BUSY UO FRESHMAN BEGINS FALL TERM WITH 16 CREDITS Glendale High School graduate Malissa Bare will have a big head start on her classmates when she begins classes at the University of Oregon this fall. Though she's only a freshman and this will be her first term on the UO campus, the southern Oregon resident will begin her university career with a respectable list of college credits already on her transcript. Bare, a journalism major, started taking UO classes on the Internet last winter through the UO's distance learning program. "I had already finished all the high school classes I needed to graduate," Bare says. "Then I heard about the UO program." Bare completed university classes in economics, American politics, world politics and vulcanology last year. She also held down three part-time jobs to earn college money. Bare figures the Internet classes will help her savings stretch farther over the next three years because she was able to complete the work while still living rent-free at home. SOURCES: Terri Heath, support specialist, Social Sciences Instructional Lab, (541) 346-3256; e-mail, dtheath@oregon; Malissa Bare, UO freshman. To schedule an interview with Bare, call Pauline Austin, assistant director, UO Office of Communications, (541) 346-3129, during office hours. ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS REACH AROUND GLOBE ON GROUP PROJECTS VIA WWW University of Oregon students in the "Virtual Design Studio" (VDS) will form "virtual work groups" with students in British Columbia, the East Coast and Hong Kong to work on collaborative group projects this fall. To bring about these projects, students share information via the World Wide Web and make use of advanced technologies such as desktop conferencing. Nancy Cheng, assistant professor of architecture, who launched the program last year, said opportunities for this kind of global cooperation simply did not exist before the technological advances of the last few years. Bringing together students with varying skills from different continents in a collaborative project is extremely useful preparation for future career demands. Our graduates, she says, will face similar complicated situations in the "real world" of their careers as architects. SOURCES: Nancy Cheng,AIA, assistant professor of architecture, can be reached at (541) 346-3674; e-mail, nywc@darkwing.uoregon.edu; Scott Passman, a student who has participated in the VDS, (541) 346-3656; e-mail, passman@darkwing.uoregon.edu WEB SOURCES: Nancy Cheng's Virtual Design Studio information: <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~nywc>. VDS Project, UO/University of British Columbia (UBC) <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~design/tc-screen.html>. VDS Project, University of Hong Kong/UO/UBC: <http://www.architecture.ubc.ca/vds97/>. S -30- #T-1043/Daybook