All of Georgia Tech’s colleges are highly ranked by national and world standards and, the Scheller College of Business is no exception. The school, which houses 1220 undergraduate students this semester, is ranked 1 out of 25 top business schools according to Business Insider, and the Princeton Review said that Scheller has the 5th best classroom experience.

Since many of Georgia Tech’s students still don’t quite understand what they do over at Scheller, here’s a quick overview of the mysterious business school.

Undergraduate students pursuing a Bachelor’s of Science in Business Administration start out taking a class or two a semester in a business-related topic in order to introduce them to the field. Later, they will choose a concentration in order to narrow their focus; they can choose from accounting, finance, information technology management, leading and managing human capital, marketing and operations and supply chain management.

Tyler Harper, a first year with a finance concentration, is starting out his Scheller experience with a class in business law and loves it so far. “The professor is amazing. She used to be a lawyer, and she always brings in her own cases,” he says. “She really makes the course material come to life.

Like many others, Harper has big dreams. After he gets established on Wall Street, doing investment banking or emergency acquisition, he wants to get involved in a start-up.

Even between students who have the same concentration interests can vary Sam Medinger, a third-year who also has a concentration in finance, wants to go into corporate finance.

“My favorite class so far has been my Intro to Finance class, which really solidified the fact that finance is what I want to do,” Medinger said.

Medinger is on his third co-op semester working with the Southern Company’s treasury department. He helps them work with cash operations, debt issuances and deal with their operating companies, like Georgia Power and Alabama Power.

He also is President of Scheller’s Student Business Ambassadors, which organizes both events for recruitment and for the undergraduate students. He might be a bit biased, but he likes to think that these programs help bring the school together.

“I think the Scheller College has the strongest and closest community of all of Tech’s colleges,” Medingher said. “It is in part because the undergraduate staff is so awesome. They actively seek us out to advise us, to give us job help and job search opportunities.”

But why business at Georgia Tech, which is clearly an engineering and research institution? Many choose Scheller because of this very reason — it provides unique opportunities due to the integral role of technology in their education.

“We are the cutting edge, and we have innovation centers all around us. Having a business school where there’s so much technology is very important, because it will be used forever in business and will only continue to grow and change,” Medinger said.

Others agree, and point to the college’s growing rankings and awards. Harper says that “the business school is getting better and better every year, and I think when business school catches up, that’s when GT will reach its true potential.”

Scheller even tries to actively integrate the business and engineering colleges, through things such as the Technology and Management program. This minor in Computing or Engineering in Business is a two-year program where, each semester, business majors take an engineering class, engineering majors take a business class, and they take a joint class together. The students get the opportunity to develop diverse skills and work with their peers.

Business at Scheller is one of many strong communities at Tech that have become firmly rooted in the university’s culture, much like Tech’s budding Literature, Media and Communications programs. It is here to stay, and its position makes it undeniably intertwined with the fields of technology and engineering.

Apple’s biggest release yet, iOS 10, is also the least impactful. To understand why, one must understand jailbreaking — hacking the iPhone.

There have been over 30 million jailbroken iDevices, so it was almost a necessity to do. The three reasons to jailbreak were to download “cracked” versions of paid apps, re-theme the UI, and, most importantly, have a half-decent user experience.

Remember when notifications hijacked the screen until you acknowledged them? Thank the MobileNotifier hack for inspiring iOS 5, where Notification Center and banner notifications were implemented. How about having to find Calculator in a numerical emergency or having to navigate Settings just to turn on Wifi? SBSettings was one of the most installed hacks, long before iOS 7 made it baseline with Control Center.

Consequently, it seems like the iOS team has only created two original, important, user-centric, purely software features since iOS was born: Siri in iOS 5 and the flat UI design of iOS 7. (Developer-oriented features, like the Metal API of iOS 8, as well as security fixes should not be discounted, but the average user honestly does not care about any of that.)

