IUS students move into campus housing as school year kicks off

Aug. 17—NEW ALBANY — Brooklyn Watts was feeling "beyond excited" as she moved into on-campus housing Wednesday to begin her first year at Indiana University Southeast.

Watts, who is from Scott County, will study pre-nursing at IUS, and she hopes to be accepted into the school's nursing program. After graduating from her undergraduate program, she intends to attend graduate school to become a nurse practitioner in the pediatric or neonatal field.

"I'm just going to go in with high hopes and try my absolute best," she said.

IUS students are moving into campus housing this week as they prepare for the start of classes on Monday. Kelly Ryan, interim chancellor at IUS, said she was seeing "lots of excited students and emotional parents" as incoming freshmen moved in. More than 320 students were moving into IUS residence halls, or lodges, on Wednesday.

"We're really excited to welcome them back and to build our campus culture around students again," she said. "It's been a quiet summer, so every time this time of year comes around, it's just so much excitement and enthusiasm."

Watts has already gotten a head start as she prepares for the start of classes.

"I'm so looking forward to classes," Watts said. "Most of my professors have already posted the course material and the syllabus and stuff, so I've already read for that, and I've already started some assignments. I was up at like 2 a.m., I couldn't sleep, so I was like, I'm going to answer this discussion post for my online class."

Tierra Combs, an incoming freshman from Jeffersonville, also moved in Wednesday to the Forest Lodge on campus. It's "starting to set in" that her college experience is beginning, she said, and she is excited for the independence of being a college student.

"I'm looking forward to really getting an entirely new experience from previous experiences," she said. "Obviously college is really different from high school, so it's really just my first year exploring all that and living on campus away from my parents."

Combs will be majoring in elementary education. She met a few people in her major while taking some summer classes at IUS, and she is excited to meet new people throughout welcome week.

This semester, one of the focuses is "re-engaging the community here on campus and outside," Ryan said. This includes offering more activities, including presenting weekly events on the main quad by McCullough Plaza and bringing food trucks to campus.

"We're just really pushing more of that student experience," she said.

This week, students are enjoying activities such a campus picnic, water games and a movie night at the campus amphitheater.

Ryan said it will be another week before the official enrollment numbers are in for the campus, but she notes that the new student population is up by about 5% this year.

"It's a nice change of pace," she said. "I think a lot of the concerns about the pandemic are more in the rearview mirror than at the forefront of people's mind."

This semester, IUS is introducing learning communities for first-year and transfer students, which involves paired courses designed to help students "meet and create their own community on campus," Ryan said.

In the past year, IUS began offering student and faculty excursions to "local sites of interest," including workplaces that might tie into their career plans, she said. This could include visits ranging from accounting firms to the Falls of the Ohio State Park. Last year, IUS nursing students visited Tennessee to help out with dental clinics.

"We're really encouraging that out-of-the-classroom experience so students can connect their careers to their majors, but also it's that idea of creating more belonging and these memorable experiences they have in college," Ryan said.

There are also new degree programs available for students, including master's degrees in finance and accounting that will be 100% online. In the spring, IUS expanded its focus on hybrid programming to offer more flexibility for students.

"We basically created all of our on-campus programming to be hybrid, so students can complete up to 80% of their coursework online and still graduate," she said. "We're just trying to meet the students where they are and balancing their work and family obligations."

IUS is providing more opportunities to lower the costs of higher education, including a "totally new financial aid plan" meant to remove barriers for students, she said.

This fall, IUS is offering a new scholarship to match the amount awarded to students through the Kentucky Educational Excellence Scholarship (KEES), and the new Grenadier Promise scholarship will help students with tuition and mandatory fees.

"As the most affordable four-year institution in the region, we can do even more, so we're trying to make sure people are investing themselves in the future, because our students don't leave IUS with a ton of debt," Ryan said. "We want to make sure we're doing everything we can."

Ryan is also focused on increasing outreach into the external community so that IUS is more visible within the area, she said.

The past two years have been challenging for everyone at IUS, but she hopes to "bring the joy back to what we do every day."

"We have the unique privilege of actually transforming student lives, and we should be celebrating that and enjoying time with our students in a face-to-face environment," Ryan said. "This is a wonderful opportunity for us this year."

As the school year kicks off, Ryan is looking forward to a new chapter for the IUS campus.

"There's a lot of enthusiasm about not returning to 2019 before the pandemic, but actually, let's do better," she said. "Let's do even more. Let's be even more active and engaged."