In the summer of 2020, 10 UNC Asheville students participated in the SECU Public Fellows program, working full-time jobs and using their liberal arts education to benefit high-quality nonprofit and government organizations focused on improving life in rural North Carolina for a diverse array of residents. The program, which provided UNC Asheville a $50,000 grant to fund the internships, is designed to connect interested, talented undergraduate students with local leadership in order to obtain meaningful on-the-job experience with a local agency or organization, while providing a unique learning opportunity to allow students to give back to his or her community.
Learn more about the SECU Public Fellows and hear about their experiences in their own words:
The longtime Asheville home of Wilma Dykeman (1920-2006), one of Appalachia’s foremost writers and conservationists, will become home to a new UNC Asheville Writers-in-Residence Program.Â
“The house my father and mother built soon after they were married, in which I was born, and where we lived until I was six years old, was a log house sitting back from the road among thick pines. The creek for which the valley was named, Beaverdam, ran in front of it. It was a comfortable picturesque house, with a long porch running along the front and the length of one whole side. In front of the side entrance stood three dogwoods, beautiful in the spring, and at the front entrance stood the pines, beautiful in the winter…. This was a fine world for a child to know. It touched the imagination; in fact, it required the imagination.”
-Wilma Dykeman, "Family of Earth"
UNC Asheville and the Harrah’s Cherokee Casinos have established the Tribal Casino Gaming Enterprise Scholarship Endowment to award undergraduate scholarships to students from Western North Carolina.
Harrah’s Cherokee Casinos’ first endowed scholarship with UNC Asheville will exist in perpetuity and provide an annual award of over $1,000 each year to qualified students. The first scholarship will be awarded to a student in the UNC Asheville Class of 2025. First-year students and transfer students are eligible to apply.
Take a virtual stroll through campus during one of the most beautiful times of the year.
This year UNC Asheville announced the inaugural Turning of the Maples Virtual 5K. The virtual race allowed runners and walkers to participate and enjoy the fall colors wherever they were. Everyone participating received a sticker, beanie, and downloadable race bib, and winners (those whose virtual team had the most participants) got an extra Turning of the Maples care package, which includes a maple leaf cookie cutter, a recipe for UNC Asheville famous maple cookies, and hot cider mix.
Art alumna Brianna Miller discusses what her work is about, being an introvert, and the alchemy of how the two meet on the surface of the printmaker's stone.
The North Carolina Humanities Council announced Mildred K. Barya, assistant professor of English at UNC Asheville, as the recipient of its 2020 Linda Flowers Literary Award for her creative non-fiction entry, “Being Here in This Body.”
See how students in Painting I have adapted their class to the pandemic.
"For this project, we focused on techniques used to depict transparent objects. I arranged a still life setup outdoors, incorporating numerous transparent or translucent objects such as glass bottles filled with water and colored gel filter sheets." -Assistant Professor of Art Suzanne Dittenber
It’s complicated.
That’s what Patrick Bahls, professor of mathematics at UNC Asheville, wants the students in his class, Outside the Ballot Box: Voting Theory, to understand about elections.
And the students don’t only learn about elections and voting theory in the (virtual) classroom. All students are required to participate in some kind of service-learning activity during the election, bringing the theory into the real world.
From the NC Policy Collaboratory
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all sectors of our lives, from employment to education, and everything in between. As students return to campus, many worry that university campuses are becoming COVID-19 hotspots endangering students, university employees and the surrounding communities. In many places, this has happened. But not at the University of North Carolina Asheville.
UNC Asheville Professor Nancy Ruppert, chair of the University’s Department of Education, has received the John. H. Lounsbury Award for Distinguished Service in Middle Level Education, the highest award issued by AMLE, the Association for Middle Level Education.
For students in Assistant Professor Megan Underhill’s sociology courses, the work of changing the world starts with a deeper understanding of the problems that need to be solved. Students in the courses Whiteness: Interrogating Power and Privilege; and Class, Power, and Inequality; are spending the semester examining the histories and intersections of various types of systemic inequalities in the U.S., and exploring solutions moving forward.
Ramsey Library's 2020 In Character costume contest went virtual this year, with students, faculty and staff submitting their costumes via photographs.
© 2026 UNC Asheville
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