Siri herself was a company that Apple bought out, but I’ll still give them a point. Removing the skeuomorphic design of yore in favor of a flat UI honestly wasn’t that big of a deal, despite every tech outlet spawning four think-pieces about the decision.

That’s about it: a pre-existing company and a designer being allowed to have an opinion after Steve Jobs’ death. Every other major iOS feature used to be a legally contentious hack — if it wasn’t copied from a popular third-party app instead. Modern notifications, Control Center, Night Shift, Do Not Disturb, the Switcher’s card view, parallaxing app icons, custom notification vibrations, custom ringtones, battery percentage, third-party apps and even copy/paste used to be hacks to make iOS less bad.

There are some useful hacks that may never be implemented. Custom themes negate Apple’s branding. Filesystem access isn’t a great idea for the most popular, most secure device on Earth. Paid apps generate more revenue than illegal free versions.

As of iOS 7, there weren’t too many hacks left in Cydia (the App Store for jailbreakers) that Apple hadn’t already made a core part of the software. For that reason, jailbreaking stopped being necessary. The decrease in jailbreaking coincided with, if not caused, the lack of new user-oriented features in iOS 8, 9 and now 10.

Respectively, iOS 3 through 9 added basic functionality, multitasking and the unified inbox, modern notifications and Siri, Apple Maps and Facebook integration, a new design philosophy and clean UI, 4000 developer APIs and a new programming language, and a major spring cleaning and battery life improvements. (iOS 6 was bad, yes, but Apple Maps is more than worth the pixels its icon takes up now.)

That brings us back to iOS 10: fancier Messages, new UI, Siri can call an Uber, new sounds, the removal of the patented Slide to Unlock (RIP) and a neural net watching you type.

There cannot be a major release without adding or changing something fundamental — whether or not that something is user-facing. Novelty Messages is too unimportant, and enhanced autocorrect is too subtle. In order to have the “biggest release yet,” it also had to be the most fluffed — 1.1 gigabytes of Apple fiddling with the UI. Some of these changes are good; some are awful. Jony Ive changed the entire UI in iOS 7 as a new clean-design philosophy; iOS 10 changed the entire UI because it had nothing better to do.

Buzzfeed called this kind of thing “dude-fussing,” saying “these actions don’t have any real effect. But they are fussy and make a great show of effort at doing something to make it all better.” Apple changed everything to hide the fact that it changed almost nothing. Maybe there’s not much left to change.

The iPhone itself is seeing similar struggles. CPU will always be better two years into the future, but even Moore’s Law isn’t holding out anymore due to real-life physics. After the 64-bit iPhone 5S with the Secure Enclave, the only important thing that could feasibly change next was the iPhone’s size or the most-used peripheral port of all time. Once the 6 and 6+ ran the gamut for size, there was only one option left for the 7.

Removing the headphone jack wasn’t a decision made with “courage”; it was the only justification for releasing an entirely new phone in 2016. The only other choice was to not make a new iPhone, which may have been even more unacceptable of a decision. They haven’t released the 7’s sales numbers as they have done for every other iPhone in the past, suggesting the vernal SE was a good idea.

The only thing left to add to the iPhone is an organic LED (AMOLED) screen to improve battery life. This is something other popular phones already have, so Apple has to do it too.

Both iOS and the iPhone are nearly complete. It will be too soon for iOS 11 to change everything again come next year, and there’s nothing terribly important left to add. The iOS team is out of ideas, which is to say jailbreakers are out of ideas.

On the other hand, the iPhone team has one big “decision” left to celebrate the phone’s 10th birthday. At that point, modern cell phones will be virtually identical to each other.

In other words, the next iPhone or two will be a Samsung Galaxy that the FBI and your favorite headphones can’t get into anymore.

When someone asks where I am from, I reply with a practiced, canned answer: I hail from New Jersey. Born in New York City. Parents are from Taiwan. This may seem like an oddly specific way to reply this question, but for me, it circumvents the inevitable inquiry that follows: “So, where are you really from?”

