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.
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.
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.
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.
The year 2020 marks 100 years of women having the right to vote. But the ratification of the 19th Amendment only gave some women the right to vote. African American women were almost completely excluded.
Iowa has many prominent African American suffragists in its history, yet they receive little recognition. A new traveling exhibit at the UNI Museum in the Rod Library seeks to change that.
To maintain classroom safety, keep face-to-face instruction and prevent healthy students from being asked to quarantine, UNI has reassigned a total of 160 classes to new locations, and redesigned seating in over 100 classrooms, to further increase physical distancing and reduce the need for students to quarantine because of potential exposure.
UNI NEWS SERVICES - The University of Northern Iowa’s fall 2020 census numbers reflect a growing freshman class, a strong increase in out-of-state students, a near record-high retention rate, and the most diverse freshman class of all time.
UNI saw the size of its new freshman class increase slightly (1,482 freshman this year compared to 1,465 last fall), with overall enrollment coming in at 9,522 students this year. This count reflects not only the impact of COVID-19 and immigration challenges, but also UNI’s success in increasing its three-year and five-year graduation rates.
By UNI President Mark A. Nook and DMACC President Rod Denson
Long before the pandemic, Iowa’s business and higher education communities had been laying plans for the future of our state in a period of profound disruption to our workforce and economy. Automation, robotics and artificial intelligence are re-envisioning our workforces and elevating the skill pre-requisites for proficiency at every level of employment.
When the Milwaukee Bucks refused to take the court for Game 5 of the NBA playoffs in protest of the police shooting of Jacob Blake, it sparked a wave of similar wildcat strikes across the NBA and MLB as athletes called for an end to police brutality. We asked University of Northern Iowa professor David Surdam, who has written eight books and published 18 articles on various economic issues of the NBA, NFL and MLB, to bring his decades of research to discussion about the historical precedents for the strike and the effectiveness of athlete protests to drive social change.
