View the "Get Involved" NGCSU Public Events Guide at www.ngcsu.edu/eventsguide.

“Get Involved” – so named to establish an identity for the guide among the many calendars on NGCSU’s Web site – serves a dual purpose. The primary function is to be a highly used resource that will create more audience turn-out at events and build stronger constituency connections to the university through various fine arts, cultural and academic events. Customer service will benefit with employees being able to direct those interested in public events to the online tool.

The second purpose of “Get Involved” is to create a foundation for a marketing structure in publicizing events. University Relations, which developed and manages the guide, will use the information submitted by event coordinators on campus to develop more effective and timely event publicity.

A separate Web link to the intercollegiate athletic event listings maintained by the Office of Sports Information is on the guide’s main page.

Visitors may search the online guide for an event to liven up their weekend or a weeknight — musical performances, cultural events, art gallery exhibits, military parades and visiting speaker series are among the events. 

The guide allows for easy viewing of all events month-by-month through the “wall calendar,” which highlights the days that events are scheduled. User-friendly tools allow visitors to get involved when visiting the guide. Users may send reminders about selected events to multiple e-mail addresses, receive notification of cancellations or changes in events or download an unlimited number of events to personal calendars like Google or Yahoo! Calendars.

“Get Involved” is part of NGCSU’s efforts to engage the community and region in the life of the university and was supported through a President’s Innovation Fund grant. Trumba Corp. developed the online event software program and stores the data on its servers. For questions or feedback about “Get Involved,” contact the developer and event publicity manager, Debbie Martin, at dmartin@ngcsu.edu or 706-864-1949.

Joe Morgan

“Many people have a concept of forensics where they view it solely as practitioners working in labs and processing evidence coming in from the field,” says Joe Morgan, the program’s academic advisor. “Equally as important, and what this program focuses on, is the preservation, collection, security and processing of evidence at a crime scene and getting it back into the hands of those people in the labs.”

A team of four professors are teaching the concentration, composed of courses in criminal typology, criminal investigation, evidence, criminalistics, advanced criminalistics and death investigations.

The behavioral-based criminal forensics program is the only one of its kind in the state. It is centered on exposing future law enforcement practitioners to the evaluation of crime scenes, evidence and putting together “a picture of what happened.” The only other program in the University System of Georgia is through Albany State and its focus is on lab forensics.

Department head Leo Downing says that forensics education is an emerging area of study. He notes that with an increasingly scientific society, juries expect scientific proof to establish a crime beyond a reasonable doubt.

“As forensics becomes more technical, we need experts in evidence collection, evidence analysis, criminal investigation and other areas.”

Morgan is working toward developing the program into an academic minor for any undergraduate at North Georgia who might have an interest in forensics.

“There’s a tremendous amount of cross-disciplinary application here,” says Morgan, who has a master’s in Forensic Science. “Many professions have a forensic dimension. Experts in a particular field have to be able to put into practice that forensic aspect, such as when an entomologist collects an insect specimen at a crime scene and understanding how that might affect the outcome of a court case.”

Sharon Matherson wants to pursue a career in forensics but needed the chemistry background so that she could compete for a job in a forensics lab.

“The classes are exposing me to understanding how evidence will get into the lab and the various procedures it takes to collect evidence,” Matherson says.

Over the summer, a curriculum overlap in her death investigation and biochemistry courses was an exciting moment for Matherson.

“In the forensics class, we talked about rigor mortis and learned briefly about the biological systems that cause rigor, and in biochemistry, we talked about how glycolysis affects the process.”

“We’re here to expose students to theory and interlace it with practical application,” Morgan says. “The program sets a foundation for a lot of different disciplines that might have some professional connection to forensics.”