Featured Photo: UT Martin’s rocket team members show off their entry in an international competition.
Three engineering students from UT Martin placed fourth in their category and 12th overall in the third annual Spaceport America Cup, held in Las Cruces, New Mexico. This annual competition is the only international collegiate rocket engineering competition in the world.
Speaker Tackles iGen
Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, spoke Sept. 3 as the first guest in UT Martin’s ENGAGE Civic Initiative. Her presentation focused on “iGen: The Smartphone Generation” from a psychological perspective and offered insights into current social and health trends for those born from 1995-2012. “Around 2011, 2012, I started to notice changes that were bigger and more sudden. … More and more teens started to say that they felt left out or that they felt lonely. More and more started to say that they can’t do anything right or that their life wasn’t useful or that they did not enjoy life,” she says. As a correlation, teens’ time online doubled from 2006, up to six hours per day, and they spent less time face to face with others. Twenge recommends limiting leisure smartphone use to fewer than two hours per day, not including time needed for professional work, homework and navigation. “You don’t have to give up the phone. You don’t even have to give up social media, if that’s something that you want to do. But think about those things that really do make you happy,” she says.
UT Martin Tops U.S. News & World Report Lists
UT Martin is the top-ranked public Tennessee institution on the 2020 U.S. News & World Report lists for top regional universities in the South, best universities for veterans in the South, best-value universities in the South and regional universities for social mobility in the South. The Princeton Review also has included UT Martin among the best southeastern colleges for the 17th consecutive year, and Washington Monthly ranks UT Martin 31st in its “Best Bang for the Buck” category for southern schools. The university is also among Institutional Research & Evaluation Inc.’s list of “America’s 100 Best College Buys” for the 14th year in a row.
Enrollment Increases
UT Martin reports 7,296 students enrolled this fall semester, including both undergraduate and graduate-level students. This shows a 3.2 percent total increase from the fall 2018 enrollment numbers. More than 500 graduate students are studying at UT Martin this fall (a 37.9 percent increase from fall 2018), and undergraduate enrollment stands at 6,779 (a 1.3 percent increase from last fall). Dual-enrollment courses, which offer college credit to high school students across the region, report a 17.4 percent increase from fall 2018 for a total of 1,422 students currently enrolled in at least one course.
