Well Said

Summer School is already underway in Chapel Hill, but before we move on to the summer, we want to revisit some stories from the previous semester. In this episode, Bill Ferris, the Joel R. Williamson eminent professor emeritus of history, tells us what it’s like to win a Grammy and Sarah Birken, an assistant professor in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, shares how difficult it is to start a new podcast.

Chapel Hill was bustling with graduates and their supporters over the weekend as Carolina celebrated more than 6,000 students who are prepared to take on the biggest problems around the world. With words of advice from Interim Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz and alumni Ramesh Raskar and Jonathan Reckford, the graduates turned their tassels and became Carolina alumni at Doctoral Hooding and Spring Commencement. This episode of Well Said captures the excitement of Commencement weekend and the thoughtful advice graduates received before heading out on their next adventures.

As the CEO of Habitat for Humanity International, Carolina alumnus Jonathan Reckford knows a thing or two about the value of home. “When you think about the idea of home, it’s really a foundation and a launching pad for the kind of lives we want everyone to have the opportunity to have," said Reckford, who graduated from Carolina in 1984 with a degree in political science. The Chapel Hill native will return home on Sunday to deliver Carolina’s Commencement address, in which he will challenge the Class of 2019 to aspire toward bigger ambitions. “I think sometimes we settle to lightly for either material things or for short-term happiness against that deep reward of finding real joy that comes from deep relationships and losing yourself in a purpose bigger than yourself,” he said. On this week’s episode, Reckford will share the experiences he had at Carolina that served as a launching pad for his career of serving others.

Flavio Frohlich has always been interested in the human brain. He became even more interested in its inner-workings after learning how brain cells produce a small amount of electricity, which results in “rhythms” in the brain. Even more interesting was his discovery that rhythms would respond to electric stimulation. When he arrived at Carolina in 2011, he recruited a team of students and academic colleagues to investigate the possibility that small electric charges could alter the brain rhythm of patients with schizophrenia. “We have a good scientific understanding of what to give to whom in terms of strength of the stimulation or duration of the stimulation,” said Frohlich, an associate professor. “There’s all these different things that you can choose when you do brain stimulation, which you can't really with medication. But with stimulation, millisecond-to-millisecond you can define and individualize how you want to stimulate.” Now, the team is applying those findings to depression. On this week's e

On a previous episode, global studies associate professor Jonathan Weiler and political science professor Marc Hetherington discussed the political divide in the United States. This week, the conversation continues on how our choices — such as the coffee brand we drink or the car we drive — can cause others to assume our political preferences. “These non-political tastes and preferences are just such clear political signals nowadays,” Weiler said. “You tell me what kind of food or beer you like, and I download a whole bunch of associations about you and how you see the world, and who you probably voted for." Weiler and Hetherington, co-authors of Prius or Pickup?: How the answers to four simple questions explain America’s great divide, believe that the root of the acrimonious divide in the United States spawns from the growing affinity Americans have for their own political party, and in turn, the adversarial feelings developed for those across the aisle. “Our identities are so driven by how negatively we

Like many kids, Matt Cannon grew up playing video games. For him, it was a hobby that eventually grew to something much more substantial. Cannon spent years playing and coaching video games professionally, even while he was a student at Carolina. He made his mark in Overwatch, a first-person shooter game with several modes of competitive play, but retired as a player in 2016. Cannon still maintains a top-500 rank in North America, and he retired as a coach in 2018 with six tournament championships. Now, he's helping Carolina enter the esports world. On this episode of Well Said, this Tar Heel explains how Carolina keeps calling him home and how he hopes to make collegiate esports more mainstream.

When Kate Sheppard graduated from college in 2006, the path for young journalists was pretty straightforward. You started at a small, local paper, then moved onto a bigger one and then a regional newspaper. Maybe then you’d make it to a big market like Washington, D.C. But Sheppard, an enterprise editor at the HuffPost, said that path is fundamentally broken now because the current business model in journalism isn't working. As a teaching associate professor at the UNC School of Media and Journalism, she works with students to reshape the future of journalism in her class called “Creating Tomorrow’s News Products.” On this week’s episode, Sheppard explains how she encourages her students to explore problems and develop ideas — while teaching them valuable lessons they’ll need throughout their journalism careers.

