Growing up in a home where her mother struggled with drug addiction, Yolanda Williams was determined to take a different path. She wanted to be like the teachers and counselors who helped her survive.
Now, in her new role as director of UNI’s Classic Upward Bound program, which helps support marginalized students to successfully complete high school and succeed in college, she’s able to use that life experience and empathy to help others.
While Panthers have done a great job of working together to slow the spread of COVID-19, case levels nationally are expected to begin rising as we enter the fall and winter months. Having a frank conversation about safety precautions is a good way to ensure that everyone in your residence, whether on or off campus, stays safe.
We reached out to some UNI public health students to ask how they’ve handled it.
Growing up just outside the Meskwaki Settlement in Tama, Iowa as the oldest of four siblings, Alma Pesina knew she wanted to go to college. But as the first member of her family to take that step, Pesina sometimes felt like she was on her own.
Born to a Meskwaki mother and a Mexican father, Pesina struggled to reconcile her two identities when she enrolled at the University of Northern Iowa in 2017. Without a role model to guide her, Pesina initially turned away from her Indigenous roots.
Growing up poor as one of nine children in Indianapolis’ 64th Street neighborhood, Jamie Chidozie learned young the blunt, destructive force of institutionalized racism. Her father, part of the first generation of Blacks in the U.S. to attend college en masse, earned an accounting degree only to be one of dozens of African-Americans who lost their state jobs soon after in a discriminatory purge, she said.
A joint art project by students at the University of Northern Iowa and Holmes Junior High School persevered through a global pandemic to convey a message of inclusivity and creativity.
The Iowa Energy Center announced more than $800,000 in grant funding to two University of Northern Iowa projects working to boost energy efficiency in underserved rural areas and educate the next generation about career opportunities in an ever-evolving energy market.
The IEC awarded $418,696 to the Developing an Iowa Energy Curriculum for Secondary Classrooms project proposed by UNI’s Earth and Environmental Sciences department, which will develop and disseminate an energy curriculum for Iowa middle and high school students that incorporates career connections into each topic.
Although COVID-19 has forced students to keep the residence hall doors of Lawther Hall closed, there are still signs of life taped to hallways in the form of small, origami creations of Baby Yoda.
The characters, from the television series “The Mandalorian,” were created during an origami-folding grab-and-go event, one of several efforts of the dorm’s nine resident assistants to bring students together during a global pandemic that is forcing everyone to stay apart.
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.
