UNC Asheville awarded five Selby and Richard McRae Scholarships to exceptional students from the incoming Class of 2024. Each student will receive $50,000 over the course of their four years at UNC Asheville.
“UNC Asheville’s inaugural Selby and Richard McRae Scholars excel academically and as leaders in their communities. We welcome them to our University and look forward to supporting their academic potential, ingenuity, and leadership skills during this exciting time of their lives,” said UNC Asheville Chancellor Nancy J. Cable.
"I want what we do with the technology to reflect the liberal arts mission that we have. We have to make sure that what comes out of this for us as an institution is innovative – that we’re not just following trends, that we take what we were forced to do – to stand up remote classes very quickly – and learn from it.
And when this is all over, we’re going to sit back and say, ‘ah, isn’t it nice to be back in the brick and mortar classroom with our students in the same real live room.’ But we’re also going to have learned a lot about what our students need when we can’t be in the same room."
-Ellen Holmes Pearson
Isaiah Green, president of UNC Asheville’s student body, has now been elected to lead the UNC System-wide Association of Student Governments (ASG). A rising senior majoring in management, Green has been UNC Asheville’s elected student leader and an ex-officio voting member of UNC Asheville’s Board of Trustees since the start of the school year. Now, as president of ASG, Green will assume a leadership role on behalf of students throughout the UNC system.
In any music business course, Associate Professor of Music and Department Chair Brian Felix likes to keep a flexible itinerary, but this semester that’s proven to be a pivot point for his Music Business II class.
“The music business is always changing. It’s always in flux, no matter what. If you make all of your assignments at the beginning of the semester, it’s guaranteed that something will be out of date at the end of the semester,” said Felix. “This spring, it was clear COVID-19 was going to re-write the entire music business.”
So this spring the class decided to re-write the resource guide.
For most UNC Asheville students, undergraduate research culminates their classes and college career, but this spring, with COVID-19 taking classes online and scholars working remotely, the results have been a bit different. Not in the work itself, which goes on side-by-side synchronously or asynchronously, but in the presentations themselves, which for the first time in UNC Asheville history, are all shared online. See the complete schedule of project abstracts at https://annualspringsymposium2020.sched.com/. Many projects also include uploaded posters, narrated slides, videos, podcasts and more, adding an extra layer to the creativity that we have come to know, love, and expect.
From the frontlines of healthcare work to the front pages of investigative journalism, UNC Asheville alumni are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic with their own expertise and experience. We’re bringing you their stories, along with the stories of our continued UNC Asheville community, knowing that we are Bulldogs, wherever we are.
April is National Poetry Month, and we're celebrating by sharing poems written by UNC Asheville students, faculty and staff that explore this spring season...pandemic and all.
Digital Revolutions was the topic on the syllabus for Associate Professor and Chair of New Media Christopher Oakley’s April 8 History of Animation class, but this spring semester it was a digital revolution of its own, becoming the first class session offered via Zoom webinar in UNC Asheville history. The reason was the COVID-19 pandemic, during which all classes are offered remotely, and the results have given Oakley new ways to think about his teaching.
“The students are really engaged and asking questions,” Oakley said of the webinar format. “It’s much more discussion than we’ve ever been able to have before. Usually if I’m in the classroom and there are so many questions, we only have five or ten minutes at the end of a film. Now [since we’re not watching a full feature film,] I’m showing longer clips that illustrate what I’m trying to say and we have time for in-depth discussions.”
Mallory Rothrock, a UNC Asheville junior from Greensboro N.C. studying chemistry and neuroscience, has been awarded a Goldwater Scholarship, the preeminent national scholarship awarded to undergraduates studying the natural sciences, engineering and mathematics. She is one of only 287 students across the country majoring in the natural sciences to receive the Goldwater Scholarship this year.
The AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) program is all about providing structure and support to kids who face disenfranchisement in school, so they graduate and make the transition to college – typically becoming first-generation college students. And this spring has brought another huge transition for AVID students and their tutors, turning their in-person relationship into a “Google Meet relationship.”
UNC Asheville has appointed Kirk I. Swenson as the University’s next vice chancellor for University advancement starting June 1, 2020. Swenson currently serves as vice president for college advancement at Dickinson College and brings more than 25 years of advancement experience and fundraising success to UNC Asheville. He previously held development positions at Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Ithaca College, St. Mark’s School, and the University of Rochester.
COVID-19 has changed nearly everything about our lives. Our public universities and our businesses have closed, our governments are enacting restrictions to limit transmission of the virus.
Our universities have transitioned to online learning for the balance of the semester. We are using technology to create daily and hourly “virtual” meetings, classes, and conferences. Gov. Cooper’s closure of K-12 schools will force a similar shift to remote learning for our children and teens. Businesses are asking employees to work from home.
The coronavirus pandemic highlights the importance of making adequate, reliable, leading edge broadband infrastructure accessible to all American families. Comprehensive broadband can expand work from home, remote education, telemedicine and many other vital services— we can move information, not people.
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