Friday Focus: Campus is hopping!

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 UAF 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 UAF’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 to us most recently from the University of Montana, and great things are already happening under his leadership at CSE. With Josh’s help, our Student Affairs and Enrollment Management leaders and staff have been busy revising New Student Orientation for this fall. It will be more active, more fun and much more engaging for students than in previous years. One goal of the revised curriculum is for students to “make a friend, make a memory” during orientation. We are also hiring a new set of student ambassadors to facilitate orientation. This crew, the Chancellor’s 49, will be selected from nominations and applications. Thank you to all those working to improve the start of the fall term.

Over at Nanook Recreation, the Patty Pool is coming back online after some much-needed drain maintenance. Hopefully, it will open July 21. Check uaf.edu/recreation for updated lap swim schedules. After a close brush with a freon leak that nearly shut down the ice rink, Nanook Recreation hosted a giant state hockey tournament last weekend. The rink remains packed with public skate sessions and public ice time for hockey. Summer basketball leagues are wrapping up soon. New spin instructors are being trained for fall, but on Wednesday nights at 5:45, you can join the new instructors for their final classes. If you enjoy disc golf, the Gold Disc golf course on the North Campus trails will be getting new Tee Box turf this month. Check out the fresh update in August. Students living on campus can sign up for a hike up Table Top Mountain; Residence Life is sponsoring the trip and managing sign-ups, while Outdoor Adventures will be leading the trip. Student hockey players should bring their gear to campus this fall, as we will continue to grow the club hockey program with practices twice a week and games on Saturday nights! All this and so much more is brought to UAF by the handful of professional and student staff down at Nanook Recreation. 

Lastly but not least, we took another step forward in our enrollment strategy when Student Affairs and Enrollment Management welcomed the good people of the Academic Advising Center, Student Support Services and Interdisciplinary Studies to the fold. This is a continuation of their important work serving our students and a big step forward in further streamlining the student experience at UAF. Each day our advisors provide comprehensive advising, helping students navigate our institution to fulfill their educational goals. I am especially grateful to these teams as they kept a positive attitude and kept their focus on serving our students during this significant structural change. The Student Affairs and Enrollment Management team members are enthusiastic about the benefits this shift will bring to the student experience and the more seamless experience it will bring to the enrollment experience for our students. Big thanks to Holly McDonald for stepping in as interim director of advising during this transitional time. Her background as registrar, with over 20 years of student service experience, has been invaluable. We have begun the recruitment for the permanent director and expect that search to conclude before classes start in August. 

This (much too long) list is just a glimpse of the work from a few of the teams of one of the five vice chancellors at UAF. There are dozens of teams and hundreds, thousands of heroes working to keep UAF running strong through summer, serving our students, preparing for the fall semester and coming to work each day to build a better, stronger UAF. Our work at the largest and oldest educational nonprofit in our beautiful state of Alaska is so important. Thank you to all those I highlighted and thank you to those who are heroic out of sight — thank you for making summer amazing at UAF.