Samantha Stainburn

The Sophomore Slump

(The New York Times, 01 November 2013)

Pity the sophomore. You are feted as a freshman, but no one seems to care that you’re back on campus. Quirky first-year seminars have been replaced by large foundation classes, making you doubt that major in econ or bio. You’re not high enough up the totem pole to do fun stuff like join a research team or lead student organizations. With the newness of college gone, malaise sets in.

The “sophomore slump” helps explain the findings of a 2012 report by the Education Advisory Board — that 6 percent of students at state flagship campuses leave in their second year. It may also explain why a quarter of sophomores in a 2012 survey by the consulting firm Noel-Levitz reported not being energized by their classes or feeling at home on their campus.

Dissatisfaction with how college is going is in itself not a bad thing, says David Shein, dean of studies at Bard College. “Whether it comes off as a slump depends on how you handle it.”

GET WITH THE PROGRAM

Some colleges are trying to make sophomores feel less like overlooked middle children. This year, Ohio State University is piloting a program to increase sophomore-faculty interaction. One thousand sophomores are living in dorms visited regularly by faculty mentors, who help them set goals and plan an educational experience like studying abroad or interning, for which $2,000 stipends are available.

Purdue University recently announced its fourth sophomore-only “learning community.” Starting next fall, 20 second-year students interested in statistics will live together, take classes together and work on a full-year research project, and earn a $9,400 stipend. (The other communities focus on leadership and science and technology research.) “Sophomores struggle with academic engagement, and a learning community allows a student to explore a topic out of the classroom with faculty members,” says Jared Tippets, Purdue’s director of Student Success.

STUDY AROUND

Big decisions loom sophomore year: what are you going to major in and, by extension, do with your life? Angst about committing to one path, and rejecting others, can cast a pall over the second year.

“We enter college with all of these dreams about what we’re going to be, and we have to put some of those to rest in the second year,” says Molly A. Schaller, a University of Dayton professor who studies the second-year slump. “Even if it was Mom and Dad’s dream, it feels like a loss.”

Often, struggling with a second-year course indicates that a career in the subject is not meant to be. But not always. Dr. Shein of Bard poses the question: “Are you struggling because you like the material but you’re having difficulty with some of the components, or are you not engaged with it?”

If it’s the former, tutoring in your weak skills could get you back on track. If you’re bored with what you’re studying, Dr. Schaller says, “redouble your efforts to figure out where you fit in.” Meet with professors, try different classes, get involved with new clubs.

Above all, she says, don’t settle for a major because you haven’t explored enough to find what you really like.

CHANGE UP FRIENDS

Not everyone falls in with lifelong friends as a freshman, but in the strange social universe of college, it’s socially taboo to jettison students you hung out with in the first year.

That doesn’t mean you’re stuck with people you don’t click with, says Andrew Wilson, senior associate dean for external relations in the office of campus life at Emory University.

While a confrontational end to relationships isn’t acceptable, Dr. Wilson says, “friendships can also dissolve in a nebulous, unstructured way. It’s fairly easy to fade away from people if you aren’t feeling connected to them. Blame your schedule.”

Dr. Wilson should know about such things. For many years he oversaw the Second Year at Emory program, which places advisers in residence halls and organizes dinners with faculty members and workshops on goal-setting for sophomores. And the focus of his research: college friendships.

Read this article at the New York Times.

Burdens of Operating a Century-Old Brand

(Crain’s Chicago Business)

A three-piece suit from the Hart Schaffner Marx archives.

Chicago’s Largest Public Companies — No. 90: Hartmarx Corp.

They may carry BlackBerrys instead of fountain pens, but many executives still sport the suit label their great-grandpas wore: Hart Schaffner Marx.

Founded in Chicago in 1887, Hartmarx Corp. has a longstanding reputation for high-quality tailoring that has helped it grow from a single, family-owned clothing store into a $600-million company that is the largest suit maker in America.

Hartmarx makes suits under 14 labels it owns or licenses, including Hart Schaffner Marx, a classic line that retails for upwards of $700 in stores like Macy’s, and Hickey Freeman, a luxury line aimed at CEOs that sells for $1,200 at Neiman Marcus.

But maintaining a century-old brand has burdens, too. “Every 10 or 20 years, you have to make some dramatic changes,” CEO Homi Patel, 57, says. “If you get stuck in what you did before and are not constantly evolving, it can be a problem.”

One advantage Hartmarx has over competitors trolling for women’s brands is a reputation for giving designers creative freedom, says Gary Giblen, an analyst with Brean Murray Carret & Co. in New York. “Most other companies centralize everything and make it hard for an entrepreneur to stay on,” he says.In 1982, Hartmarx branched into men’s sportswear, manufacturing golf apparel by Jack Nicklaus and polo shirts and slacks for British label Ted Baker. More recently, it embraced women’s apparel. Through acquisitions, it owns 10 womenswear lines, a division that has grown from 8% of business in 2004 to 25% today.

That’s an important edge as Hartmarx continues to diversify its clothing lines, a strategy that has become crucial as more companies relax their office dress codes. In the early 1980s, 95% of company revenues came from suit sales. Today, it’s 48%.

