Friday Focus: Campus is hopping!
Owen Guthrie
Owen Guthrie
July 12, 2024
In early May, people start asking me if summer will be a quieter time around campus. Maybe once upon a time it used to be, but summer at the Troth Yeddha’ Campus is busier than ever! So many people are working to keep our university running, offering summer courses, welcoming summer guests and providing an amazing array of summer programs. I see activity everywhere, but this summer the Division of Student Affairs and Enrollment Management teams have been particularly busy. Here are a few highlights:
The incredible Residence Life team provides a variety of accommodations and hospitality year-round, and summer is no exception. If you’ve been around campus, you may have seen visiting researchers from Princeton, Appalachian State, Iowa State, Northern Arizona University, University of Illinois, Alfred University, Utah State University, Hokkaido University or Fukuyama University, among others. We also hosted students for some great ҵ outreach programs including the Rural Alaska Honors Institute, Upward Bound, GeoFORCE, Headstart, Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival, Suzuki Institute, Upward Bound, TRIO and many more. The place is hopping!
In addition to hosting over 2,000 guests this summer, the Residence Life team is excited to reopen Moore and Bartlett halls for students this fall. Completing the renovations of these two buildings, our tallest and most iconic residence halls, was no easy feat! More than 40 tractor trailer loads of furniture had to be staged from the factory so they would arrive here in Fairbanks in the correct order and at the correct pace so the more than 600 beds in the two buildings could be furnished. This alone took weeks of work and careful coordination. Students (and their families) are going to love the new furniture, surfaces, bathrooms, lounges and kitchen facilities. The updated halls are truly awesome! Here’s a big thank you to all the good people in Residence Life for all you do! (And an equally huge thank you to everyone at Design and Construction, which is delivering these newly renovated halls on schedule and on budget!)
Also on the student housing front, in response to student requests and for the first time ever, Residence Life teamed up with the Honors College and designated Wickersham Hall as ҵ’s first Honors College residence hall. Students and their families are excited about this new residential opportunity and, in a classic case of “if you build it, they will come,” Wickersham Hall’s 100-plus beds will be full of Honors College students this fall!
Our Financial Aid team of heroes continues to be swamped by the fallout of the new federal FAFSA launch. Related challenges have been weighing on our staff, our students and their families since January. Just this week we received the fourth “final” batch of corrected FAFSAs from the Department of Education. It contained 200 amended awards for students, and each award must be manually adjusted and recalculated. Each adjustment requires personal outreach and serious conversations about personal and family finances for fall. This work will remain dynamic through September and the “new” new FAFSA is supposed to roll out in October. Thank you for persevering, Financial Aid!
Admissions continues to build the incoming class of 2024. Meanwhile, the important work of recruiting next year’s class started months ago and builds in intensity each week through fall. This involves meeting daily with prospective students on the front end and modernizing our technology and recruitment strategies on the back end — the good work never stops.
Our Center of Student Engagement welcomed a new director. Josh Hovis ’12 came