Assistant Professor of Management and International Business Alexander Assouad served as lead author in a recent article published on Harvard Business Review titled “Graduates of Elite Universities Get Paid More. Do They Perform Better?”
The article summarizes research on job performance of graduates from elite universities to help an employer understand if and how these graduates may be better employees.
Read the full article on Harvard Business Review here.
Drs. Fernando Diggs and Phillip Lee from Belmont’s College of Pharmacy collaborated to publish a chapter on the management of hyperglycemia in hospitalized patients in APhA’s PharmacotherapyFirst.
PharmacotherapyFirst is a peer-reviewed, online publication designed to meet the needs of modern learners and educators. Inpatient Hyperglycemia draw’s from Dr. Diggs knowledge and experience with critically ill patients in addition to Dr. Lee’s expertise in the care of general medicine patients.
The module covers the topic by combining current guidelines, landmark trials and treatment of special populations. In addition, the module contains patient cases for learners and faculty members to ensure mastery of the information presented. Read their chapter online here.
On Friday, September 4, Brad Paisley and Kimberly Williams-Paisley joined a Zoom conversation with several hundred Belmont students to discuss balancing life, their careers and The Store, a nonprofit free grocery store on Belmont’s campus that the couple started in association with Belmont, Brad’s alma mater.
The couple discussed the work The Store is doing in the community and the wonderful timing of its opening when the pandemic began. Their fulfillment in overseeing The Store led them to share advice with the students that they typically tell their children: find something to do where you can make the world a better place.
Brad and Kimberly also told stories of how they met, their first gigs, projects they’ve been working on during quarantine and lessons learned along the way, as well as answering several questions from students.
In the Zoom’s chat feature, students constantly shared their excitement, questions, reactions and gratitude for the couple spending an hour sharing their stories with them. Countless comments flooded the chat, such as, “Thank you for taking the time to talk with us today. You are both such an inspiration!” and “This is so special. Thank you for talking with us and always staying involved in the Belmont community. We want to help with The Store in any way we can!”
A new, high school songwriting club hosted by Quadio, a music streaming platform designed to foster community in the music space for college-aged students, is now giving high school students a taste of what real-world songwriting circles are like. Belmont’s own Chelsea Kent, adjunct professor and founder of Worktape Junkie Management, and Miranda Martell, chief growth officer of Quadio, have partnered to launch the program and create curriculum to support rising musicians and give them a platform to collaborate, create and discuss with other songwriters across the country.
Martell explained, “We started Quadio to champion the college creative community and to help artists connect with one another — our tagline is ‘make music. make friends.’ So we’re constantly striving to further that community connection and to foster collaboration.”
One of the main ways Quadio supported musicians prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was by hosting large events and booking college talent. However, when events began getting cancelled due to the pandemic, the organization decided to adapt by creating this six-week, virtual summer session where students could connect with others, hear from guest speakers and share their work with other songwriters. Martell quickly reached out to Kent to make this happen.
Kent said she was inspired to join forces with Quadio because of the shared mission “to create a safe and inclusive space for high school students to develop their songwriting skills while building a community of friends during this new normal of virtual learning.”
“The High School Songwriting Club provides a writer of any experience level the opportunity to connect with the industry and peers safely from their home,” Kent explained. “As a Belmont Songwriting alum and industry professional, I am always asking myself, ‘How can I give back and how can I do better?’ This program answered both of those questions for me.”
The purpose of this program is to build the foundation of songwriting for high school students. The summer songwriting club for college students hosted 100 students globally and was successful enough to inspire the Songwriting Club to host a similar event this fall. Shifting the program into more of an educational format, the club strives to provide attendees with an extracurricular activity to safely connect with others with similar passions while most in-person extracurricular activities continue to be canceled.
This fall, the program will explore each letter of the word ‘create:’ each week students will learn about a new skill set for songwriting: create, repeat, evolve, artists, team and encore. Belmont songwriting faculty Drew Ramsey and James Elliot are part of the program’s “pep rally” which is essentially a moderator training session. They will be teaching songwriting essentials to the Quadio team. The curriculum will also include prominent guest speakers from the industry who will give advice on how to connect with other songwriters.
The program takes 100 students over Zoom to listen to a guest speaker and from there, students will be split into breakout groups to collaborate, share their creativity and improve their songwriting technique. Students will be given a prompt each week that they can then elaborate on, free to create music with little stress. As Kent explained, the club’s curriculum is both instructional and interactive. “CREATE develops each student’s songwriting fundamentals. The goal is for them to discover their creative selves in the songwriting prompts and exercises.”
