stuff with (a trash can) for no reason and harassed people who were studying," Sharpe said.
But usually there's not an issue with anything, he said. "Usually it's pretty peaceful. . It's chill here."
The volume the library sees spikes before fall break, said Hassan Nashid, who has worked as a security officer at the Undergrad for a year and a half. His shift generally lasts from 11:20 p.m. to 7:20 a.m.
He said his nightly interaction with students has helped him develop a positive rapport with them. They'll even pick up his favorite cookie at Alpine Bagel Cafe.
"One boy tonight asked for my e-mail because he went to Ghana and wanted to show me pictures," he said.
In his time patrolling the library, Nashid said he has seen everything from pajamas to costumes to no clothes at all.
"I haven't seen any love fests, but one of the great things about the library is that people build relationships. There's a lot of people that date and come to study - I'm sure there's a lot of marriages that come from the library."
UNC students are great people, he said. "I can honestly say they aren't wasting their parents' money because they are here all night."
Nashid said he wouldn't be as challenged or have as much fun anywhere else.
"The Undergraduate Library offers a little bit of everything. The only thing we don't have is cookies. But they're close."
Contact the Features Editor at features@unc.edu.
(09/13/06 4:00am)
Christian Kunkel and Kyle Lininger want to bring beer pong to the masses.
While surfing in Hawaii this summer, the entrepreneurs founded the American Beerpong Association of America with a lofty goal - to be the ultimate governing body of the most popular drinking game, said Kunkel, a 2006 Duke University grad from Harrisburg, Pa.
"As we see it, beer pong right now is an underground sport," said Lininger, a 2006 graduate of Vanderbilt University. "It's played behind closed doors."
Kunkel and Lininger plan to change that.
They're traveling in an RV to host tournament events at 60 colleges. The ABAA National Tour kicked off Thursday at N.C. State University.
It will make its second stop tonight at La Residence Restaurant and Bar on Rosemary Street.
Registration to become one of UNC's official beer pong champions starts at 10 p.m. Balls will fly at 10:30 p.m.
The premise is simple: two-player teams will toss ping-pong balls into beer-filled cups. If the ball goes in, the opposing team drinks. The first team to eliminate the other teams' cups will move one step closer to beer pong glory.
A $5 cover at the bar includes tournament entry and prizes, but contenders also will pay for drinks.
"We are trying to push the fraternity scene. Frats love beer pong," Kunkel said.
The ABAA has never run an event on a Wednesday, but Kunkel said he expects the crowd to be a few hundred strong.
"We want to get (people) . out of the dorm rooms. There's something wrong with that, you know?" Lininger said. "When you're in college, you've got to live it up."
After conducting an online survey involving more than 250 colleges and universities, the ABAA established official rules to reconcile regional differences in game regulation. The final compilation is available at www.theabaa.com.
According to the survey, almost 70 percent of respondents reported using the name "beer pong" to refer to the game. For that reason the ABAA uses that term in its name.
"Beirut", however, is viewed as an acceptable alias, according to the Web site.
"We've done a lot of research and we understand beer pong better than anyone else," Kunkel said.
Kunkel and Lininger spent the past two days decked out in official ABAA gear giving out fliers on North Campus.
On Tuesday, they tried to set up a water-pong game in the Pit but were asked to shut it down by a representative of the Student Union because they hadn't reserved space.
Senior Breana Lai laughed when she read her flier outside the Undergraduate Library.
"It's interesting because everyone has their own set of beer pong rules," said Lai, a nutrition major. "I guess there's a need to standardize."
Reaction from UNC students has been positive, Lininger said.
"The smiles aren't always joking," he said. "There are more that are like, 'Oh my god, that's so cool.'"
Kunkel said he's seen similar reaction when recruiting tournament participants.
"A lot of guys will say 'I'm unbeatable, I'll definitely be there.' People get pretty excited."
Senior Jake Hamrick, a political science major who is "fairly decent" at beer pong, said he might make it out to the event tonight.
"It's a fun and competitive way to drink beer," he said.
While junior Sam Thorp wasn't as sold on the merits of beer pong, he said he still might show up,
"I actually think the game sucks," Thorp said. "It usually involves expensive beer, and I don't want to drink something that had a ball in it when God knows whose hands have been on it."
Thorp said that his brothers, however, are "phenomenal" at beer pong, and that he loves the chosen venue.
As for the ABAA, Kunkel said the double-country reference in the name says it all.
