With early polling locations in the November general election opening next week, college students across the country are preparing to vote, some of them for the first time.
Issues including the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare, the environment and racial justice have made this an election that some are describing as perhaps the most important in a generation. And with an ongoing pandemic, voting will look much different this year.
George Stigler (UNI ’72), who retired July 30 as Iowa’s longest active serving judge and only its second Black district jurist, credits an impromptu hallway chat with two of his University of Northern Iowa professors with changing his life’s course.
“In fall semester of my senior year, I was waiting for class to start in Seerley Hall when Professor Thomas Ryan asked me to come into his office,” recalled Stigler, 70, who earned his bachelor’s degree in History in three-and-a-half years.
She’s a classically trained vocalist who as a grad student co-authored a paper on health issues among Gulf War veterans. Born to a music-teacher mom and college-administrator dad, UNI’s new admissions director Terri Crumley’s life has straddled both worlds in a career that led from The Juilliard School to teaching to admissions posts in Iowa and Wisconsin. Through it all, she kept singing.
As a first-generation, low-income Latino from a single parent household, Jesus Lizarraga-Estrada can relate to the struggles of underrepresented students.
Now the associate director of freshmen recruitment and access at UNI, Lizarraga-Estrada is working to break down the barriers for minoritized populations to access higher education and succeed on campus, and his work landed him on the Waterloo Courier’s “20 under 40” list in 2020.
In a normal year, barring a global pandemic, Andrew Morse travels a lot.
As the University of Northern Iowa’s primary federal government relations officer, he frequently jets off to Washington D.C. or Department of Defense sites or conferences across the country to advocate for legislative change. But don’t let that fool you. While he’s often away, his focus is solely on the local community.
When Kelli Snyder moved from her hometown of Dunkerton to Milwaukee to complete her master’s degree, she swore she’d never move back.
But then she received a job offer from Cedar Valley Medical Specialists for the athletic training position at Waterloo Columbus High School. And her husband, Andy, was working as a deputy sheriff for Black Hawk County. And her grandparents’ acreage, just down the road from the farm where she grew up, went up for sale.
Answering the phone has never been more important.
Since the beginning of the semester, UNI contact tracers have been hard at work helping prevent the spread of COVID-19 by notifying students of their required quarantine for those in close contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19.
They may not be marching this year, but the Panther Marching Band will play on.
Like just about every other aspect of life on campus, COVID-19 has drastically altered marching band. This wasn’t the 120th season the nearly 300 members anticipated, but the group is pressing on, finding creative ways to stay safe, socialize and continue doing what they love even during a pandemic that has delayed the fall football season. They have performances scheduled throughout the semester, beginning on September 11th.
The University of Northern Iowa’s accounting department ranked third in the nation in preparing students to become certified public accountants, according to a new analytic by Baylor University and UNI professors.
The newly created CPA Success Index estimates students’ progress toward completing all four parts of the CPA exam. The metric found UNI students had an 89% success rate on the notoriously difficult test, just below Texas A&M University (90%) and the University of Missouri-Columbia (95%).
UNI Career Services didn’t let a global pandemic stop them from giving students an opportunity to safely find their future career.
With restrictions on face-to-face interaction due to COVID-19, UNI will hold its Career Fair virtually from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 21. Attendees will be able to interact and network with representatives from more than 120 different companies via video chat through the Handshake app.