The Songwriting Club allows students to explore their passion for songwriting in an educational format, which is helpful for students who are considering enrolling in a songwriting program in college. Kent and Martell said the goal is to make parents and students comfortable in pursuing a career in songwriting while also providing students with connections for jobs beyond college. Luckily for Belmont, students will have heard from Belmont faculty and will have a great “pipeline,” should they decide they want to pursue a collegiate songwriting program.
This fall, the club runs for six weeks from September 17 to October 22. For more information or to sign up, see Quadio’s High School Songwriting Club website here.
Graduate Nursing students Mosam Patel and Kelsey Wolfe have been selected as the 2020 Area Health Education Center (AHEC) Scholars at the Matthew Walker Comprehensive Health Center.
This program is designed for health professions students interested in supplementing their education by gaining additional knowledge and experience in rural and/or underserved urban settings. In this two-year program, students will receive 40 hours of didactic training and 40 hours of clinical training each year along with a stipend. The students will receive core content around interprofessional education, behavioral health integration, social determinants of health, cultural competency, practice transformation and current and emerging health issues.
This experience is an opportunity for these students to gain knowledge, skills and experiences that will help them meet the needs of underserved populations.
Wolfe said she is excited to be a part of the AHEC Scholars Program to meet and learn alongside other students in healthcare professions. “This opportunity perfectly fits what I am most passionate about – providing healthcare to the underserved,” she said. “AHEC will help me learn and grow by exploring healthcare disparities and how to best combat those disparities. Everyone should have equal access to excellent quality and affordable healthcare.”
Patel is looking forward to the excellent opportunity to learn about the underrepresented. “I have always been interested in helping those who have difficulty accessing healthcare. My ultimate career goal is to set up a clinic in a rural area to give them the care they need. With this program, I can eventually reach my goal by gaining more knowledge and experience,” she said.
Belmont’s Graduate Programs in Nursing have had AHEC Scholars since 2018. The 2018 AHEC Scholars were Joanna Plumb and Jaanki Bhakta. The 2019 AHEC Scholar was Taylor Journigan.
The AHEC mission is to enhance access to quality health care, particularly primary and preventive care, by improving the supply and distribution of healthcare professionals via strategic partnerships with academic programs, communities and professional organizations. These efforts support strategic priorities to increase diversity and distribution among healthcare professionals and enhance healthcare quality and delivery to rural and underserved areas.
In conjunction with the third and final Presidential Debate being hosted by Belmont University, middle school and high school students enrolled in Metro Nashville Public Schools are invited to enter the Presidential Debate Essay Contest. First place winning essays will be published in the Tennessean, and winners will also be invited to provide a video of themselves reading their essays or excerpts to be shared publicly by Belmont. Winners will also have the opportunity for a behind-the-scenes tour of grounds for Belmont’s Presidential Debate.
The contest is open to all MNPS middle and high school students enrolled in grades 5-12 at the time of submission. Students are provided a variety of prompts to select a topic for their essay to showcase their knowledge and learning. Each submission will be judged by a panel that will include one Belmont faculty member and two Belmont students.
Monetary prizes will also be awarded to the contest winners. For the high school contest, 1st place will receive $300, 2nd place will receive $200 and 3rd place will receive $100. For the middle school contest, 1st place will receive $150, 2nd place will receive $100 and 3rd place will receive $50.
The submission deadline for students to enter this contest is October 5. Click here to read the full guidelines for the Belmont Presidential Debate Essay Contest.
In a time where the pandemic has put a pause on live performances for the foreseeable future, Belmont alumni Erik Anderson, Gordon Droitcour, Emily Buckner Pierce and David Supica wanted to create a sustainable live experience where creatives could use their skills, equipment could be put to use and audiences could safely experience live entertainment once again.
This group of alumni has joined forces to do just that, providing innovative entertainment safely with a new concept called EAMOTION and its debut event “Tempo.” Pandemic-safe and contact-free, this immersive sensory experience physically guides attendees along a fixed course of dynamically-designed audiovisual installations. Tempo debuts in Nashville September 18-22 at the at the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway.
Erik Anderson, 2009 music business alumnus, and Gordon Droitcour, 2010 audio engineering and entrepreneurship alumnus, teamed up in 2015 to start their company Cour Design & Cour Content and have designed world-touring stage productions for artists like Billie Eilish, Kacey Musgraves, Lizzo, Maggie Rogers, Maren Morris and Paramore.
Belmont communications design alumna Emily Buckner Pierce serves as Art Director for EAMOTION, and Belmont commercial music alumnus David Supica serves as Operations Director.