UNC School of Government professor Anita Brown-Graham fell in love with North Carolina when she first attended UNC-Chapel Hill as a law student. Now, she’s giving back to the state through ncIMPACT. Brown-Graham’s goal in launching ncIMPACT in 2017 was to find solutions to significant issues like human trafficking and the state's opioid crisis by bringing resources to communities across North Carolina and embracing the idea of teamwork to find solutions for these statewide problems. The initiative aims to tackle all sides of a problem by recruiting experts from Carolina’s School of Medicine, Eshelman School of Pharmacy, School of Social Work, Gillings School of Global Public Health and School of Law. “There's something very magical that happens in the room,” Brown-Graham said. “I'm just always reminded when I'm in the room with them about not just the enormity of what we've taken on, but about the hardiness of the human spirit.” As the scope of work grew, ncIMPACT also grew into a different resource for

When Amy Locklear Hertel enrolled at Carolina in 1993, she wanted to join the Greek community, but as a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, she couldn’t find an organization that fit her needs culturally. "We needed something uniquely matriarchal that represented our nature of our tribes," said Hertel, who now serves as the chief of staff to Interim Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz. She and three other students decided to create their own sorority to express themselves and to help retain native women at Carolina. Alpha Pi Omega was established in 1994 as the first historically American Indian sorority in the country. In 1995, the organization inducted its first pledge class, the 15 Warrior Women. Since the induction of that first class, chapters have been established at North Carolina State University, UNC-Pembroke, Oklahoma State University, Dartmouth College and others. On this week’s episode, Hertel and other founding members — called The Four Winds — tell us what it means to them to have a las

In the workplace, the terms “status” and “power” are often used interchangeably, but they're not really true synonyms. “Status and power are both associated with hierarchy in groups and organizations,” said Alison Fragale, associate professor at UNC Kenan-Flagler School of Business, “but they have different definitions. They are theoretically and conceptually different.” According to Fragale, power is measured by the number of resources one controls — like the office budget. Status, on the other hand, is a measurement of how well-liked someone is. These two factors, when considered together, consequently cause people to stereotype their co-workers. These stereotypes are hard enough for many to manage when a person holds a leadership role, but it's an especially difficult balance for women, Fragale said. “Women are supposed to show up as high on the warm-cold dimension,” she explained, “and leaders are supposed to show up as high on the dominant dimension. That doesn't mean they can't be warm as well, but

Sarah Birken, an assistant professor in the Gillings School of Global Public Health, focuses her research on applying lessons learned from academic studies to clinical practice, especially in cancer care. When she wants to share something with the world, her first instinct is to write an academic paper. But an academic paper didn’t seem like the most effective way to share her experiences as a woman in academia. She pitched the idea of starting a podcast to tell her story and to help other women share theirs. When the idea was approved, Birken had a realization. “I just volunteered to do something that I have no idea how to do,” she said. With the help of Whitney Robinson and other women across campus, Birken launched AcaDames earlier this year, a podcast which discusses the experiences of women in academia. On this week’s episode of Well Said, Birken shares with us how this idea developed and explains the challenges she and her team overcame in taking AcaDames from an idea to iTunes.

In the early days of the University of North Carolina, classrooms were filled with only male students. But with trailblazers like Sallie Walker Stockard, Kitty Carmichael and Inez Stacy, women at Carolina progressed to a central role in campus life. "This history of women at Carolina is a movement from being concerned with how we would be talked about on campus to thinking about how we want to talk about ourselves," said Sarah George-Waterfield, a graduate student at Carolina who has shared the story of women’s history at Carolina with many campus visitors. On this week’s episode, she tells the stories of several pioneers, including the first group of female students who enrolled at Carolina in 1897.

Growing up in a segregated Georgia in the 1940s, Howard Lee didn't know where his life would lead, but eventually, it led him to earn a master’s degree from the UNC School of Social Work in 1966. “The students in the School of Social Work embraced us, and of course we just simply didn't feel any different from any other student,” Lee said. “That started me on a road of feeling recertified as a person.” But outside the classroom, Lee and his family continued to feel the racial tensions they experienced in Georgia. It was this tension that pushed him to run for mayor of the town in 1969. “I decided to run for mayor not so much to win — because I didn’t think a black person would be elected mayor in Chapel Hill — but to make a point to push certain issues that needed to be dealt with,” Lee said. Lee’s victory helped to pave the way for future black leaders. On this episode of Well Said, Lee details living life in the segregated South and his path to the mayor's office.