From a young age, I have grappled to define myself between two cultures, that of my parents and the one that was thrust upon me at birth — never fully fitting in one box or the other.  My grade school lunch was a perfect symbolization of my cultural mix: a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a dessert of Pocky and a can of Apple Sidra.

I was standout in my elementary and middle school, not due my unique lunches but being one a handful of non-white students in a school district dominated by Caucasians whose families have been in the country for generations. To my grade school classmates, I was an Asian Leopold Bloom, belonging to two nations, one of which underlined an outsider status.

The flip side was no different. When returning to “the motherland” for visits, my sister and I encounter the branding of “vi go lang,” Taiwanese for American, wherever we go by strangers on the street and relatives alike. To them, by our sense of style, ideas and preferred language, we were undoubtedly American.

These statements were in some ways more accurate. I am, in fact, an American, born and bred in spite of my parent’s efforts to connect us with our Taiwanese roots with speaking Mandarin at home and attending Chinese school for 12 years. I studied Mark Twain in lieu of Li Bai, mastered the ideas of the Constitution and what it stand for, and was constantly preached the American Dream of if you work hard enough, you can do anything.

In an interview with Vulture on the Taiwan-based episodes of “Fresh off the Boat,” a show that constantly addresses this disconnect, showrunner Nahnatchka Khan noted, “When you are something-American, like Persian-American, Latin American, Asian-American, you are American,” she says. “Otherwise you’re just Asian or Persian. That idea that you go back and everything falls into place is a fantasy — your experience of living in America changes you.”

So, why aren’t Asian-Americans like me perceived as just Americans in the eyes of our fellow Americans? We grow up speaking English. We watch the same television shows. We take the same classes and are taught the same ideals. Is it impossible to divorce the ideas of who we may look like and who we actually are? Even if that’s the case, why isn’t how we look accepted as also American.

There is an equal number of Italian-Americans and Asian-Americans in the U.S., so why are they hailed as being entirely American while the Asian-Americans are perceived as foreign?  As New York Times editor Michael Luo pointed out in his piece “An Open Letter to the Woman Who Told My Family to Go Back to China,” we have to say that we are born in this U.S. as proof that we belong.

That ambiguity is further muddled when pieces like Jesse Watters’ Fox News piece on Chinatown reduces people into a punchline with gross stereotypes that Asians in America, can’t speak English well, ignorant of American issues and only care about karate (which isn’t even Chinese, the group he was trying to target in his segment.) We are not the submissive model minority that Bill O’Reilly and his team are trying to mis-characterize us as.

Like many Asian-Americans and other children of immigrants, I have been culturally trapped in the middle. I’m not just Taiwanese, but I am not just American either. I’m really that hyphen in the middle trying to bridge the two ideas. We include the “-American” because ultimately, we are Americans.

While the quality of Tech students and a Tech education has only risen in the past years, one aspect of Tech has remained relatively constant: the quality of its transportation system. With the exception of the Tech Square Express, which mostly benefits business students or those living in off-campus housing, the majority of the undergraduate population have seen no great increase in the quality of the transportation system, qualitatively or quantitatively, since their arrival on campus.

One deficiency is exceptionally wearing for many students, particularly those who walk next to or bike on the bus routes: pollution. Almost every student is familiar with the suffocating black cloud of smoke (pollution) that the buses emit as they accelerate. It is an eyesore, nose-sore and health hazard. With a campus that prides itself on being green and touts its LEED certifications, the transportation system is a black sheep.

The solution is simple: go electric. While many cite cost as a deterrent, I will cite competition as an incentive. In June of 2016, U(sic)GA was awarded a $10 million grant from the GO! Transit Capital Program to purchase 19 electric buses for its fleet. U(sic)GA provided another $5 million in matching funds. These buses are intended to replace the oldest of U(sic)GA’s diesel buses and will contribute to a cleaner and more appealing campus environment.  Just as America’s space program was pushed onwards by Soviet competition, so should Tech’s transportation modernization be pushed on by U(sic)GA’s. As an aerospace engineer and history nerd, I appreciate such things.

