When University of Oregon School of Law alumna Starla Hargita graduated in 2011, she set up a ballot box and invited friends and professors to vote on her future.

The votes would determine whether Hargita would become a legal practitioner or continue her education and receive her Master of Law degree. The results were mixed, but one of her friends insisted that Hargita belonged in front of a classroom, as a professor.

The words resonated with Hargita. With dual degrees in law and conflict and dispute resolution in hand, she didn’t feel she was finished learning.

Twenty lucky Ducks got help with textbook costs last month, courtesy of The Duck Store and Enrollment Management.

Roger Thompson, vice president for Enrollment Management assisted to The Duck Store in handing out $5,000 worth of academic supply cards to students. Twenty students received a card in the amount of $250 each to be used toward textbooks and other academic supplies.

Michael Andreasen had a simple and straightforward message to former University Relations staff members as he welcomed them Thursday morning under the new University Advancement umbrella.

"We serve the purpose of the academy; we take our directions from the academy," said Andreasen, the University of Oregon vice president who previously headed University Development and now leads University Advancement – a consolidation of University Relations and Development.

The University Senate has extended the deadline to Wednesday, May 3, for responses from those who wish to serve on the senate, or on various elected or appointed committees.

When your client is the Springfield Golf Club, it just makes good business sense to visit the course and play a few holes.

Undergraduates in Lundquist College of Business instructor Beth Hjelm’s business strategy and planning course did just that recently, as part of their real-life consulting efforts for a real-world client.

The UO has received the Fresh Air Gold Campus award for adopting a 100 percent tobacco-free policy, the highest level of achievement awarded by the Fresh Air Campus Challenge.

The award is the pinnacle of a challenge that brings together college campuses and local, state and federal tobacco control partnerships to help ensure all institutions of higher education in Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington begin the process of going smoke or tobacco-free by the end of 2013.

The mark of a university can be found in its people.

That was the message from Jamie Moffitt, vice president of Finance and Administration, at a recent reception honoring this year’s outstanding employees.

The 2013 recipients of the Outstanding Employee awards were recognized April 11 at the university’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. The program was created to acknowledge excellent employees, with faculty and staff nominating colleagues, co-workers and supervisors who have made outstanding contributions in the past year.

A University of Oregon professor will chair the 27th International Conference on Supercomputing, considered the premier forum for research results in high-performance computing systems.

Allen Malony, a professor in Computer and Information Science, will preside when the conference comes to campus, June 10 to 14.

Keynote speakers include:

University of Oregon archaeologist Jon Erlandson, whose research has found some of the earliest evidence of seafaring societies contributing to the peopling of the Americas, is a newly elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Her school supplies were glass cups, dried mugwort, three-thousand-year-old textbooks and, of course, needles.

“It kind of reminded me of the Hogwarts School, only because it was all these really ancient things,” Mary Ann Petersen says of her first impression of the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine, where she studied for her career as an acupuncturist.