“Erik and Gordon recognized early on that live entertainment as we knew it couldn’t go back to how it was before – it had to be nimble and scale efficiently to address local and global challenges,” said Pierce. “None of us were spared professionally from the impacts of COVID, so finding a sustainable way to work again was a key motivator. They pitched to myself, David and a few other industry professionals the idea of combining the self-contained environment of the humble, holiday, light show drive-thru with the familiar elements and scale of an arena tour or festival. Creative problem solving is a cornerstone of what we do anyways, so it only seemed natural to dive head first into figuring out the creative opportunities and logistics involved with actually putting on such an event at scale.”
EAMOTION has all the familiar elements of a concert experience on a much larger scale. It is a safe and scalable experience that, following the same model touring and production companies already use but with pandemic-safe guidelines, can be something that tours across America to provide no-contact entertainment for the whole family. The experience showcases a 50-foot tall pyramid constructed from more than 2,000 video panels and 400-foot wide projection mapped surfaces. The two-mile outdoor course includes more than 8,000 lighting, video and special effects elements, providing a 40-60 minute live entertainment experience for the audience.
“Since we’re introducing a new concept of what live entertainment can be, I’m most amped for when folks have that ‘ah-ha’ moment when they take in the scale of what we’ve achieved,” said Pierce.
Learn more about EAMOTION and get tickets for the debut event, Tempo, at the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway on September 18-22 at eamotion.com/.
Belmont freshman Jessica Lang is one of the first recipients of the International Bluegrass Music Association Foundation’s Sally Ann Forrester College Scholarship for female bluegrass musicians.
Lang is a guitar and mandolin player from Wake Forest, NC. She will be majoring in commercial music, with guitar as her primary instrument, and is a part of Belmont’s Academic Honors Program. She was recently selected as the new guitarist for the Belmont Bluegrass ensemble. Lang has performed and recorded with the Lang Sisters and the Carolina PineCones, and she hopes to pursue a career as a singer/songwriter, guitarist or a composer for television and film.
Sally Ann Forrester played accordion and sang as a member of Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys from 1943-1946, thus becoming the first female professional bluegrass musician in history. Initial funds for the scholarships for female bluegrass musicians were donated by Murphy Hicks Henry, co-founder with her husband, Red Henry, of the Murphy Method instructional media company and the author of Pretty Good for a Girl: Women in Bluegrass (University of Illinois Press). Additional supporters of the Sally Ann Forrester Scholarship Fund, which has been permanently endowed at the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, include Chip Bach, Alison Brown, Tom Brown, Megan Brugger, Cathy Fink, Jordan Entertainment Inc., Maria Nadauld, Nancy Webster, the late Donald Wermuth, and anonymous donors.
Click here for the Sally Ann Forrester Fund promo video, featuring a score of well-known female artists
This year’s Parthenon Awards honored five Belmont students amongst other honorees. The event, sponsored by the Public Relations Society of America Nashville Chapter, was held virtually as a Facebook live event on August 31 on PRSA Nashville’s Facebook page.
Public Relations Campaigns students Ladara Lucas (alumna, class of 2019) and seniors Madeline DiMauro, Emily Stembridge and Aliah Tayyun, received a Parthenon Award in the student category. The service-learning class in fall 2019 allowed these four students to develop and implement a campaign entitled “Unlocked: Jewelry with a Purpose.”
Chandi Morar received an Award of Merit for her research project, “Marketing/Communications and Emerging Technologies,” completed in her Public Relations Research class.
Area professionals in public relations and communications also were honored by award presentations. PRSA is the nation’s leading professional organization serving the communications community, with more than 30,000 professional and student members. The Nashville Chapter sponsors five student chapters of Public Relations Student Society of America, including Belmont PRSSA.
Charmaine Uy, a 2019 alumna of Belmont’s School of Occupational Therapy, recently completed a neurological occupational therapy fellowship at the Brooks Rehabilitation Institute of Higher Learning. The Brooks Neurological Occupational Therapy Fellowship is a one-year program in which fellows-in-training gain extensive experience in the evaluation and treatment of individuals with various neurologic diagnoses but with an emphasis on spinal cord injury, brain injury and stroke.
Fellows-in-training received 1:1 direct mentorship from expert clinicians in these fields with a focus on enhancing clinical reasoning and improving general practice management. In addition to working full-time and managing a full-case load, Uy attended neurologic-focused classes. She completed a total of three case studies examining occupational therapy treatment interventions for pain, upper limb ataxia and stroke in order to improve ADL (Activities of Daily Living) performance and overall independence.
Of her experience in the program, Uy said, “My participation in the neurologic fellowship over the past year has allowed me to become a more knowledgeable and efficient occupational therapist. I feel that it was a great first step as I start my career as an OT and would not have done it any other way.”