While the upfront cost of switching to electric vehicles is a deterrent, it pays for itself in the long-term. While not directly related to Tech, a New York University study on New York’s transportation system can provide insight into the savings. The study found that diesel buses typically cost $500,000, with electric buses coming in $300,000 higher at around $800,000. However, over the 12-year lifetime of the bus, a diesel bus will cost the operator $1.348 million while an electric bus will cost only $1.18 million. Over the lifetime of the operation, an electric bus will save the operator $168,000.

While it is likely that the numbers for Tech will be somewhat different, $168,000 over 12 years is a significant number and one that provides enough margin to justify looking into the idea. If one assumes that Tech operates 16 vehicles (assumption is 3 each for Red, Blue, Green, Trolley, and 2 each for Emory and Tech Square), then that works out to be a savings of $2.688 million over the lifetime of the system (12 years x 168,000 per year per bus x 16 buses). Per year, that works out to be a savings of $224,000 (enough to pay for at least two more full-time counselors in the counseling center, or assist in upgrades for the Student Center, Instructional Center or aerospace buildings).

Tech is ideally positioned to conduct such a study. According to the data that I was able to obtain, Tech’s current contract with Groome Transportation ends in 2020. A study started in the Spring of 2017 could make a decision on the future by Fall of 2018. This would provide nearly 2 years for development of a plan to go fully-electric. This could be done either in the form of only allowing bidding from electric bus companies or through the establishment of a Tech run and operated bus system, which would have the advantage of giving Civil Engineering and Public Policy students, among others, access to internships and work experience on a problem directly relevant to challenging real-world issues.

There is a final benefit to Tech switching to an electric bus system: marketing. The prospect of a totally green transportation system would add to Tech’s reputation as a progressive, technologically advanced institution.

Two Door Cinema Club’s third album, “Gameshow,” represents the proving ground for the relatively young band.  While their first two releases found success in the increasingly competitive indie-rock scene, “Beacon” and “Tourist History” differ very little in terms of musical content, although this is not a bad thing. “What You Know” and “Undercover Martyn” stood out as some of the most popular electropop/dance songs during their respective releases.

In order to retain current fans while simultaneously attracting a new audience, members Alex Trimble (lead vocalist), Kevin Baird (bass) and Sam Halliday (lead guitar) needed to produce a set list that retained the danceable, electropop attributes of the first two albums while venturing into new territory. Inspiration from the likes of David Bowie and Prince drove the tone of “Gameshow” to adhere to an 80’s nostalgia-themed movement.

The headliners, “Beacon” and “Tourist History,” emanate a sense of occasion. “I Can Talk,” for example, is featured in the soundtrack of the popular soccer video game “FIFA.”  The celebration of the occasion is complemented by the upbeat foreshadowing of the song.

While some content within “Gameshow” is true to the band’s roots, such as “Are We Ready? (Wreck)” featured in “FIFA 17” for its recognizable upbeat tone, the headliners carry more weight than those of Two Door Cinema Club’s previous albums.  In a sense, it is evident that the band has matured in its song writing.

For those that are familiar with the heist film “The Italian Job,” the scene in which the characters have finally completed the heist and must go their separate ways, pockets stuffed with cash, would be perfectly covered by the current album’s weightier songs like “Fever” or “Invincible.”  The sense of opportunity in these respective songs is impressive, for pieces with such critical lyrics and regretful undertones are seldom positive and opportunistic in their overtones.  The productions of Two Door Cinema Club’s past albums did not carry such depth.

It is not to say that there are no songs in “Gameshow” that identify with the indie-rock and electropop mixtures that are familiar in the band’s previous albums.  The title songs “Gameshow” and “Bad Decisions” both resemble the highly danceable songs of the band’s past recordings, and for that reason are sure to achieve the same, if not greater, amount of success as their predecessors.

