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The COVID-19 pandemic has created challenges for University of Nebraska at Omaha students who are striving for their degrees. Thanks to the help of generous supporters like you, eight students have been able to continue their studies this year with a scholarship from the UNO Fund. Through the collective power of gifts from you and alumni like you, we have been able to provide access to exceptional education to students who need it the most.
While there are many scholarships at UNO, the UNO Fund for Student Scholarships is the only one that sees hundreds of alumni and community members come together and make gifts – last year as low as $5 and as high as $5,000 – to give directly back to students.
We’d like you to meet some of 2020-21’s UNO Fund scholarship recipients:
Karina Ruiz was just starting to feel confident when the pandemic hit. Having moved to a new country, learned a new language, started her business degree at UNO and secured her own place, the pandemic again threw life into uncertainty. She said receiving the UNO Fund scholarship “was like being able to breathe again.” “It really inspires me to want to give back, too, once I graduate and have the means, because I’ve been there,” she said. “I continue to feel more freedom financially because of what you did, because of you deciding to give. Thank you… you changed my life.”
Anna Wesch, already raising three children and working at the same time, decided to pursue her bachelor’s degree and fulfill her longtime dream of becoming an early childhood educator. The UNO Fund scholarship gave her inspiration to keep going, even when her studies got tough. “It’s just so unexpected,” she said. “I’m so very grateful. It definitely helps to make things a little easier and makes it a little more like, ‘OK, I can do this.’ To know that there’s people that believe I can do it too and make me successful, that’s just really cool.”
Beth Hoyt moved from McCook, Nebraska, to pursue communications studies at UNO. With three in her family attending college, she wanted to make sure her degree was affordable for herself and her parents. She chose UNO partly because it has one of the lowest tuition rates in the region, and the UNO Fund scholarship is helping her to graduate on time. “I’m so grateful I won’t be in debt for a long time afterward,” she said. “Th¬at was a terrifying prospect. But just to have that peace of mind is so incredible and so rare, and I’m incredibly grateful for that.”
Anna Buchannan has experienced a year full of changes — a move from Metropolitan Community College to UNO, a switch in majors, a new job and, of course, adjusting to the new virtual life of a college student in 2020-21. Fortunately for Anna, UNO alumni and donors have made all of the changes — and hitting her goal of graduating on time — just a little bit easier to manage, providing a scholarship to complete her studies. “It was a super big relief,” Anna said, “because it took out a lot of stress of me having to take a loan. I’ve gotten this far in my college career without having to take out a loan. It was amazing. I was so happy!”
Leah Stednitz had been putting her professional skills as a respiratory therapist to use by volunteering with elderly citizens when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and when that work was put on pause, she decided to become a full-time student and enrolled at UNO. She’s pursuing a multidisciplinary studies degree with emphases in health care administration, gerontology and respiratory care. “I would love to take this degree and run a long-term care facility here in the Omaha metro,” she said. “I want to take my knowledge and passion to truly honor and celebrate our senior citizens. I feel that I can bring the younger tech-savvy groove of society and apply it to our long-term care facilities to help them stay socialized and connected with the outside world.”
Sara Pedersen aspires to be both an author and a librarian. She’s pursuing an online education in library sciences from her hometown of Norfolk. Already a contest-winning writer for her mystery and horror tales, Sara’s own story got a surprising twist last fall when she received a UNO Fund scholarship. “I don’t usually win these kinds of things,” she said. “I am lucky sometimes, but not in the stuff that really matters. I have an older sister who is now an art teacher and went to college, and I have a younger brother who is currently in college in Wayne. So that is three children with debt. My parents both have good-paying jobs, but this award helps lighten the load. I am really grateful for these funds, and if you are one of the people who gave, thank you.”
Thanks to UNO Fund donors, UNO was able to offer renewable scholarships to these students to cover much of their tuition through graduation. The more people who give, the more scholarships we can award to students who need and deserve them. Make your gift of $25, $50 or $100 to the UNO Fund today.
For more UNO Fund scholarship recipient profiles, read about the 2019 recipients here.
Karina’s family moved to the United States when she was a teenager, and now as a University of Nebraska at Omaha college student, she’s working full-time, living on her own, taking a full schedule of classes and trying to manage her time and her money, all during a global pandemic, which occasionally has made that peace of mind elusive.
