News Updates
The 2011 Westover Freshman Retreat, August 16 - 17
Six Westover Honors upperclassmen and our three directors joined forty-one Honors freshmen at the annual retreat at Wilderness Adventures at Eagle Landing. A senior sums up the experience:
As a freshman to the Society and LC, the retreat enhanced my personality in ways I would never have expected. I was not an outgoing person but the activities we did during the retreat enabled me to embrace myself, gain self-confidence, and make lasting bonds with my fellow members. I appreciated the fact that we did a variety of activities, ranging from seemingly silly ice-breakers to independent high ropes challenges. I could not have asked for a better freshman orientation . . . Even though the retreat lasts for little more than twenty-four hours, the two bus rides are completely different. On the way to the site the bus is rather quiet and there is a certain nervous tension among the students. On the way back to school the chatter never dies. Something special seems to occur during [the] night we stay in the lodge, something that happens each year.
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Fellows Participate in Summer Research
Two Westover Honors students joined REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) programs this summer.
Brandon Gannicott, a sophomore from Evergreen, Virginia, and a computer science major, traveled to the University of South Carolina to participate in that school's National Science Foundation-sponsored REU Program in Multidisciplinary Computing. More than 80 students applied for the eight available positions in this highly competitive program. Brandon and the seven other students from across the country actively engaged in research focused on software engineering during the eight-week program. These students defined a project-independent model, generated a prototype application, and then modified the presentation and business rules to develop a finished web-based application. The goal of the project was to enhance the ease with which software can be produced and increase the robustness of the resultant software.
Michael Blatnik from Bedford, Virginia, graduated with a mathematics and physics double major in May, 2011. He returned to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) at Green Bank, West Virginia, and continued work on an REU project. Michael helped created computer programs to mine the metadata archives of the Green Bank telescope 
for usage and statistical purposes. He worked with the NRAO Green Bank and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to prepare a histogram of electromagnetic frequency observed vs. time spent observing at that same frequency for the Green Bank telescope over the last 10 years of operation. This was a timely project, since the data will be used by NSF to help allocate the use of frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum for cell phones, television, radio, military use, and radio astronomy.