As a 10-year-old in Chicago, Priscilla Layne was obsessed with Indiana Jones. She knew the movies forward and backward — except for a few parts in “The Raiders of the Lost Arc” and “The Last Crusade" when characters speak German without accompanying subtitles. So Layne decided she would learn German to understand what they were saying. “It became a hobby of mine,” she said. “Everyone knew my thing was German.” On this week’s episode, Layne explains how a simple hobby developed into a career of professing her love for German.

Each year, about 610,000 people die from heart disease in the United States. But thanks to UNC School of Medicine professor Sam Cykert and Heart Health Now, practices are getting better access to patients’ health data and helping people build healthier habits with dedicated coaches. In 2015, Cykert — in partnership with Healthcare Research and Quality, Community Care of North Carolina and North Carolina Area Health Education Centers — developed Heart Health Now, a project working toward combating cardiovascular disease in North Carolina. On this episode of Well Said, Cykert explains the Heart Health Now project, its impact on the state and where it’s going next.

In 2009, political science professor Jonathan Weiler and global studies associate professor Marc Hetherington released their research on the relationship between four questions and the political divide. Those relationships continue to have implications in the current political climate today. Weiler and Hetherington became interested in the acrimonious nature of politics as they watched the unfolding of the 2000 presidential election. They agreed that the political divide was intensifying, and as they investigated further, they discovered what might be a correlation between our intrinsic values and our passion for politics. “At some point, we stumbled on these four parenting questions,” Weiler said. “Those four parenting questions don’t really tell you anything about how people feel about taxes, but they tell you a lot about how people feel about race, gay rights, gender, family structure [or] immigration.” On this episode of Well Said, Weiler and Hetherington discuss the findings from their initial study,

Ever since he was a young boy on a farm in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Bill Ferris was drawn to music. When he was 12 years old, he started to document the music he loved after he received a camera for Christmas. Documenting songs, storytellers and other artists all around him soon quickly become a new hobby. And that hobby eventually became a profession that ultimately led Ferris to Chapel Hill, where he is the Joel R. Williamson eminent professor emeritus of history at Carolina. That profession also led to “Voices of Mississippi,” a compilation of songs, stories and films that Ferris has recorded over the years. The box set was nominated for two Grammy Awards this year for best historical album and best album notes. The Grammy Awards ceremony takes place Feb. 10. On this week’s episode, Ferris discusses his life’s work as a folklorist and how these Grammy nominations make good on promises he gave to his subjects many years ago.

As a husband, father, faculty member and full-time student, Kessonga Giscombé is no stranger to stress, but he doesn’t let stress affect him by staying in the moment. Specifically, he uses mindfulness, which he defines as paying attention to the present moment on purpose without judgment. Giscombé, a faculty member in the UNC School of Medicine’s Program on Integrative Medicine, teaches mindfulness courses at Carolina designed to introduce people to the practice of mindfulness and to reinvigorate the practice of others. These courses are open to the public, and his next course for beginners starts Jan. 29. On this week’s episode, we discuss mindfulness — what it is and what it isn’t — and the benefits that can come from its practice.

As the son of Kenny Moore, founder of Hwy 55 Burgers and Fries, Andy Moore helped the national burger chain throughout his childhood and formative years. He had several responsibilities, including working behind the counter and at the grill. After graduating from Duke University, however, Andy Moore applied for jobs outside of the restaurant industry, ultimately relocating from North Carolina to New York City. “You know, after a couple of years I kind of — not kind of I really did — miss the job,” Andy Moore explained. “I missed the people I had worked with, and I felt like I wanted to do something meaningful with my family's business. So I made a pretty tough decision to come back, but I don't regret it.” Since returning to the restaurant chain in 2014, he has transitioned from his role as director of communications to area developer, focusing on expansion efforts in Texas, while also enrolled in the MBA@UNC program at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School. Not only is Andy Moore learning practical skil

As part of her role in UNC Athletics, Rachel Manor works with student-athletes on a weight-neutral approach to food consumption, which she likes to call “fueling.” She teaches students not about diets, but about intuitive eating — the intentional body check-ins before eating a meal. “I tend to steer people away from diets,” Manor explained. “Research has shown that not only do diets not work, but restrictive eating is actually harmful in the college population for individuals of all sizes.” On this episode of Well Said, Manor discusses the benefits of intuitive eating and some strategies anyone can use to be more mindful to eat healthier and the right amount, leading to weight loss and a healthier mindset.