But Karina has been able to capture a bit of harmony though determination, hard work … and a bit of pottery.
“I took two classes on pottery when I was in high school, and I loved them,” she said. “Once I was out, I missed it. So recently I bought materials, just because I was very stressed. I thought I might as well during COVID, because I cannot go anywhere. I started doing pottery again, which I loved. I make mostly dorky stuff. I’m not a professional at all. But I like it. You know how your mind is never blank? It kind of just makes me blank.”
Karina said she appreciated the break pottery gave her from stressing about school, work and money. In fact, she’s not sure she would have even been able to take those chances to relax were it not for the incredible surprise she received this fall — a UNO Fund scholarship, courtesy of alumni and donors of UNO.
“It was like being able to breathe again,” she said. “A little bit of hope in the midst of COVID, in the midst of full-time work, in the midst of having to pay for school, in the midst of debt. I just felt like there is hope for me, like I’m getting a break finally, even though I didn’t think I would be able to.
“Life sometimes knows what you need, even when you don’t expect it. It was one of those things you don’t expect would actually happen, so you finally get a break.”
Karina is one of seven promising UNO Fund scholarship recipients who are getting financial assistance thanks to generous alumni and supporters of the UNO Fund. While there are many scholarships at UNO, the UNO Fund for Student Scholarships is the only one that sees hundreds of alumni and supporters come together and make gifts — last year as low as $5 and as high as $5,000 — to give directly back to students.
“I would like to put an emphasis on how inspiring this scholarship is,” she said. “It isn’t one person – it’s inspiring that all these alumni decided to help those who are right behind them. It’s also very inspiring because it makes me want to give back, and it makes me know that I will give back once I’m a not college student. Hundreds of thank yous.”
While Karina has been inspired by those who gave to support her scholarship, her own story is itself quite inspiring. A native of Monterrey, Mexico, Karina and her family moved to Omaha in 2015 when her father accepted a position as a computer science engineer. Karina enrolled at Millard North High School and had to quickly adjust to life in middle America.
“While it was hard at the beginning, it was a definitely a nice challenge and an opportunity to learn two languages, to get used to the culture and everything. I finished high school and started college early, just because I saw that as an opportunity to continue growing not only my language but also my knowledge.”
Karina initially enrolled at Metropolitan Community College, earning an associate’s degree in business. Always one to push herself, she wanted to continue her education and achieve her bachelor’s degree. Fortunately for her, UNO made it easy to transfer her credits and enroll in the College of Business Administration with a concentration in human resource management. But she also discovered that she wasn’t eligible for many of the scholarships and assistance the university offered. Having just moved into her own apartment, and then in the fall, having her hours as a product specialist at Apple reduced because of the pandemic, she found herself relying on loans and credit cards to pay for classes and essentials.
“It was not very smart, but it was getting me by,” she said. “Money was getting very tight for me. So when I received this scholarship, it pretty much changed my life to be completely honest. It was amazing. I was able to go part-time [at work], focus on my schooling and get my financials together.”
Karina’s feeling a bit more harmony today, thanks to the generosity of UNO Fund scholarship donors. She also said she appreciates the care UNO has taken to protect its students during the pandemic — another source of relief for her.
“I was talking to another person this week, and it happened that they were going to a different college, and I really think that UNO is leading right now in how protective they are,” she said. “I’m honored to say that, just because there are many big educational institutions, but I feel like I am part of a school that cares so much about their students. I’m confident that if something happens, UNO has my back. That’s why I’ve continued taking multiple classes. I feel confident that the college has my back.”
Thanks to the continued careful access the university has provided, coupled with the scholarship she received, Karina was happy to report that she is on track for graduation in December of 2021, ahead of many of her classmates.
After graduation, she hopes to use her degree to find a position in human resources and continue to bring inspiration to others. She has a passion for talent development and harmony in the workplace. She’s looked into some of the larger corporations in Omaha and hopes that she’ll find one that fits her goals and ambitions. Ultimately, she wants to continue learning and work her way into an executive position.
“One of my goals is learning more from people who have been there, and who are there, and becoming one of them myself,” she said. “My goal is to do my best to be able to lead people, to be able to provide that harmony. It brings me a lot of passion and makes me want to wake up every day, continuing to learn and improve myself.