Portions of this mastering process that Two Door Cinema Club has achieved with “Gameshow” are evident in the minor changes within the production of each song.  Trimble’s voice now takes the back seat to the prevalent beats and synthesis particularly noticeable in “Ordinary,” “Surgery” and “Good Morning.”  The effect, reminiscent of Prince’s style of dance as a complement to his music, encourages the listener to “feel” the music.

This method of production, along with the increased depth of the band’s music, separates not only “Gameshow” from its predecessors, but also Two Door Cinema Club from its competitors.  No other electropop/indie rock band manages to generate such a mixed range of emotions from its music.  “Gameshow” is now available to download and stream via Spotify, Apple Music and Google Play Music.

A neuroatypical accountant who disposes of those that clash with his moral code is the idea behind “The Accountant.” This stars Ben Affleck (“Gone Girl”) as Christian Wolff, the accountant, and other notable actors Anna Kendrick (“Pitch Perfect”) and J.K. Simmons (“Spider-Man”).

The audience is first introduced to Wolff, diagnosed with autism, via flashbacks of his childhood. The audience learns that his mother wanted him to be in a care home as a child, with other neuroatypical children and the caregivers who can help him adapt. Wolff’s father disagrees, and this division leads to a rather unexpected outcome for Wolff. The relationship between Wolff and his brother is an important touchstone that recurs throughout the movie.

The current day Wolff is an accountant who has normal clients, like a farmer couple, that cover for his less sunny work as an “accountant” for crime lords and mob bosses. He un-cooks the books or finds a leak in the money over years of financial accounting. He is not only mathematically talented, but also has amassed the talents of an effective soldier with impeccable sniper capabilities and impressive hand-to-hand combat skills.

Those who stray from his moral bounds face consequences as he plays judge, jury and executioner. This brings Treasury Agent Ray King (J.K. Simmons) to his trail to unmask Wolff’s identity. As his cover, Wolff works as a certified public accountant (CPA) in a small town. When Wolff discovers his cover is being investigated, he takes a huge cover job with the prosthetic company, Living Robotics, to determine if someone has been embezzling funds after Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick, “Pitch Perfect”) notices an oddity in the numbers.

Watching the movie was only enhanced by knowing scenes were filmed on Tech’s campus where Affleck and Kendrick exchange an awkward, adorable and slightly stilted conversation on the steps of the Student Center by the Campanile. A beautifully nerdy accounting montage occurs when Wolff fills the windows and walls of a conference room in Klaus with numbers as he deciphers the 15 years of financials of Living Robotics in one night. It is quite fitting for such a scene to occur on Tech’s fantastically nerdy campus. The movie was also filmed in the Academy of Medicine, and other spots around campus.

Though Wolff’s character could have easily come off as an off-his-rocker autistic hit man, the creators of the movie deftly intertwined the autistic disorder and the role Wolff plays in the world. It is an exquisite masterpiece that has been achieved when the audience attaches to Wolff and laughs as he shoots the man threatening Dana, much like “Deadpool,”  that created a lovable “villain” through comedic value and character transformation.

That’s not to say there was no comedy in the movie. Wolff’s interactions with Cummings were delightful, especially when Cummings tries to joke with Wolff as he tries to be polite despite not understanding most of her jokes. The small smiles that slightly lift the corner of his lips every now and then when he interacts with Cummings are heart-warming. This movie allowed the
audience to bond and relate to Wolff as a man trying to fit in the world as well as he could while overcoming the obstacles associated with autism.

“The Accountant” was deeply satisfying throughout. At no point did the plot drag out or become overly predictable. The movie itself was an oddity in that it is so different from most in its genre,  and the film was made so much better knowing that Tech was the backdrop. Affleck’s acting was phenomenal, completely redeeming his performance in “Batman v. Superman.”

From the coping mechanism to deal with the sensitivities due to autism, to the friendship and love he holds for Dana, Wolff’s large heart is unlikely at first glance but becomes apparent  when he aids a couple to lower their taxes as a small town CPA, and the deep friendships he has for those he lets in. Ben Affleck hit it out of the park with “The Accountant.” Overall, the movie was outstanding in its portrayal of autism and was a phenomenal tale from start to finish.

