Well Said

Winter Commencement is a time to celebrate the graduating Tar Heels.

But, Bryan Hernandez, a graduating UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School business administration major, knows the day is about more than him.

It’s a day to celebrate all of the people who have helped him get to this moment, like classmates, professors, mentors and, especially, his parents.

“They gave up everything, so we had the chance to go to college,” he said. “It’ll definitely feel like their hard work paid off, too.”

Hernandez has certainly put in some hard work of his own, though, to get to this day. He applied to Carolina as a high school senior in Sanford, North Carolina, but he was not offered admission. Instead of attending another university, Hernandez decided to take advantage of the Carolina Student Transfer Excellence Program.

He completed his general education requirements during two years at Sandhills Community College. Then, he transferred to Carolina in the fall of 2017 as a junior.

On this week’s episode, Hernandez explains how he took advantage of every opportunity available at Carolina and why he feels so prepared for his next journey in life — a position at Cisco.

Everyone gets stressed. It’s a natural part of life. We all face many stressors every day.

Stressors can take many forms — jobs, relationships, children. For college students, final exams are one of the stressors they face throughout the semester. Final exams begin Dec. 6 at Carolina.

To appropriately deal with stress, Anthony Zannas said, you don’t want to avoid it.

“There are certain things in life that we have to come to terms with,” said Zannas, an assistant professor in the UNC School of Medicine who studies how stress interacts with our bodies. “There are many studies showing that the more you avoid a stressful situation, the more stressful it will become when you actually face it.”

Zannas researches epigenetics and examines how stressors influence the chemicals on top of DNA that determine whether genes will be active or not. His research can help identify people with stress-related disorders earlier.

“If we can detect these epigenetic changes that happen in response to stress early on,” he said, “then we might have a chance of targeting those individuals earlier.”

On this week’s episode, Zannas explains the differences between good and bad stress and shares some tips on how we can better deal with the stressors we face every day.

What’s your favorite food?

How you answer that question probably isn’t only about how the food tastes but also the memories you associate with the food.

For Andrew Hardaway, a research assistant professor in the UNC School of Medicine, his favorite food is mashed potatoes. Specifically, his mother’s mashed potatoes. He’ll make sure to go back for a second — or even a third — helping of them on Thanksgiving.

As a member of Thomas Kash’s lab, Hardaway researches how food interacts with the brain. He recently found that cells in the central amygdala — the area of the brain associated with memory, decision-making and emotional responses — drive the consumption of food after basic needs are met.

“At Thanksgiving, when you sit down and you think about your favorite food, think about how your amygdala is being activated in that moment,” Hardaway said.

It’s not something that most of us need to think about, but it’s crucial for helping treat people with binge eating disorders. In addition to eating a large amount of food in a short amount of time, binge eating is also associated with a loss of control. People with binge eating disorders cannot control their eating behavior, which can lead to other problems, like obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular issues.

Although there are some treatments and medications available, understanding what’s going on in the brain can help treat people with binge eating and other food disorders.

“For those people, it’s very difficult to just flip a switch in their brain and change behaviors,” Hardaway said. “They need another tool in the toolbox, and that’s what we’re going to provide.”

On this week’s episode, Hardaway shares his favorite Thanksgiving traditions, defines comfort foods and explains the differences between binge eating and the overeating we all might do to celebrate the holiday.

It’s hard to describe a “typical” classroom experience at Carolina. From makerspaces to research labs, learning spaces are designed to provide hands-on experiences.

On this episode of Well Said, Katz shares what drew him to research and teach hip-hop and discusses the culture of DJing.

The room is decorated with graffiti Katz commissioned from alumni artists and filled with turntables, recorders and CD players for his Art and Culture of the DJ and Rap Lab classes.

On this episode, Katz shares what drew him to research and teach this hip-hop and discusses the culture of DJing.

When Nikole Hannah-Jones ’03 (MA) was in high school, she became obsessed with one year: 1619 — the year African slaves were first transported to an English-speaking colony in the Americas.

As the 400th anniversary of that voyage was approaching, Hannah-Jones found herself at the New York Times Magazine, where she works as an investigative reporter. She pitched a project to re-examine the legacy of slavery in this country tied to that event.

“I feel like my whole career and, in some ways, my whole life was geared toward this moment,” said Hannah-Jones, who received her graduate degree from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media.