Last year, Hartmarx took a hit on its suit lines when department stores Marshall Field’s and Saks Fifth Avenue changed hands. The new owners pared the higher-end brands and pushed their own private labels, causing Hartmarx’s net earnings to plunge 69% year-on-year to $7.3 million. To compensate, Hartmarx is boosting production of its luxury brands and looking for new customers abroad.

Last December, it licensed the Hart Schaffner Marx name to Youngor Group Co. Ltd., the largest men’s apparel manufacturer and retailer in China. The agreement calls for 400 stores across China in 20 years. Six of those stores are scheduled to open in the Shanghai area this fall.

Hartmarx is seeking similar partners in India and Vietnam. If all goes well, Asian businessmen won’t just be buying a suit; they’ll be starting a family tradition.

Read this article at Crain’s Chicago Business.

How Do You Say ‘Profit’ in Chinese?

(Crain’s Chicago Business, 16 April 2007)

Chicago’s Largest Private Companies — No. 291: W.S. Darley & Co.

Weapons factories aren’t the only businesses that profit from troubled times. Take W. S. Darley & Co., which makes fire trucks, pumps and firefighting equipment.

Since Sept. 11, the federal government has given $4 billion to municipal fire departments to increase emergency preparedness, which they’re doing in part by purchasing new equipment from Darley. U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan also need firefighting gear. Last year, a single order from the coalition of forces in Iraq brought in $3 million.

All this adds up to higher sales. Last year, revenue was $57.5 million, up 11% from the previous year, according to Darley.

It’s not the first time conflict has given the company a boost. During World War II, Darley supplied the U.S. military with thousands of pumps, many of which were left behind in Europe, Asia and Australia when the troops returned. That jump-started Darley’s international business, unusual for a company of its size. Today, 25% to 30% of its revenue comes from sales overseas.

When Chicago inventor William Stewart Darley started the company in 1925, he cut manufacturing costs by attaching a firetruck cabin to a Ford chassis rather than to a custom-built frame, allowing him to sell a truck for $695. New towns that couldn’t afford the $5,000 vehicles offered by other manufacturers lined up at Darley’s door.

When competitors tried to squelch his success by getting pump manufacturers to stop selling to him, Mr. Darley hired the chief engineer away from one of those companies and started his own pump factory in Chippewa Falls, Wis., in 1932. Darley still runs that plant, plus another in Toledo, Ore. Pumps are its core business, accounting for 45% of revenue.

The company, now run by three of Mr. Darley’s grandsons, Paul, Peter and Jeff, plans to expand by starting a new division to build custom pumps for other firetruck companies and finding new uses for its pumps, like purifying water.

More overseas business is in the offing, too, particularly from China, which buys more than $10 million worth of pumps from Darley a year. Yankee ingenuity is not the only appeal for these customers.

“As luck would have it, the word ‘Darley’ sounds like ‘Da-li,’ which means ‘strength’ in Chinese,” Paul Darley says.

Read this article at Crain’s Chicago Business.

Q&A: Advice From an Old, and Notorious, Pro

(Crain’s Chicago Business, 26 February 2007)

Just because criminals have moved online doesn’t mean they’ve stopped going through your garbage, says fraud expert Frank Abagnale Jr. He would know. His life as a con artist from age 16 to 21 was the inspiration for the 2002 Leonardo DiCaprio movie “Catch Me if You Can.” Crain’s asked Mr. Abagnale, 58, how businesses can protect themselves against security threats.

What financial crimes threaten companies the most in the Internet age?
It’s amazing to say this, but check forgery is still huge in the U.S. Last year, $20.6 billion in losses occurred from check forgery, with banks taking about 10% of those losses and businesses taking 90%. I’ve been teaching check forgery at the FBI Academy for 32 years, and I always thought it would go away, but it’s still as popular as ever.

Why?
We’re still very much a check-user society. Americans write 39 billion checks every year. Seventy-five percent of all payments from one company to another are made by check, even though we have the Automated Clearing House Network (a national electronic funds transfer system) and wire transfers.

Has technology made forgery easier to commit?
Yes. Forty years ago, if I was going to forge a company check, I needed a Heidelberg printing press, which costs $1 million. It was 90 feet long and 18 feet high. You had to know color separation, typesetting and graphic art. Today, you sit down at a laptop and pull up United Airlines’ Web site. You capture their logo in color and maybe one of their 747s taking off and you put that on the screen in check format. In 15 minutes, you have a check 10 times nicer looking than United’s actual checks.

What does a company that’s a soft target look like?
It’s a company that leaves information everywhere. If I was doing this today, I would be looking at doctors’ offices and those independent insurance agents who are one guy alone in a strip mall with a secretary. In a typical doctor’s office, the files are in a file cabinet without doors. I would find a janitor who cleans that building and say to him, “I don’t know what they pay you, but I’ll give you $100 for each file you pull down. I’m not asking you to steal anything — just copy their Social Security number, date of birth and name onto a Post-it Note.”

