For Jeremy Rosel, the transition to college life was a bit different than most students.
Instead of dealing with the challenges of leaving home for the first time, he was leaving five years of military service as a combat medic with tours in Iraq and Germany.
It was an abrupt transition. He left the rigid structure of military life to enter the more relaxed atmosphere of a college campus, and he struggled to adapt.
When COVID-19 first started making waves in the United States and colleges across the country began moving to online instruction, Jaycie Vos, special collections coordinator and university archivist at UNI’s Rod Library, turned to the university archives for a sense of what was to come. She searched the stacks for information on how the 1918 Spanish Flu impacted campus life at UNI but didn’t find much.
The outbreak of COVID-19 has shuttered most of the University of Northern Iowa’s campus services, but a small, dedicated group of dining services workers have continued to work through the pandemic to provide three meals a day to the tiny population of students still living on campus.
When the UNI Foundation launched a fundraising campaign last week for a new scholarship to help students facing financial hardship as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the response was powerful.
Within a few days more than 500 people donated a combined $50,000 for the new UNItogether Scholarship, which will help mitigate tuition costs for new and returning students.
Nearly 2,000 brand-new University of Northern Iowa graduates are expected to gather Thursday for a commencement ceremony unlike any in UNI history.
Instead of crossing a stage at the McLeod Center this weekend to receive their degree, the Class of 2020 will celebrate their achievements online. Social distancing guidelines amid a global coronavirus pandemic have left US universities little choice but to move their commencement ceremonies off campus.
As the nation and Cedar Valley region continue to grapple with the devastating fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, the University of Northern Iowa is stepping up to help students.
Under a cloudy sky on the first day of May, Emily Dvorak and two University of Northern Iowa students pushed seedlings of broccoli and cauliflower into freshly tilled soil at the People’s Community Garden in downtown Waterloo.
Marion, Iowa, and Rawalpindi, Pakistan are separated by a distance of over 7,000 miles. Mahlia Brown grew up dreaming of a career in human resources, while Farhan Amjad’s interest in technology led him to study computer science with a desire to make his own impact on Silicon Valley. Their paths converged at UNI as the 2020 Lux Service Award recipients.