“I’ve worked so hard in the last five and a half or six years,” she added. I’ve worked so hard to adapt, so hard to learn, so hard to excel, so hard to even demonstrate I can do it — for myself, not me wanting to tell everyone I can do it. At the beginning I didn’t think I could, and now I’ve demonstrated to my 15-year-old self, you can do it, you graduated with your class, and not through an ESL program. You learned the language, you learned the culture, you started college early and you’re graduating early. So I’m very excited to find a job and continue to demonstrate to myself that I can do it.”
Furthermore, Karina wanted all donors to the UNO Fund to know that their gifts to help her toward these goals were crucial and appreciated.
“It really inspires me to want to give back, too, once I graduate and have the means, because I’ve been there,” she said. “I continue to feel more freedom financially because of what you did, because of you deciding to give. Thank you, because you were there where I was, and now you were inspired maybe by someone else who gave you something — or you simply felt the need to give somebody something — and you actually really changed my life.”
Starting this month, the UNO Alumni card goes fully digital. The UNO Alumni card is issued to all individuals who give a gift of $25 or more to the UNO Fund. It provides access to a number of services on the University of Nebraska at Omaha campus, including Criss Library, the ability to purchase a membership to the UNO Wellness Center in H&K, discounted tickets to performances, the bookstore, and more. A full list of card advantages can be found here, though some of these privileges are currently limited due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The alumni card has been available digitally on the UNO Alumni smartphone app since 2018, supplementing the paper cards issued with donors’ gift receipts. This month, the University of Nebraska Foundation and UNO Alumni Association will discontinue automatically issuing paper cards on the receipts and will direct all UNO Fund donors to access their UNO Alumni card on the UNO Alumni app, available on both the Google and Android app stores.
The UNO alumni card is valid for one year after your gift is made. The app allows for easy tracking of this period and expiration date, as well as easy renewal of your alumni card before its expiration. The digital card cuts down the wait time for issuing cards, and it is also a convenient way to make sure you always have your card handy for use on campus and around town.
For more on the app, including links to download it, visit https://unoalumni.org/unoalumniapp
Those without access to the UNO Alumni app can email joel.gehringer@nufoundation.org to be issued a paper card. Please allow 1-2 weeks for delivery of the card after request.
The University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) will celebrate its first annual Wear Black, Give Back 24-hour celebration and giving day on Oct. 28-29.
UNO alumni and friends across the country and around the world are encouraged to wear their favorite black Maverick gear and consider giving to scholarships, colleges and programs, student groups and activities, inclusion and wellness, athletics or other areas of choice.
The celebration starts at noon on Wednesday, Oct. 28, and goes through noon on Thursday, Oct. 29. In addition to sharing Maverick pride with #WearBlackGiveBack, contributions may be made at givingday.unomaha.edu to help any area of UNO. Gifts are accepted now through noon on Oct. 29.
UNO Chancellor Jeffery P. Gold, M.D., said Mavs from across the nation will come together to show their support of the university by wearing their proud UNO colors and by making gifts to support access to exceptional education.
“There’s never been a better time to be a Mav, and we have much to celebrate,” Gold said. “Our incredible, resilient students continue to work hard to achieve their dreams, and our world-class faculty and staff are doing all they can to make it happen safely and effectively. I want to extend my thanks to everyone who gives during Wear Black, Give Back.”
Campus kickoff activities planned Oct. 28
To celebrate the event safely, two physically distanced activities will take place on Oct. 28 at UNO.
UNO employees can drive through one of two Wear Black, Give Back stations on campus to receive a donut in thanks for their service to the university. The first station is from 9-11 a.m. at the West Parking Garage on the Dodge Campus. The second station is from 2-4 p.m. on the Scott Campus in parking lot two.
On the morning of Oct. 28, 10 small, plush Durango mascots will be hidden across the UNO campus, each one with a gift amount attached to it. The UNO students who find the Durango mascots will then get to keep it and also choose which campus cause for Wear Black, Give Back will receive the assigned gift amount.
These hidden gifts, as well as various other challenge gifts planned throughout the celebration, are made possible by individuals and corporate sponsors of the event.
For more information, updates and image downloads go to givingday.unomaha.edu.
Wear Black, Give Back is planned in partnership with UNO, the UNO Alumni Association and the University of Nebraska Foundation.
