Students, faculty and staff will host an open house 4-6 p.m. Wednesday to promote summer and fall courses and introduce the new University of Alaska Southeast Sitka campus director, Dr. Jeremy Rupp.
Registration opened Monday for the university’s full fall semester course roster, and is open for a limited suite of summer classes.
Doors will be open throughout the campus building for the event.
One attraction for visitors will be in the welding shop, where students from Sitka, Pacific and Mt. Edgecumbe high schools are building a 28-foot landing craft in a special topics course sponsored by Nordic Construction.
Student artwork, including ceramics, will be displayed in the Art Studio and the Northwest Coast Arts Room 106.
On the other side of the campus, students and professors will be giving demonstrations in labs for the university’s Applied Fisheries, Whale Research and Rural Alaska Southeast Ocean Research programs.
Visitors will be free to poke into the dive locker room, where SCUBA tanks and scores of dry suits, snorkels, goggles and fins are stored.
A medical simulation mannequin will be at the center of demonstrations by University of Alaska Anchorage nursing faculty and students in the campus nursing lab.
Jasmine Shaw, who works with the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Cooperative Extension program will be offering a seed-starting activity.
A Career Services representative will be on hand to take professional headshots for current UAS students and alumni.
Activities like a campus-wide art scavenger hunt, drawings for prizes, and opportunities to partake of light refreshments will be offered throughout the open house. Minors must be accompanied by an adult during the event, UAS said.
Representatives from the main UAS campus in Juneau, including the university’s director of admissions, Alaska Native Retention Specialist, and Outreach Coordinator for the UAS Career and Technical Education program, will be attending the event.
First-year UAS-Sitka student Phoebe Pepper said in an interview Monday that the open house would show visitors “how much there is that’s special to this campus, and how much there is to grow, but how great we are already.”
Pepper, who is vice president of the UAS-Sitka Student Government Association, builds community at the campus through her work organizing student support nights, and activities like barbecues, hikes, trash clean-ups, and an end-of-year whale watching tour.
UAS provides funding for these events, enabling the student government to lay in supplies like personal hygiene products and food for the student food pantry.
Student Government leaders across the UAS system work together on a “coalition of student leaders” that meets regularly on Zoom, and convenes in Juneau each year to lobby for the statewide university system.
As of last month, every single UAS campus has a student government, Pepper said. The Ketchikan campus was the most recent to organize a student government.
Pepper also works on contract for UAS as a student peer coach. She said this program provides a comfortable alternative for students who need extra help with class assignments.
UAS-Sitka provides many opportunities for “learning how to do college here in a smaller safer environment,” said Akléi Helen Dangel, an academic adviser with UAS-Sitka.
The campus also offers community-wide resources, such as a testing center that offers professional and standardized exams, and community event spaces, Dangel said.
"We are the community campus where you can take your general education requirements, you can get an associate’s degree if you want … we have students who transfer onto other universities,” Dangel told the Sentinel.
The UAS-Sitka campus’ new “Sitka Start” program is built for “people who haven’t done college before to come and try things out,” Dangel said. She said the supportive program is open to freshmen or other students with fewer than 30 credits.
Pepper, who enrolled in “Sitka Start” this fall, explained that the program is hinged on a course called “Navigating College” that connects students with resources and emphasizes “mindfulness in college.”
UAS provides a three-credit tuition waiver for students who enroll in the one-credit “Navigating College” course, she said.
Having taken dual-enrollment courses through UAS while attending Sitka High School, Pepper said she was “already familiar with the university, in a sense,” when she took the course.
“But once I got thrown into, you know, full time college, it felt like a very scary shift,” she said. “It felt like, you know, being thrown off a cliff, almost, but that's what Sitka Start is for.”
“A lot of us never even were aware of the resources that were available, unless they were, like, directly put into our curriculum for our classes,” Pepper said of the “Navigating College” course.
The new campus director, Dr. Jeremy Rupp, is a newcomer to Sitka and said that he’ll be learning about the university’s programs and meeting community members at the open house.
Rupp started working in his role as campus director last Tuesday. He was born in Soldotna, raised in East Africa and most recently lived in a Minnesota area, where he worked on community education programming for Duluth Public Schools and the Lake Superior School District.
Rupp said Monday that he sees his role as the Sitka campus director as “not bringing my ideas, but as a social collectivist, kind of acting as kind of a synthesizer and lightning rod for those other ideas” at UAS-Sitka.
“I am a high energy, emotional, excited, human,” Rupp said. “I'm bringing five of my kids here, ages 14 down to 5. … Right now they're 14, 12, 10, eight and five.
“I am just excited to be here and to be with and I feel like I've already just been ‘at it,’ because I feel like the people here are ‘at it,’” Rupp said.
