Celebrate Academic Achievement

By Graciela Caneiro-Livingston

The closing weeks of the school year give us the chance to celebrate our community’s academic achievements—and look ahead toward some of the exciting opportunities to come. 

Student Research Symposium 

The Student Research Symposium is April 24. All undergraduate classes are cancelled that day so students can explore their classmates’ research and creative work. 

More than 200 NWU students will present work on topics ranging from African drum music performance, to coding for complex data visualizations, to trends in murder mystery fiction. Encourage your student to attend! 

Student-Faculty Collaborative Research 

NWU’s Student-Faculty Collaborative Research Program supports projects that bring students and professors together. Funding is available in all academic disciplines. 

Recently funded proposals included psychology research on the relationship between eye contact and social anxiety; sociological research on the relationship between boredom and turnover among skilled workers; and art history research on the repatriation of Peruvian antiquities. 

We encourage your student to reach out to professors to talk about research projects and opportunities to collaborate. 

Prestige Scholarship Support 

Do your student’s goals include graduate study or experiences abroad? Could scholarship programs help them reach those goals? 

NWU offers formalized coaching and support to students seeking prestige scholarships. Nebraska Wesleyan’s Prestigious Scholarship Program is coordinated by Professor of Communication Karla Jensen and Professor of Spanish Catherine Nelson. They partner with a team of NWU faculty across multiple departments. Together, they work with students individually to help them identify strong options and craft competitive applications. They also coach students ahead of scholarship interviews. 

This approach has garnered impressive results. In recent years, NWU has been a top producer of Fulbright Fellowships and Gilman Scholarships among small colleges. Just this month, Macie Thomas (’24) became NWU’s latest Fulbright scholar. She will use her scholarship to teach English in the Czech Republic.

Faculty Accomplishments 

One of the ways Nebraska Wesleyan professors foster their students’ academic achievement is by modeling engaged scholarship in their own work. Our faculty’s recent accomplishments are also worth celebrating.

• Associate Professor of Music John Spilker’s book, Sound Pedagogy: Radical Care in Music, was published by the University of Illinois Press in February.
• Professor of Art Lisa Lockman held solo exhibitions of her work in Ames, Iowa, and the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colo.
• Associate Professor of Music Amy Spears used her international sabbatical to coauthor an article with a colleague at Ghana’s University of Cape Coast.
• Professor of History Patrick Hayden-Roy used his sabbatical in Berlin to complete a manuscript on images of Martin Luther during the Nazi era; it has been accepted for publication by the University of Oxford Press. 

Graciela Caneiro-Livingston is provost.