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SMU mourns loss of beloved former vice president
"Jim Caswell devoted his professional life to the well-being of our students, providing them with a campus experience that would strengthen their educational and personal development," said SMU President R. Gerald Turner."As an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church, he exemplified the values of our religious heritage and served as official liaison to the Church," Turner added. "Generations of students benefited from his leadership, thoughtfulness, and caring manner. They showed their appreciation by honoring him with many University service awards, and have stayed in touch with him as a friend and mentor. We will miss his presence among our University family, but his impact on our campus will endure. Our heartfelt prayers go to his family and other loved ones."
It is estimated that, starting from the time he first worked as a graduate residence hall director, he would have touched the lives of nearly 40,000 SMU students, out of SMU's alumni population of 100,000.
A memorial service celebrating his life was held Thursday, Oct. 25, at Highland Park United Methodist Church.
Memorial contributions may be made to the Jim Caswell Endowment for Leadership Development and Training at SMU or the American Cancer Society. For more information on the Leadership endowment, contact Bonner Allen at 214-768-2986, by e-mail at bonnera@smu.edu, or at SMU Box 750305, Dallas, TX 75275.
To succeed, discover your strengths
To succeed in today's workplace, employees must have very clear ideas about their own strengths and weaknesses, said pioneering researcher and best-selling author Marcus Buckingham during the Turner Construction Student Forum on Tuesday, October 16.Unfortunately, he continued, "Most of us are just rubbish at it. The most popular answer in job interviews to the question 'What are your strengths?' is 'I like working with people," or "I'm a people person" -- with no mention of which people or what you're doing with these people."
Buckingham, co-author of First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, interviewed thousands of employees in his 17 years with the Gallup Organization and developed StrengthsFinder, an online assessment that identifies a person's top five of 34 possible strengths. First-year SMU students who attended Mustang Corral this summer took the assessment through the Division of Student Affairs' StrengthsQuest program.
Here are highlights of Buckingham's question-and-answer session with SMU and area high school students before his talk at McFarlin Auditorium as part of the Willis M. Tate Distinguished Lecture Series.
Do you believe leadership skills are innate, or can they be taught?
There are skills you can learn as a leader -- to set clear strategy, to be vivid as you describe a better future for people. But there are some that are better to be born with. I'll give you two:
First, you better have an unfailingly optimistic view of the world. If instead you are naturally wired to see everything that can go wrong with the world, there are jobs for you -- go be a lawyer. [Laughter.] The challenge for leadership is to see the world as a better place and believe deeply, unquestionably, that it can be so.
The second thing you need is an ego. If you're going to drag me as a follower into this better future that you see so clearly, you better believe that you have a right to do so.
By the way, start really early as a leader. Volunteer for as many leadership positions as you can -- in school, in your community. You're going to learn a ton about what makes people want to follow you.
What are your top five strengths on StrengthsFinder, and how do you use them?
First is "Futuristic." I'm the guy who goes, "Wouldn't it be great if ...?"
"Context" is my second one. It asks, "How did we get here?"
"Focus" is my third. You have to 'fess up really early in life to who you are and who you aren't, and one thing I know I'm not is a multitasker.
"Intellection" is the next one. I like to have time alone; I'm not good at cocktail parties.
And last, "Ideation." I'm a concept guy. I like going beneath the surface.
How do I use them? Like you, I play them all the time. The challenge is how to channel them productively.
When you're interviewing, how do you know whether a job is the right fit?
There are three questions you tend to ask yourself:
Why is this job important to me? Who's going to be working there? What am I actually going to be doing?
Normally, people ask the "why" question first. Why do I want to be a vet? Because I like caring for pets. Why do I want to be a teacher? Because I like teaching.
The one that should be the most important is the "what" question. What are you actually going to be doing every day?
What you'll find in your career is that you join because of the why, you stay because of the who, and you quit physically or psychologically because the what goes wrong. You still like the why, but the actual stuff you do in the course of a week drains you -- it's not the right stuff for you.
What is the difference between managing and leading?
They're two very different jobs, and very few people excel at both.