"Beer pong is for America," he said. "And America is for beer pong. That's why we emphasize America - for emphasis."
Contact the Features Editor at features@unc.edu.
(08/30/06 4:00am)
Johnny Lechner isn't just a guy who wakes up in his toga at noon everyday.
"Sure that is happening some days a week definitely, but I couldn't have done that for 12 years," said Lechner, 29, who is at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater for his thirteenth and final year of college.
"It was more or less my friends started to graduate, and I got cold feet, didn't know what I wanted to do with my life," Lechner said of his decision to spend more than a decade as an undergraduate.
He could graduate now with three majors and three minors, but he opted to wait one more year to study abroad - for the second time.
The extended education student has become so famous - or infamous - in Wisconsin that the state legislature passed a law requiring students with three majors and three minors to pay double tuition.
But he would not have been able to stick around as long at UNC.
"I think we would have caught him," said Bobbi Owen, senior associate dean for undergraduate education.
UNC discourages students from extending their college careers a la fictitious career college student Van Wilder.
More UNC students are graduating within four years than in the past, and the Board of Trustees recently instructed the University to improve graduation and retention rates even more, Owen said.
Traditionally students could complete nine semesters without a formal petition to remain at UNC. But Owen said this year UNC, like the University of Virginia, will start the paperwork after eight semesters.
And in light of the new option to have three areas of study, Owen said rules were amended to keep students from delaying graduation to fit an extra major or minor.
"We're not going to let that happen," she said. Now if a student delays graduation for a fifth year, they can only graduate with one major.
Of the class that entered UNC in 1969, 52.1 percent graduated in four years and 64.7 percent graduated in six.
Fast-forward three decades, and it's another story. Of the class that entered in 1999, 70.5 percent graduated in four years and 83.7 percent graduated in six - both figures are above the average for peer institutions.
Owen is quick to point out that last spring, only 84 students pursued a tenth semester.
"If you don't graduate somebody else doesn't get to come," she said.
A UNC super senior would have had to start paying a 25 percent tuition surcharge under N.C. law when he exceeded 110 percent of the credit hours he needed for an additional degree.
While Lechner purposefully extended his college career, many at UNC said they are taking extra semesters out of necessity. Owen said they blame finances, medical problems and switches in majors.
Senior Christine Pate is back for her ninth and final semester this fall. She changed majors several times, suffered a bad case of strep throat and was bitten by a copperhead snake outside her dorm, causing her to miss a week of school. After feeling "ungrounded" at UNC initially, Pate said she finally feels comfortable with her path.
She will graduate in December with a bachelor's degree in biology and Spanish and hopes to work with Heifer International, a humanitarian organization.
"I'm less stressed out (this year) because I know what I want to do," Pate said.
Senior Jennifer Poole faces three semesters ahead of her before graduation. But she thinks it's a better fate than the alternative.
"I could graduate in the spring if I were to take both summer sessions next year," she said, "but I have better things to do."
A transfer from Richmond, the American International University in London, Poole switched majors from environmental studies to environmental science.
She said it's weird to think of her friends graduating before her.
"I do want to make a shirt that says 'I'm coming around for a victory lap,'" she said.
But even Lechner, who was recently featured in People magazine's hottest bachelors issue, knows there's a time to move on.
He'll document his last year on his Web site, www.johnnylechner.com, where surfers can check an online graduation countdown and donate to his college fund.
"You'd be surprised how generous people are," Lechner said. "There are a lot of people that want to live vicariously through what I'm doing."
For his last year he's concentrating on finding a hot tub for his pad. He's also helping friends along the path of extended education.
Pate said she also is ready for the next step.
"I'm ready to graduate," she said. "I feel a responsibility to graduate and use what I've learned."
Contact the Features Editor at features@unc.edu.
(04/28/06 4:00am)
Sept. 16, 2005 - In the fall of 1950, then-Student Body President John Sanders stood in front of an all-white crowd at UNC's annual fall convocation and predicted a monumental change was en route.
"I remember saying, 'It is probable that in the course of your stay here we will have black students in the student body,'" says Sanders, former director of the Institute of Government. "'And they will be accepted without differentiation.'"
While Sanders' prediction wasn't exactly on the mark, his prophecy came true exactly fifty years ago.
On Sept. 17, 1955, Leroy Frasier, Ralph Frasier and John Lewis Brandon - graduates of Durham's all-black Hillside High School - attended their first classes at UNC. The trio became the first black undergraduates to be admitted in the University's 166-year history.
