Oct. 1, 2024

Welcome to Week 6!

Week 6! Can you believe it!? 

Finally, some beautiful September weather landed here in Fairbanks this weekend and this week looks to be spectacular. The skies have cleared and the sun is out. What a great way to start your sixth week of classes! For those of you who are new to the Interior, these bright, clear, cold autumn days are what we old-timers expect this time of year. With climate change, however, these glorious days seem to be coming later. September has been wetter and wetter. Still, we’ll take them when they come.

You can really feel the change coming now. Each day is a bit colder than the one before. The nights bring heavy frosts and snow is creeping down the distant mountains of the Alaska Range. Winter is coming.

How are you doing? Are you engaged? Do you feel like UAF is your place? Are you at ease in your surroundings? Have you made some social connections? Now is a good time to check your strategies. Finding a productive groove can help you go the distance – but sometimes that groove becomes a rut. Check yourself, especially your mental and physical health. You can address both of these by checking in with UAF Outdoor Adventures, join intramurals, or take a fitness class at the SRC. Have you joined a club? Don’t see one you like, create your own. You can always grab a friend and go for a walk in the arboretum! Check out Nanook Engage to build your connections and help you find your place and more of your people.

So you are in week six. Amazing! If you had been walking every day since the start of classes, for eight hours per day, at three miles per hour, you would have already traveled over 600 miles. That is nearly from Fairbanks to Anchorage and back! Look how far you’ve come! Some of you have put in even more time than that. You are doing so great.

This is how you succeed – one step at a time. Each day is another day of success. You move a little further and climb a little higher. Make sure to take care of your ‘shoes’, and your support systems. Keep it up. Keep going. You are over one-third of the way to the finish line!

Things to do:

Check in with yourself. Take a health check. How are you doing academically, mentally, and physically? Be honest with yourself. If you don’t know where to start, try one or all of the above options.

Have a great sixth week!

As always, if there’s anything you’d like to share, something we’re doing great, or something we can do better, please do! You can find me at obguthrie@alaska.edu.

— Owen Guthrie, vice chancellor for student affairs and enrollment management