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.
While COVID-19 forced an unimaginable end to the semester, our graduating seniors continued to impress with their academic brilliance, strong relationships with faculty and other students, and wide variety of out-of-class experiences to create a strong foundation for their future. These are but a few of our promising Class of Spring 2020 graduates:
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.
The UNI Foundation today launched a crowdfunding campaign to support the new UNItogether Scholarship Fund, which was created to provide tuition assistance to students facing financial hardships as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sometimes a little destruction is necessary for creation.
That’s certainly true at the University of Northern Iowa’s Textile and Apparel Product Development and Materials Analysis Laboratory - a unique, $3 million state-of-the-art facility brimming with advanced machinery capable of putting every type of stress imaginable on fabric. National retailers use these sorts of tests to create strong, light fabrics.
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.
The award is the most prestigious given by the Office of the Dean of Students each year to honor graduating seniors with a track record of serving others on campus.
It was 1976 and Arthur Cox was at his first day on the job as salesperson at a Quad Cities real estate firm. Excited to learn the ins and outs of his new position, he followed his boss to the open-office area where the company’s brokers spent a portion of their workdays. Rows of desks filled the space, and Cox’s then-boss pointed to an empty workstation and left Cox to do his job without any more introductions or training.
Growing up in a tight-knit neighborhood community in Waterloo, Wilfred “Mickye” Johnson learned the importance of helping your neighbor. Johnson has 12 siblings, and his parents often struggled to make ends meet. But his community’s generosity helped his family thrive and instilled values in Johnson that guide him even today.
“Everybody uses the phrase, ‘It takes a village…’ and we truly had a village that raised all of us,” Johnson recalled. “We would share everything we had. ... We knew we were loved by our family and by the total community.”
The University of Northern Iowa College of Business Administration once again earned the “gold standard” for business colleges worldwide after the AACSB extended its accreditation for another five years in recognition of its continued excellence in education.
Only 5% of business schools worldwide have earned AACSB accreditation, and UNI was one of just 38 business schools in the country to receive the extension in this recent quarter.
Name: Lauren Luce