The date simultaneously marked the first time that blacks were accepted as undergraduates at any state university in the Southeast.
Life on campus
Brandon says the culture in Chapel Hill was different from other places at that time.
"We didn't have that large a problem in Chapel Hill," he says. "In my classes, I never had negative-type behaviors shown at me."
Charles E. Daye, who became the first black to join the faculty of UNC's School of Law, says students were more open to the change than the country as a whole.
"Students were ahead of the social curve of the time," he says.
All three men commuted to campus at first. Then in the spring semester of his freshman year, Brandon opted to live in a special section of Steele Building - which then served as a residence hall - that University officials set aside for him and seven other black graduate students.
Although dormitories were segregated, remaining that way until September 1964, Brandon and the Frasier brothers ate at the same dining hall as white students without incident.
"The integration of campus facilities came somewhat ahead of other communities at large," Sanders says. "In 1950 there was no place I could have taken a black guest for dinner - in 1960, for that matter."
The impact of Brown
Black students had been enrolled in graduate programs at UNC since 1951, when five men transferred from the N.C. College in Durham to UNC's law school.
Daye says he doesn't think the undergraduate school could have been integrated before Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954.
"You have to prove that the education was unequal, which was far more difficult to do for an entire university itself rather than just a law school," he says.
"We would still be litigating today if it wasn't for Brown."
Ralph Frasier told The Daily Tar Heel in 2003 that reporters for the student newspaper's staff approached his high school for black applicants.
"This whole effort was initiated by students at (UNC) who, following the Brown decision in 1954, believed that (UNC) should be on the front edge and took the initiative to see if the University would voluntarily admit African-Americans," Frasier had said.
Other groups, such as student government and the YMCA, sent the new students letters of congratulation.
"Student leaders were more aware of racial issues, more concerned with treating blacks justly," Sanders says. "Vocal students such as those in student government and The Daily Tar Heel had established a pattern of acceptance and not of resistance."
Contact the Features Editor at features@unc.edu.
(10/11/05 4:00am)
On Jan. 15, 1795, a delegation led by Gov. Richard Dobbs Spaight struggled through a severe downpour and treacherous paths to reach a place called New Hope Chapel Hill.
(10/11/05 4:00am)
Before he left for France to fight in World War I, Robert B. House, a 1916 first-honors graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, sent Frank Porter Graham a letter in which he made his loyalties clear.
(10/11/05 4:00am)
Although the dining hall that has stood in the Pit since 1939 carries his namesake, many are not aware that Gen. William Lenoir put what is arguably the first culinary stamp on the University.
(09/16/05 4:00am)
In the fall of 1950, then-Student Body President John Sanders stood in front of an all-white crowd at UNC's annual fall convocation and predicted a monumental change was en route.
(08/31/05 4:00am)
Many high-school graduates are anxious about the demanding classes that await them on college campuses this fall.
(08/30/05 4:00am)
The life of a college student is a life envied by many.
(08/29/05 4:00am)
Freshman Abbas Rattani tasted defeat on his first day as a UNC student, but he remains undaunted as he enters his first week at college.
(04/26/05 4:00am)
Blenders are buzzing, burgers are sizzling and oldies are drifting gently through the bright booths of Sutton’s Drug Store at lunch hour.
(04/15/05 4:00am)
When one of Jay Smith’s students wants to make a trip to the restroom during an exam, he’d better be prepared for a quick detour.
(04/11/05 4:00am)
Correction
Due to an editing error, the photo caption accompanying the April 11 article “Diverse group steps out in sync” states that Morgan State University is located in Florida. The university is in Maryland.
(02/28/05 5:00am)
With dozens of dance marathons taking place annually at schools nationwide, fund-raising tactics vary significantly, and success hinges on variables ranging from the unpredictable to the deliberate.
(01/31/05 5:00am)
Maha Alattar waited a long time for Sunday, the official Election Day in Iraq.
(01/24/05 5:00am)
Those familiar with University lore know Cornelia Phillips Spencer best as the woman who rang the bell.
(01/13/05 5:00am)
Sophomore Andrew Zoeller said he doesn’t know that much about Chancellor James Moeser.
(11/19/04 5:00am)
Junior Becca Frazier said she thought it was "pretty cool" when senior Kelsey Keeran lost the top part of her finger at field hockey practice earlier this year.