Fans of science fiction/mystery series like “Fringe” and “Mr. Robot,” anxiously gathered around their televisions on Oct. 13 to watch USA Network’s latest contribution to the now-crowded genre, “Falling Water.”

Part surreal mystery, part science fiction thriller, the new series centers on three characters who find that they — or, rather, their dreams — exist in a single, interconnected world and who must discover what their dreams might tell them about their actual lives. On the surface, it seems that the mystery which underlies the show could be engaging and fascinating, but there is one glaring problem: after the first episode, there is no indication whatsoever as to what that mystery might be.

In fact, after the first episode, the viewer has little idea of what the show might even be; the pilot introduces a complex web of shallowly developed characters and partially explored motifs which coalesce into an incoherent mess of confusion. The plot is so entangled, in fact, that the viewer is left with a few disconnected ideas and practically no notion of why those ideas are significant or how they will play into the narrative of the series.

The episode does show some promise, however, in the development of the three principal characters: Burton (David Ajala, “Kill Command”), Tess (Lizzie Brocheré, “American Horror Story”) and Taka (Will Yun Lee, “The Wolverine”). The creators of the show effectively bring out deep conflicts and personality traits in these characters in the single episode, revealing with subtlety and taste some of their deepest and darkest secrets.

The viewer becomes aware that each of the three characters has some weakness, some emotional demon which haunts them and frustrates their desire to maintain control of themselves and their situation. The three also lack a propensity to trust others, a deficiency almost certainly stemming from the personal demons haunting them in their dreams.

Still, these interesting and well-developed characters are brought down by a sea of obnoxiously underdeveloped characters that surrounds them. These characters often have considerable amounts of screen time and dialogue, yet the viewer learns practically nothing about them from the episode.

There are even characters who seem poised to play a significant role in the show but are then left with less character development than Marcello’s, a restaurant referenced by the characters with unusual frequency.

One case that stands out is Bill Boerg, as there is even reason to believe that he is the otherwise unnamed narrator. This lack of development of some major characters presents a serious problem for a show which professes to explore the “ripples in the Jungian collective unconscious.”

Tragi-comically, the show’s greatest power, its ability to confuse the viewer’s delineation between dream and reality, is ultimately its greatest weakness. While watching the show, the viewer is never quite sure whether or not a character is dreaming.

This unique feature is impressive, and it lends the show flexibility in that any viewer theory is possible because anything that contradicts itself in the show can be dismissed as actually being part of a dream. Still, this actually takes away from the thrill of watching. If any theory is possible, no theory feels correct, and the suspense viewers love so much about watching science fiction mystery show disappears.

For now, after the release of the pilot episode, the show is ambitious and at first intriguing, but it is weighed down by an inconsistently developed cast of characters, an absurdist narrative style which puts Samuel Beckett to shame, and a barely embryonic plot. If “Falling Water” does not offer viewers something new and coherent in the next few episodes, a second season might exist only in its dreams.

Tech recently took the Healthy Campus 2020 pledge to become a Healthy Campus Partner, showing its commitment to improving health on campus.

Created in 2012 by the American College Health Association (ACHA), Healthy Campus 2020 comprises a set of objectives and guidelines developed over a course of five years to assist certified universities nationwide in creating safer, healthier environments for their students.

“We are focusing on implementing a comprehensive, holistic, collaborative approach so that our students and employees can flourish and be fulfilled,” said Suzy Harrington, executive director at the Center for Community Health and Well-Being.

ACHA makes available several resources to help Tech and the other 42 Health Campus Partners pursue the Healthy Campus 2020 goals.

“The ACHA survey provides the data to track the specific objectives,” Harrington said. “They also have a fabulous website with resources for those just starting a health and well-being program to those deeper into their initiatives.”

At Tech, the Office of Health Promotion is in charge of addressing students’ health needs through a variety of awareness and facilitation programs.