How could a company stop something like that?
You can never be 100% risk-free, but you can make it difficult for people to steal from you. For example, replace your garbage cans with shredders. Shredders are so inexpensive and quiet today that you should have one at every desk. Also, criminals will notice if you buy checks with no security features on them at Staples, so buy controlled check paper that’s not available through wholesalers.

Should business owners worry about how much access their employees have to company information?
Yes. You wouldn’t believe how many companies have their bookkeepers write, sign and reconcile their checks. Under the law, if a bank can prove that the bookkeeper does all this, the bank has zero liability. The owners say, “I trust her; she’s been with me a long time.” Well, the embezzler is always the trusted employee. After a while, the bookkeeper says, “This guy doesn’t know if he’s got $1.34 million or $1.33 million. If I take $10,000, he’s not going to know.”

What can companies do to protect themselves from their employees?
There’s software that allows companies to control who sees information. So if my secretary started to download my clients’ personal information, the computer would freeze up. The most expensive I’ve ever seen is $100,000, and there are more-affordable versions for small businesses.

Do companies need to spend a lot of money to protect themselves from financial criminals?
No. You can make minor changes that won’t cost a lot. For example, don’t have your officers’ signatures in your annual report on white paper with black ink that anyone can scan and put on a check. Also, I recommend that all companies use Positive Pay, a simple, free or low-cost service offered by most major banks. You write checks and, at the end of each day, your office downloads to your bank what’s called an “issue file.” It says to the bank, “Here’s all the checks we wrote today, the check number, dollar amount and who we wrote the checks to.” When they come back to your bank, each check has to match the file you sent or the bank will not pay.

Read this article at Crain’s Chicago Business.

Q&A: What Is Political Asylum?

(GlobalPost.com, 03 July 2013)

“Helmet,” Seth Cohen.

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, charged with espionage by the US government, is desperately trying to obtain asylum in another country.

GlobalPost asked Ashley Huebner, managing attorney for the National Immigrant Justice Center’s Asylum Project, for a primer on what asylum is and how hard it is to get. This interview was edited and condensed by GlobalPost.

What is political asylum?

People often call it political asylum, but it’s just asylum nowadays. It started out as being much more politically-based after World War II, but today you can get asylum based on your political opinion, your race, your religion, your nationality or your membership in a particular social group.

The purpose of the benefit is to provide protection to somebody who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of nationality because they have a well-founded fear of persecution by the government or an entity the government can’t or won’t control.

In order to get asylum, what do you typically have to prove?

The first thing you have to prove is you have a well-founded fear, which in the United States means you have to have at least a 10 percent chance of being persecuted if you go back to your country. If you’ve been persecuted in the past, it’s presumed you’re going to be persecuted in the future.

You have to prove you will suffer or have suffered persecution – that’s a legal term. It tends to be any kind of harm, harassment or discrimination that’s risen to a certain level in order to constitute persecution.

Then it has to be on account of political opinion, race, religion, nationality or group membership. So it can’t be general violence in a country. In a political opinion case, it can be your actual political opinion – you’re a human rights activist in a dictatorship – or it can be a political opinion that’s imputed to you – maybe your parents were political activists, or you’re from a particular region that’s known for being rebellious.

Several countries – including Spain, Ireland, Ecuador, Austria and Finland – have said that Snowden’s asylum requests can’t be processed because he is not in their country. Is this typical of asylum systems?

Yes. It’s the general rule with asylum and the general difference between asylum and refugee status. Refugees have been determined to meet that definition somewhere outside, and they come in with that status already.

Snowden has applied for asylum in 21 countries. Is it easier to get asylum in some countries versus others?

There are countries, typically in the developing world, that simply don’t accept any kind of refugees or asylum-seekers. In Western countries, they’re all within a certain level of each other. Some have more benefits while you’re waiting for a decision in your case, others don’t. Others may have specific policies, such as maybe they have a good policy for people from certain countries but for other countries they’re more strict, or essentially racist. I wouldn’t say that there’s any country that has an absolutely fantastic asylum system.

What do you think of Snowden’s chances of obtaining asylum?

In the Snowden case, where it becomes tricky is there’s this prosecution versus persecution issue. On the one hand, a government has the right to uphold its laws and punish those who don’t follow the laws. The question can become, ‘Is the law legitimate?’ Someone could still be eligible for asylum because it’s not a law that we would consider the country has the right to have. Or maybe the law is legitimate but the punishment is so severe that it changes from prosecution to persecution.

If he was coming from another country and requesting asylum in the US, I think he’d have a hard time proving his case because of the prosecution versus persecution issue. But maybe some country that wants to thumb its nose at us will grant him some kind of protection.

Read this article at PRI.org/GlobalPost.com.

Image by Seth Cohen. Used with permission.

Nelson Mandela’s Greatest Speeches (VIDEO)

(GlobalPost.com, 05 December 2013)

From his first television interview in 1961 to the video messages he recorded for South Africans after he retired as president, Nelson Mandela was a masterful communicator, adept at finding common ground with people even as he took tough positions on complicated issues.

First television interview (1961)