For questions about the event and to learn about sponsorship opportunities, contact Joel Gehringer at 402-502-4924 or joel.gehringer@nufoundation.org.
About the University of Nebraska at Omaha
Located in one of America’s best cities to live, work and learn, the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) is Nebraska’s premier metropolitan university. With more than 15,000 students enrolled in 200-plus programs of study, UNO is recognized nationally for its online education, graduate education, military friendliness and community engagement efforts. Founded in 1908, UNO has served learners of all backgrounds for more than 100 years and is dedicated to another century of excellence both in the classroom and in the community.
Become a fan of UNO on Facebook and follow UNO’s Twitter updates.
“This whole experience actually made me realize that I want to start a small business. You get inspired by clients, see their innovation and passion.”
Assistant Director of Communications
Contact: josh.planos@nufoundation.org
NBDC seeks to lessen the impact
Hui Ru Ng might not have boarded a flight to Nebraska if not for Tommy Lee.
Ru (as her friends call her) was raised in Malaysia and dreamed of traveling to the U.S. to enroll at a college that was equally affordable and reputable. She also dreamed of seeing the sun-swept landscape exhibited in the since-canceled TV show “Tommy Lee Goes to College,” which chronicled the former Mötley Crüe drummer’s uninspired attempt to assimilate at Nebraska’s land grant institution.
Ru ultimately chose the University of Nebraska at Omaha and boarded an airplane for the first time.
“Back home, it’s summer all year,” she said. “When I got to the airport, I was like, ‘Oh, this isn’t what I thought.’ But I grew to love this place because of the people. I will never forget how Nebraskans supported me.”
After completing her undergraduate degree, Ru applied to be a graduate assistant at the Nebraska Business Development Center located at UNO. Oluwaseun Olaore (Seun, as his friends call him) applied around the same time.
A project director back home in Nigeria, Olaore foresaw a professional ceiling unless he had an advanced degree.
Ru and Seun’s two years with the NBDC coincided with a 100-year flood and a COVID-19 pandemic. Suddenly the vulnerabilities of the Midwestern economy were tested like never before.
“This whole experience actually made me realize that I want to start a small business,” said Ru after having experienced a frightening two-part course on the financial realities of small-business ownership in times of crisis. “You get inspired by clients, see their innovation and passion.”
Seun too came away from this experience reaffirmed in his commitment to the industry.
“I’ve been able to help business owners figure out a way around these problems,” he said. “This hasn’t scared me away. It has strengthened me.”
This hasn’t scared me away. It has strengthened me.
Since its founding in 1977, NBDC has operated with a statewide mission out of its office in UNO’s College of Business Administration. For nearly four decades, Robert Bernier shepherded the center as its director.
“My opinion is that small business is more important to Nebraska, more important to our communities than anything,” said Catherine Lang, assistant dean of the UNO College of Business Administration who took over as NBDC state director for Bernier in 2016. “Nebraska small-business owners are innovative, resilient and tenacious. They care about their community.”
With Lang’s guidance, NBDC has assisted more than 8,500 clients — everything from fire-rated window providers to monarch butterfly habitat conservers — and helped them obtain in excess of $590 million in government contracts. All told, NBDC had a $1.9 billion impact on Nebraska’s economy over just the last four years, either directly creating or saving nearly 6,000 jobs.
If the NBDC is a tent, there are five support poles beneath: the Small Business Development Center, the Procurement Technical Assistance Center, Innovation and Technology Assistance, Professional and Organizational Development, and NU Connections.
There are centers in Chadron, Grand Island, Kearney, Lincoln, McCook, Norfolk, North Platte, Omaha, Scottsbluff and Wayne.
As Lang puts it, “We are kind of campus agnostic. We serve the entire state.”
One-on-one discussions are confidential and available free of charge. Proposals are tailored to the client.
“We work with them to develop their business plan,” Lang said. “That way they’re 100 percent intimately knowledgeable about financials, market research, everything.”
Located in UNO’s Mammel Hall, the center can tap into the university’s student body and faculty. “There’s a nice little symbiotic relationship between the academic world and the business world,” said UNO economics professor Christopher Decker.
Bernier deserves a lion’s share of the credit for the success of the graduate assistant program, Lang contends.
At any given time, Ru juggles a dozen clients on the innovation and technology side of the operation, helping them identify which grants to pursue. Olaore works with the small-business development center to help companies flesh out business plans, construct financial projections and apply for loans.