“Our priorities this year are mental health, sexual violence, and alcohol and other drugs,” said Vladimir Oge, director of Health Promotion. “We are looking at past assessments and further refining our data tool for more effective programming and services, to ensure we are improving health behavior and mitigating risks.”

One of Health Promotion’s priorities is to provide support to survivors of sexual violence while increasing access to information about safe, consensual sex.

“Health Promotion coordinates the VOICE Initiative, a comprehensive sexual violence program with a mission to end sexual violence at Georgia Tech through prevention, and victim advocacy services to support survivors of sexual assault,” Oge said.

“The GYP (Get Yourself Protected) campaign is geared towards promoting safer sex practices via print and social media, along with increasing the availability of condoms for students who choose to engage in sexual activity,” Oge said.

Health Promotion also works with outside organizations to bring new health programs
to campus.

“Through a partnership with the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety, we promote a number of outreach programs aimed at preventing the consequences associated with alcohol abuse,
including impaired or distracted driving,” Oge said.

“Our mission is to provide learning opportunities to empower students to make healthy decisions,” Harrington said. “The best way to make healthy decisions is to equip yourself with the knowledge and information that enables you to stay healthy.”

Harrington encourages students interested in finding out more about health initiatives on campus to check out Health Promotion online.

“All of the information about the programs and services we provide is readily available via our website: healthpromotion.gatech.edu,” Harrington said. “Additionally, students are encouraged to follow us on our many social media platforms.”

For the fifth consecutive semester, Tech’s campus population will temporarily grow to thousands of students and several hungry, four-legged mammals.  While students have gone out of their way to visit the guests, they are actually on campus for an express purpose.

Kudzu, an ornamental shrub initially brought from Japan to the United States, was meant to be used to counter erosion thanks to its rapid and thorough growth.  However, the vine eventually proved too much for the farmers of the South after they discovered that it could grow at an uncontrollable rate of 12 inches per day, or roughly 60 feet per season.  Kudzu continues to grow in the southeast at a rate of 150,000 acres, or 375 Tech campuses, annually.

Landscape professionals at Tech have found a means of controlling the kudzu, albeit an unconventional one in the world of landscaping.  Three years ago, Anne Boykin-Smith, master planner and landscape architect in Tech’s Capital Planning office, took notice of the overgrown kudzu just north of the MSE building.  After researching various methods of removing kudzu that were environmentally friendly and avoided potentially-harmful herbicides, Boykin-Smith stumbled across sheep as a means of removal.

“Sheep are more selective in terms of eating plants and will tend to eat vines and leaves up to four feet tall,” Boykin-Smith said. “Goats will eat anything, including shrubs and small trees that you want to retain and will reach taller, say five to six feet tall and completely denude the area, which is not the intent for this area of campus. Having sheep on campus is also fun, with students taking selfies with them and remembering them.”

Tech is not unique in using sheep for groundskeeping purposes. “Using sheep and goats to remove invasive species/weeds like kudzu, poison ivy and English ivy has been in practice for years,” Boykin-Smith said, “with inner city parks and private nature reserves using them to remove undergrowth. Sheep have been used to graze grass at the Atlanta airport in areas that are difficult to access. Years ago, [University of Georgia] used sheep to graze along a stream that meanders through campus because the vegetation had gotten really thick and now the stream is visible to the campus. To my knowledge, Tech has used herbicides to remove kudzu in
the past.”

This year’s flock is set to address the continuing kudzu problem in the Biotech Quad, near the Molecular Science building.

“This area was allowed to overgrow because of a construction project nearby,” Boykin-Smith said, “that prevented our staff from maintaining the area.” A high-functioning flock of sheep can defoliate an acre of kudzu in approximately three weeks, but multiple treatments are required to completely get rid of kudzu.

This semester may not be the last that students can expect to see  the groundskeeping sheep.

“We expect for the sheep to be on our campus until Saturday, Oct. 22nd,” Boykin-Smith said.  “[We] will evaluate whether or not they need to return to the campus in the late spring.”