OCCC ranks third in the state for educating veterans, said Janis Armstrong, Veteran Services coordinator.

Last year OCCC enrolled more than 800 veterans and the number has increased this year, even though Armstrong said she doesn’t have an exact count yet.

She said the enrollment of military service members has grown significantly as veterans return to Oklahoma to take advantage of the G.I. Bill to receive their college education.

With six different G.I. Bills available, the benefits are a tremendous help, and often pay tuition and fees, and sometimes living expenses, Armstrong said.

Blood, gore and the seasonal spirit have come to OCCC.

Students are learning about faking traumatic injuries, choosing their costumes and planning the designs for the pumpkins they will carve.

On Oct. 14 the theme in Rebecca McCauley’s Makeup for the Stage class was gore and gruesome injuries — especially facial trauma.

The class meets once a week on Thursday to learn about different styles of makeup.

During this particular class period, students learned how to create realistic bruises, cuts, scrapes, gashes and even bloody noses, using a mixture of latex, tissue paper, makeup and special blood formulas.

More than a dozen OKC-GO scholarship students took part in a service learning day at the YWCA women’s shelter of Oklahoma City on Oct. 15. The students worked cleaning the playground, parking lots and surrounding areas on the grounds of the facility as part of Domestic Violence Awareness Week.

They worked for a better part of the afternoon using rakes, leaf blowers and their own hands to clean leaves that had settled in nooks and crannies around the playground.

• Haunt the Zoo for Halloween

The Oklahoma City Zoo hosts its annual Halloween event at 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. each night through Oct. 31, featuring several days of trick-or-treating for the kids. Admission cost is $7 per child ($6 if purchased in advance), and accompanying adults 18 and over are admitted free.

The University of Oklahoma campus is rife with legends of ghosts, secret societies and daring pranks. This Halloween season, OU and OCCC adjunct professor Jeff Provine will lead a walking tour to various spots on the Norman campus and tell the tales not shared in typical hours.

Having covered many stories with an element of risk in Jordan before, today’s journalism students learned from one of the practitioners of Mid-East broadcast journalism.

A classroom of News Writing students listened to former Jordan Television Corporation reporter and current adjunct professor of Arabic, Thabet Swaiss, on Oct. 7.

Students from OCCC’s Emergency Medical Sciences program attended a public safety forum in early October at the Oklahoma State Capitol. They heard candidates for the Fifth Congressional seat, as well as candidates for attorney general and lieutenant governor.

The congressional seat is being vacated by Mary Fallin, who is running for governor.

Sixty-two students and about 10 faculty members attended the forum. Most students attending the forum are in the program on the OCCC campus but a few were from the Tulsa area and are a part of the growing online program, said Leaugeay Barnes, Emergency Medical Sciences director.

Nearly half of all U.S. undergraduate students are enrolled in community colleges and half of those students are not reaching their educational goals, according to an overview of Achieving the Dream, a national program that uses data to initiate change, according to the OCCC website at www.occc.edu.

OCCC is included in those numbers, said Stu Harvey, executive director of Planning, which is why the college has joined scores of community colleges around the country to try to improve the outcomes for students.

Video games draw players into hours of fantasy and relaxation, a fact well known to OCCC students. A recent survey of 44 students in September showed that computers are the platform favored by most of the respondents.

The survey handed to students gave them a choice between different systems, such as the Nintendo Wii, Sony’s PlayStation 3, and Microsoft’s Xbox 360.

Students also were given a choice between six different genres such as first-person shooter, role-playing, and sports games.

More than half of the top 20 fastest growing occupations in Oklahoma will pay more than $15 an hour, according to the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission.

OCCC offers training for some of these occupations with degrees or certificates of mastery, and some through corporate learning, according to the OCCC student catalog.