The Emergence Of A Big

If you’re at all familiar with Oakland’s basketball team, you already know the Keith Benson back story. Skinny boy from the ‘burbs lands at OU, redshirts, puts on some weight, has an up-and-down first-year, then starts to show flashes of brilliance in his second year. That second year, nearing a close now, started back in November at Cleveland State when junior point guard Jonathan Jones threw a calculated pass toward the basket for a driving Benson. Kito, as he is called in these parts, grabbed the ball and dunked it, signaling the arrival of a new kind of play. In that game Kito went 6 for 9 from the field for 15 points alongside 11 rebounds.  From there, our man would struggle while on a grueling nine game road trip, and the prized double-double would not return for a good month.

When Benson finally turned it on again, he did it in front a packed house at the Palace of Auburn Hills, stomping grounds for the Detroit Pistons. Not only were his 23 points and 11 boards impressive because he did it in front of so many people, but he managed to do it against DeShawn Sims and the University of Michigan Wolverines. While the game ended in a loss, as guarantee games almost always do, it nonetheless proved that Benson, long considered an unaggressive softy, had the might to stand up to superior competition.

Scholarship Season

The dawn of the winter semester at OU brings with it the beginning of Scholarship Season. From now through roughly the end of February, various organizations, departments, and schools on-campus welcome scholarship applications from hopeful students.  These scholarships vary in both criteria and amount and come from a plethora of sources, yet they all accomplish the goal of helping Oakland students finance their education.

For several hundred students each year, the dream to receive a scholarship based on hard work in the classroom, on-campus, and in the community is realized. Despite this fact, there seems to be a widespread lack of knowledge pertaining to where and how one can attain these impeccable sources of financial assistance. While the Office of Student Financial Services has established a helpful database of some scholarships, it is important that students look elsewhere on-campus as well.

For example, if you do some digging, you can find a great list of departmental scholarships offered through the College of Arts and Sciences (found through using the old CAS site).  The list includes scholarships for several departments, even a less-populated one such as Women’s Studies. Scholarships such as these are not listed in the aforementioned Financial Aid database, yet these are the kinds that are quite specific and thus very attainable. In addition to a source such as this, it is important to ask professors, department chairs, and academic advisors as they may also know of additional sources of aid through the university itself.

Once you have found out just how many scholarships you may be eligible for, it is important to remember that you will be competing against other students for said scholarships. In general, there are three keys to becoming a quality candidate: strong record of academic excellence, demonstrated leadership, and involvement at OU and in the wider community.

Great Places To Grizz: Dodge Hall Courtyard

As this blog progresses, we’ll occasionally try out various “theme posts” in hopes of establishing some that can appear regularly. The first attempt at this will be called “Great Places To Grizz.”

—

One of the downers of going to college in a northern state is winter. Every fall, thousands of students come back to Oakland University’s beautiful campus. They are given approximately two months to  enjoy the fading beauties of summer, and then winter happens, leaving the campus covered in that familiar white stuff for much of the remainder of the natural semesters (fall and winter, from here on out).

While OU certainly has scenic stability during its wintery months, the ultimate bummer comes from the fact that students can not easily enjoy the views when they want to get their grizz on. Instead, they are forced to set up shop in familiar locales such as Kresge Library, the OC, or any of the various study lounges in order to prepare for The Next Big Exam. An unfortunate result of this occurrence is the development of the mindset that these are the only paces for intense study sessions, even when the campus is blooming.

Struggle, And What It Means At Our Level

Life as a mid-major college basketball team is defined by the term struggle. These teams struggle from the start of the basketball season in November until the end of December. This two-month time frame consists of the out-of-conference games in which the mids compete against the big schools at their arenas and amongst their fans for recognition, money, and wins when they are lucky enough to get them.

For the past two months, the Oakland University Golden Grizzlies  men’s basketball team lived this struggle. They competed against some of the biggest and most historic basketball schools in the country: Syracuse, Michigan, Michigan State, Kansas State, and Iowa.  They even picked up a win on the road against the University of Oregon Ducks. They did it all without their star senior, and they did it in a respectable manner, showcasing their toughness and heart on a national level.

When they were not playing the super schools, they took on regional foes such as Cleveland State, Green Bay, Eastern Michigan, and Toledo, accumulating a 3-1 record. These games proved that the Grizzlies are an area mid-major powerhouse always looking to execute well against the schools that compete with them for future student-athletes.

For our purposes, this struggle is important because it better prepares our team for conference season where true recognition can eventually be achieved. As a mid-major, winning the conference is the only sure way to make it to the vaunted NCAA Tournament in March. Here, 65 teams compete for the chance to win the national title. For smaller schools like Oakland, though, the chances to win the national title are one-in-a-million, yet simply being a part of the Madness has huge dividends. Not only is it a great opportunity for the players and the coaches (who can use the appearance for name dropping purposes while recruiting), but it also helps out the university in so many ways.

Beginnings

To accurately capture the essence of a university experience is, quite naturally, impossible. After all, an experience encompasses so many different things and could be told from so many different perspectives that doing so would never provide an audience with a complete, unbiased account. But the biases that exist from having an experience are inherently a part of said experience, and these biases ultimately make the retelling all the more real.

The takeaway message here is that the endeavor undertaken today is one full of personal experiences and opinions where bias may be hard to separate from fact. It is with this knowledge in mind that The Peeking Grizz begins.

For the next few months and hopefully beyond, the aim of this blog is to offer readers a “peek” into life at Oakland University as a Golden Grizzly. It will be updated frequently with in-depth posts on various aspects of OU, from the buildings to the services to the activities to the wealth of opportunities available to its students. There will also be random musings, weekly specials, and, of course, a helping of Golden Grizzlies basketball coverage when in-season. In essence, a reader can expect perspective on a broad range of OU topics coming from someone who is proud to write tuition checks to the black and gold.