Her 1619 Project debuted in August with essays, poems, short fiction, a photo essay and an audio series, and they all work together to build a case that slavery is one of the foundational elements of the country’s development.

“We can’t understand why things are like they are in the country until we grapple with the fact that slavery is at our foundations,” she said.

Significant amounts of research, investigation and fact-checking went into this project, and Hannah-Jones learned those skills at Carolina.

“I think you see what I learned here in my work every day,” said Hannah-Jones, who was a Roy H. Park Fellow at the journalism school.

And she’ll be returning to Carolina on Nov. 16 to officially kick off a collaborative relationship between Carolina and the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, a national organization she co-founded to train investigative journalists of color.

On this week’s episode, Hannah-Jones will explain how Carolina helped prepare her for that pivotal moment to lead the 1619 Project and why she’s returning to Carolina to train more journalists.

Do you remember what the internet was like back in the early ‘90s? It wasn't at all like what it is now.

There were about 1,000 websites then. Today, there are more than a billion, and that's growing every second.

“The coming of the World Wide Web set a different expectation about how the internet would be used,” said Paul Jones, a clinical professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science.

The internet was initially mostly used to share files, like email, audio or software. Now, we use it for nearly everything, including streaming media. Jones was instrumental in creating the internet as we know it today.

Jones led a group of students to work with emerging technology and archive the digital world in 1994. The archive was called SunSITE, but is now known as ibiblio.org. One of those students was working as a student DJ at WXYC — Carolina’s student radio station — and asked a groundbreaking question, “Why can’t we broadcast the radio everywhere?”

That question led Jones and Michael Shoffner, the student DJ, to organize the first radio broadcast streamed over the internet on Nov. 7, 1994.

On this week’s episode, Jones and Shoffner, who is also a faculty member at the School of Information and Library Science, explain the challenges they had to overcome to make history.

With more than two centuries of history, Carolina is bound to have ghost stories. The campus has legends filled with duels gone awry, top-secret student societies and friendly, pranking ghosts.

In this episode of Well Said, the UNC Visitors Center staff shares spooky stories from some of Carolina’s most famous ghosts and legends.

When you think of critical moments in American history, what do you think of? The Mayflower, the Declaration of Independence, Pearl Harbor?

This year is the 400th anniversary of another seminal moment in American history — when African slaves were first brought to an English-speaking colony in the Americas.

“This anniversary is an important moment to go back and interrogate the meanings in different ways, from different perspectives and with a new eye,” said Joseph Jordan, the director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History.

The Stone Center will investigate the meanings of this moment with its 1619 Collective Memory(ies) Project, which will feature a conversation among a panel of experts engaged with their audience.

“We want to have a multi-vocal conversation where different voices are able to talk about their interpretation of the events,” Jordan said. “It opens up so many possibilities for new discoveries.”

On this week’s episode, Jordan shares details behind the collective memories project, explains why it’s so important to remember this moment in American history and examines how this project fits in Carolina as a place for intellectual discoveries.

On this week’s podcast, Lynn Blanchard, the director of the Carolina Center for Public Service, explains why 90 faculty members and administrators are spending fall break on buses touring the state.

On Oct. 12, 1793, the cornerstone of Old East was laid, making Carolina the first public university in the nation. To mark that occasion and to celebrate Carolina’s future, we celebrate University Day on Oct. 12 every year.

“Our history as the nation’s first public university gives us a unique opportunity to celebrate what makes us uniquely Carolina,” said Interim Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz.

What makes Carolina unique is its commitment to serving the state of North Carolina, which is this year’s University Day theme.

“We’re celebrating the fact that we are passionately public, that we are the leading global public research university that has stayed true to its mission,” Guskiewicz said.

As a member of the faculty since 1995 and the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Exercise and Sport Science, Guskiewicz knows how fundamental serving the state is to Carolina’s identity. Before serving as interim chancellor, Guskiewicz led the Department of Exercise and Sport Science and was dean of the College of Arts & Sciences.

What keeps him committed to Carolina is the faculty, staff and students who are devoted to serving our state.

“I stepped foot on this campus 24 years ago and felt something special. It just felt right, and it’s felt right for 24 years,” he said. “It comes back to the people and the mission.”

On this week’s episode, Guskiewicz explains what he thinks differentiates Carolina from its peers.