The job of a leader is to rally a lot of people to a better future. Leadership is not about strategy; the critical skill you need is clarity. People are frightened of the future because they're frightened of change -- and they're not silly to be frightened of change; they're sensible. What a leader does well is get them all to see, "Don't worry. There's a land of milk and honey, and it looks like this."
The job of a manager is to turn one person's talent into performance. You hire a person, then you go, "Who are you? Oh, yes. Now, how do I turn that into performance?" That's a one-by-one-by-one-by-one job.
So the trick of managing is to find out what's unique in everybody; the trick of leading is to find out what everyone shares and tap into that.
Learn more about the Tate Lecture Series at smu.edu/tate.
Beat the Challenge
More than 150 corporate teams will pit endurance, determination and grit against each other at the second SMU Cox Corporate Challenge at the 2007 Wellstone Dallas White Rock Marathon. Five-person corporate teams will run a relay Dec. 9 as part of the marathon.Winning teams will share a purse of more than $30,000, which will be donated to Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children in the name of their respective companies.
For more information go to http://www.runtherock.com/ and click on the SMU Cox Corporate Relay Challenge.
The Body Project
Popular culture's image of the 21st-century woman is tall, toned and ultra-slender. Today's "thin ideal" is unattainable for most women; for many, it also can be destructive.
Katherine Presnell, director of SMU's Weight and Eating Disorders Research Program and assistant professor of psychology, is helping at-risk teens challenge this ideal with the Body Project.
Presnell helped develop the eating disorder prevention program with Eric Stice, her former graduate school mentor at the University of Texas at Austin. In their nearly 10 years of research, more than 1,000 high school and college women have completed the program, and independent studies nationwide have shown that the Body Project significantly outperforms other interventions in promoting body acceptance, reducing the risk of obesity and preventing eating disorders.
During their small-group sessions with a trained leader, Body Project participants argue against the thin ideal. They write letters to hypothetical girls about its emotional and physical costs, and challenge negative "fat talk" while affirming strong, healthy bodies.
"Many girls don't question the messages we get from the media, the fashion industry, our peers and parents that it's important to achieve the thin ideal at any cost," says Presnell, who with Stice has published a facilitator guidebook and companion workbook, The Body Project: Promoting Body Acceptance and Preventing Eating Disorders (Oxford University Press, 2007). "We have the girls critically evaluate the ideal, and when they take a stance against their beliefs, that creates dissonance they work to resolve."
Compete to Win
A $10.1 million gift to the School of Engineering at SMU designed to spark K-12 students' interest in science and engineering presents the opportunity to inspire and shape our nation's innovators long before they submit their first college application -- and provides hope for the future of American competitiveness.
Applications to engineering schools by American students have been on the decline for the past two decades, a statistic that has dire implications for the nation's ability to compete in the global marketplace.
The W.W. Caruth Foundation at Communities Foundation of Texas announced their gift will fund the Caruth Institute for Engineering Education, putting bricks and mortar and the promise of valuable resources toward an ambitious program that will change the assumptions students in America make about what they want to be when they grow up.
SMU President R. Gerald Turner said the gift will allow the university to fulfill its long-standing goal of setting the pace in engineering education. Programs already in place at SMU provide innovative engineering curriculum and teacher training to reach high school students through the Infinity Project, help attract more women into engineering through the Gender Parity Project and allow middle school kids to be "engineers for a day" through the Visioneering Program.
The Caruth Institute will build on these early successes of SMU's existing Institute for Education, established through a federal grant in 2002. Thursday's gift will direct $5.1 million to endow the institute and $5 million toward the construction of a new building on the site of the original Caruth Hall, the historic home of SMU engineering since 1948.
"With the Caruth Institute at SMU, our future is limited only by our imagination," Turner said. "Our goal is to encourage more students to become engineers and then for them to lead in the development of the products and solutions that will make the word a better place by solving critical global problems."
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Homecoming 2007
Make plans to join Homecoming 2007 on November 9 and 10. There's something for everyone -- the parade, tents and family fun on the Boulevard. Then cheer on the Mustangs as they take on the Rice Owls at Ford Stadium.
Helpful Homecoming Links