“They hire a lot of international students in the office,” Ru said, mentioning that three continents are currently represented by graduate assistants. “We have great diversity.”
We are kind of campus agnostic. We serve the entire state.
When the pandemic arrived, NBDC was prepared.
“We had to be ready,” Lang said. “Businesses all over the state are contacting us for help — clients who are trying to navigate this whole CARES act, SBA loans, unemployment insurance, IRS rules.”
The inspired work has left an impact on those providing it.
“These people are so passionate,” Ru said. “You learn a lot from them.”
Lang loves how interconnected the NBDC is, that resources are available no matter where a company sprouts from. And indeed, there is an irony almost poetic about salt-of-the-earth Nebraskans turning to students born thousands of miles away for guidance through the all-encompassing storm.
“I know we’re just a sliver of the entire ecosystem of Nebraska,” Lang said. “But I’m so very proud. We are always going to do the best we can.”
In less than three weeks, three University of Nebraska at Omaha students teamed up with the University of Nebraska Medical Center to deliver a potentially life-saving mobile app.
Assistant Director of Communications
Contact: josh.planos@nufoundation.org
UNO students team with UNMC, Apple Inc. to develop COVID-19 app
It starts with an email notification.
An interesting opportunity. Care to hop on a conference call to discuss?
The three University of Nebraska at Omaha students are intrigued.
On the phone, the pitch goes like this:
Would you like to build a groundbreaking mobile application with considerable value as a public health tool? It’ll involve collaborating with two teams.
The first is the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Global Center for Health Security, which is rapidly working to quell an unprecedented global health crisis and is also home to the nation’s only federal quarantine unit. The other is Apple Inc.
With the COVID-19 pandemic having recently arrived in Nebraska, spring break has come early.
No need to juggle coursework.
The students quickly agree.
Work begins immediately. Prototyping and wireframing and coding. Analysis and dialogue and refinement. Daily meetings stretch into the pre-dawn hours as each team navigates hunger — the UNMC team subsisted on takeout curry — exhaustion and multiple time zones.
As news segments turn some of their peers infamous during imprudent trips to warmer regions, Keegan Brown, Grayson Stanton and Carly Cameron spend their spring break tucked away in a design studio, maintaining 6 feet of separation and working in conjunction with experts in the fields of medicine and technology.
Less than three weeks later, 1-Check COVID was available in the Apple App Store and was downloaded more than 10,000 times in the first 10 days. The app is now also available on Google Play for Android phone users.
1-Check COVID is a risk-assessment tool that asks the user a series of questions ranging from biographical to geographical before inquiring about symptoms. All are computed in an effort to assess the likelihood of someone having contracted COVID-19. Once the questions are completed, users learn their risk levels: low, urgent or emergent. From there, they are guided toward subsequent steps, whether to continue to monitor their symptoms or contact the public health department. If users agree, they can share their risk profiles with health care professionals, employers and family members, among others.
“This will hopefully be lifesaving,” UNO and UNMC Chancellor Jeffrey P. Gold, M.D., said in a news release, which names the three Scott Scholars, who are all Nebraska natives, computer science majors and underclassmen. Cameron, the oldest of the trio, was 2 years old when the SARS outbreak occurred. She doesn’t remember it.
In a time of crisis, both UNMC and Apple have bet on youth. And youth has delivered.
“What these students did is nothing short of extraordinary,” said Harnoor Singh, director of student development for the Walter Scott, Jr. Scholarship Program (Scott Scholars), which was launched in 1997, thanks to the generous support of the Suzanne & Walter Scott Foundation. The program challenges high-achieving engineering and information science and technology students to develop their technical, creative and leadership skills.
“These are the students we’ve been waiting for,” Singh added.
These are the students we've been waiting for.
As a Ph.D. candidate at UNMC, Thang Nguyen is researching and developing decision-support tools. An innovator at heart, Nguyen had built one such tool focused on strep throat analysis “as a launching-off point,” he said.
Then came a pandemic. And an opportunity.
With an understanding of how to parse the literature, decode and translate information into a language that coders can comprehend, Nguyen pivoted to the issue at hand, using the same logic that was already built.
“A lot of what we do is identify problems as they come up and try to just solve in a rapid manner,” said Michael Wadman, M.D., chair of the UNMC Department of Emergency Medicine, “so I think that’s kind of our mindset when we approach any problem.”
