Brazil … Brazil, Brazil, Brazil …

~Meaghan Dorff, Staff Writer

Bedecked in the… Brazil … Brazil, Brazil, Brazil …

~Meaghan Dorff, Staff Writer

Bedecked in the blue, yellow and green of the Brazilian flag, the William Pitt Union Ballroom bustled with students who came to celebrate the fifth annual Brazilian Festival Friday.

“I came out to support a cultural event,” sophomore Dio Kavalieratos said. “Hopefully it’ll promote cultural awareness and interest.”

Nicole Recchilongo, the vice president of the student group Brazil Nuts Portuguese Club, said that the event was intended to entertain and educate students on the South American nation.

“The festival is really to bring Brazilian culture to Pitt, to provide food, entertainment, dancing, singing,” she said.

From 6 p.m. until midnight, onlookers enjoyed dance performances from student groups, a presentation from the Caribbean and Latin American Student Association, and free Brazilian food.

“The food is great,” freshman Aly Ferguson said. “I love any food that’s not American.”

The Brazil Nuts sponsored the festival with the help of the Japanese Speaking Society, CLASA, the Students of the Department of Africana Studies and LACU.

Research given date-like atmosphere

~Konrad Klinkner, Staff Writer

Attention all single grad students and faculty: If you’re on the prowl for some sexy academic researchers, the School of Information Sciences has just the program for you.

Well, it’s not quite like that.

The program is called “Speed Networking: Meet Your Research Partner,” and its goal is to create potential research partnerships by gathering together graduate students and faculty and running them through sets of exercises based on popular “speed dating” exercises.

The “Speed Networking” program is the brainchild of students enrolled in an SIS library science graduate course at Pitt called “Library Marketing.”

The program is essentially their final project.

The class gave their idea its first-ever run last Thursday in the William Pitt Union. The date coincided with National Library Week.

A total of eight participants – four grad students, three faculty members and one Carnegie Mellon grad student – attended the inaugural session of “Speed Networking.”

The participants represented a fairly wide span of fields, ranging from information science to engineering to pharmacy.

The participants went through an hour-long session in which they sat in two rows of chairs facing each other. Each person was initially given allotments of two minutes to talk to the person across from him or her about research projects before a moderator called time and asked one row to shift seats and start over with new partners.

Although the number of participants was small, people organizing the event were optimistic about the program’s potential and heartened by the participants’ enthusiasm. The participants became involved enough that they quickly demanded longer increments of time to talk with one another.

“They’re asking for more time, so [the project] is definitely going well,” program spokesperson Denise Plaskon remarked. “We might do this again for the annual SIS ‘I-Fest’ later this year.”

Graduate student James “Kip” Currier added, “I think [Speed Networking] is a brilliant idea with a lot of potential.”

Currier did not end up finding a research partner, but he still felt “Speed Networking” was a worthwhile exercise simply for the opportunity to rub shoulders with fellow researchers.

“I think it was great,” he continued. “It was an excellent opportunity to meet people in such different research niches and to learn what others are researching.”