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.
A geology educator found information on St. Peter’s sandstone. An Australian researcher discovered an early paper on the physiology of oats. Both a Pennsylvania graduate student and a Colombian graduate student in France tracked down important research on education.
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.
That inspired her to launch a new project to document how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting daily life throughout the UNI and Cedar Valley communities.
