It is a little late for Earth Day, but an experimental new recycling program has started on campus.

Bins are placed in the laundry rooms of all the dorms at no cost to students.

A new student wellness center, which will include student-exclusive workout equipment and an expanded student health center, is set to open its doors sometime in 2008.

According to former Students’ Association President Ryan Brunner, the facility will cost $12.1 million, and measure about 77,000 square feet.

Plans include a rock-climbing wall, expanded equipment and facilities, a cardiovascular workout area and new facilities for Student Health and Counseling Services. The center will be open for students, as any athletics teams will be able to use the old facilities in the HPER center. It will also be managed and run by students, similar to the management of The Union.

Student Health, currently located in West Hall, will have expanded room and equipment. Brenda Andersen, associate director for Student Health and Counseling Services, said West Hall was “not well-suited for privacy.”

Providers are looking forward to moving into the new facility, which will have a better layout for the clinic.

She expressed her appreciation to the Students’ Association for seeing the need for a new facility for the free clinic.

Current plans for the facility place it attached to the west side of the HPER Center. The Students’ Association is currently working on getting bids from architects to design the facility, and final placement will depend on those plans.

The architect will hold a workshop to design a facility in an optional spot that will include all plans included in the wellness center plan.

Students’ Association President Alex Halbach is pleased with the plans.

“The facility has been needed for quite some time,” he said.

Halbach said there are hopes to break ground on the facility sometime next February or March, but setbacks might push that date farther back.

He also said that Student Health services will be in more central location to the campus and at a more student-friendly facility than West Hall.

Students using the equipment in the HPER center have long had to work around schedules set by athletic teams.

Concepts for a wellness center have been in development since the early 1990s, and a few proposals have gone before the Legislature.

This current plan was given final approval last month by the Board of Regents.

A new, student-run restaurant, Caf

You can’t hide from it forever; eventually you are going to have to do that internship.

“Students run up against some brick walls if they aren’t thinking ahead,” said Susan Fredrikson, employment development director for the Career and Academic Planning (CAP) center.

An internship gives students real-world experience in the fields they are studying, while also giving credit toward degrees. An internship also looks good on a resum

You don’t have to be a scientist to benefit from South Dakota View’s archive of satellite images.

“It’s for everybody,” says Mary O’Neill, the lead researcher for SDView. The program is part of the larger AmericaView Consortium. SDView wants to promote the use of satellite data without the cost involved with using satellite imagery.

Students researching the changes in the Missouri River, farmers examining yield rates in different sections of their fields and city councilors examining property boundaries are potential uses of SDView.

Satellite images are expensive; however, once they are bought, they can be redistributed an unlimited amount of times. SDView first finds people or organizations that have purchased satellite imagery, then asks these groups if they are willing to put their data into the SDView archives. The images can then be downloaded from the SDView Website, www.sdview.sdstate.edu. The archive currently has 299 images.

Since 2001, SDView has applied for grants from AmericaView this year it received almost $90,000, a relatively stable figure since the start of the program. The money is divided between the Engineering Resource Center, the Plant Science Deptartment, and the Computer Science Department.

O’Neill attended a meeting at the EROS data Center on AmericaView, then brought the program back to SDSU. However, she stresses that the program isn’t just for the university. Anybody who has a need for, or is curious about the data, can download it.

SDView is currently working on educating K-12 teachers on uses for the images in their classrooms. It sponsors a weeklong workshop, Earth Science Tools for Educators, for teachers and requires lesson plans involving the use of the data.