Sarah Joanne Boury overcame huge challenges that few can imagine to walk the stage May 7 for her diploma and to turn the tassle on her graduation cap.
Indeed, the 23-year-old Des Moines, Iowa, native is believed to be the first to graduate from college — having earned a double major — while deaf (using one cochlear implant), breathing with one lung and sustaining herself through a tube-feeding system.
The pandemic made this past academic year one unlike any other for University of Northern Iowa students.
But those challenges didn’t stop students from making an impact on campus.
The Lux Service Award is the most prestigious award given to graduating senior students each academic year to acknowledge the culmination of their overall involvement. Recipients consistently go above and beyond, leaving a lasting legacy upon graduation.
This year, seniors Ayah Al-Durazi, Cassie Hendrix and Zoella Sneed were recognized with the award.
The University of Northern Iowa’s Textiles and Apparel Program will hold its first-ever completely virtual fashion week for students’ designs.
Catwalk 29 is a six-day event (running April 26 - May 1) with five shows featuring garments designed and produced by UNI students using traditional,non-traditional and upcycled materials. Local high school students in the Cedar Valley also assisted in the production.
Jerrell Bates arrived at UNI as an introvert wondering whether he’d ever leave his dorm room. Three years later, Bates is a campus leader whose efforts to destigmatize mental health issues were recognized with a national award.
UNI NEWS SERVICES– The University of Northern Iowa Center for Violence Prevention (CVP) and the Iowa High School Athletic Association (IHSAA) have partnered together to provide and support racial justice and gender-based violence prevention programming to Iowa school districts and athletic departments.
Kyle Endres, now associate director of UNI’s Center for Social and Behavioral Research, arrived at UNI this fall after postdoctoral work at Duke and Fordham Universities. His research focuses on a hot topic in electoral politics - how campaigns and interest groups are using data analytics to influence behavior.
Three weeks remained before Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, but rounds of media interviews and education events had left UNI political science professor Donna Hoffman’s voice scratchy and fading. So when a French news outlet reached out to Hoffman — one of several UNI experts on Iowa’s idiosyncratic method for selecting presidential candidates — her voice couldn’t quite manage another phone or video interview.
Mental health issues are on the rise in Iowa schools, but the school psychologists to help combat this trend are in short supply. UNI's School Psychology Program is the only state accepting students and helping meet these needs, and one of its associate professors was recently recognized for her work in the field.
UNI students will once again search for the remains of the oldest building on campus.
This may seem a bit abstract, but please consider this: The grounds of the University of Northern Iowa are like a Jell-O salad.
Think of the grounds as a three-dimensional mold, the jiggly, gelatin confection analogy within which layers of the university’s history reside. Bricks, limestone rubble, nails and all other manner of bygone miscellany then become the fruit cocktail, the artifacts that are unearthed as you excavate through that iconic dessert.