A lot of what we do is identify problems as they come up and try to just solve in a rapid manner.
A relationship between Scott Scholars and Apple Inc. formed after UNO students took part in a summerlong workshop called AppJam, which included a trip to the tech giant’s California campus. Gold reached out to Singh to see if a partnership could be struck between the three teams.
After the Scott Scholars, UNMC and Apple began working together, Nguyen said the students’ focus and attention to detail stuck out.
“When you cross from the clinical side to the technical, there’s a lot of language that gets lost,” he said. “There was none of that with this team. Those are special students in a very high-functioning program. I don’t know if you see that in too many places.”
Apple representatives helped the teams troubleshoot bugs and fast-track the app for development.
“Sometimes it takes several weeks just to get approval through the App Store,” Singh said, noting that his team needed all of two weeks and five days to bring the project to the public.
“It has the potential to save so many lives,” he said, “to not only allow folks to assess their risk, but also decrease the pressure on emergency rooms and urgent care clinics.
“Sometimes the universe brings people together. Personally, I couldn’t be more proud of our students. I don’t know how many times I heard Apple executives say, ‘This has never been done before.’
“A public health crisis like this has the ability to leverage human talent to create radically innovative solutions. We took a group of high achievers and placed them in a learning environment that emphasizes human-centered design and were very intentional with teaching them how to navigate ambiguity and how to become comfortable with failure. These are all elements that they’ve learned in the Scott Scholars program.”
“The longer we retreat from one another, the longer we don’t share that physical space, the less empathetic we get, and the less we care about other people.”
Assistant Director of Development Communications
Contact: robyn.murray@nufoundation.org
UNO Professor Examines Loneliness
In 2019, researchers and the media began sounding alarm bells about a “loneliness epidemic” — a rise in people reporting feelings of isolation that could become a health crisis, leading to increases in heart disease or even shorter life spans.
And that was before COVID-19. Before the world shut itself indoors and government leaders mandated, and pleaded, for everyone to stay at least 6 feet apart.
Isolation and social distancing are terms the world is all too familiar with now.
“I have, for years, been trying to come up with ways to make people more aware,” said Todd Richardson, Ph.D., an associate professor in the University of Nebraska at Omaha Goodrich Scholarship Program who is researching loneliness. “And then this comes around and does it for me.”
What researchers like Richardson have warned of — fraying social connections and the ways people arrange their lives to perpetuate isolation — rocketed to the world’s collective consciousness as COVID-19 spread rapidly across the globe. As cities, states and countries shut down, everyone felt the pain of isolation. People kept friends and family members at bay. They missed play dates, barbecues, birthday parties and graduation ceremonies. They missed the rush and roar of live music, the shared excitement of home runs and 3-pointers. They wondered if the “sea of red” would ever wash over Memorial Stadium in quite the same way.
And everyone felt those things, together.
“It’s ironic that the experience of loneliness unites us, but I think it can in this moment,” said Richardson. “We’re all under threat from something that doesn’t discriminate between human beings. This is an extra-human threat. So we can bond as humans and realize we’re working together in order to resist this. And I think there’s something really, really beautiful in that.”
But there’s a flip side to that potential beauty. The longer people stay apart, the harder it becomes to return to one another.
“There is a period where you acknowledge the loss in your life, and you lament it, and you try and fill it in whatever way you can,” Richardson said. “But the longer you’re away from other people, the less trust you have for other people, so the harder it gets to break out and to reach out. And at that point, loneliness starts feeding in on itself. It becomes a self-perpetuating kind of cycle.”
Richardson said social interaction influences people in ways they’re not even aware of. Seeing another person express emotions, such as joy and pain, sparks a mirror response in the brain.
“The mere fact of making eye contact with them, or being in the same physical space as them, connects us to them in important ways,” he said. “It makes us acknowledge them as people, as fellow humans, as entities worthy of respect and autonomy.”
Fundamentally, Richardson said, it teaches people empathy.
“The longer we retreat from one another,” he said, “the longer we don’t share that physical space, the less empathetic we get, and the less we care about other people.”
There is also risk in social interaction, and humans are inherently risk-averse, Richardson said. People may want to avoid not just the risk of disease, but the risk of shame, embarrassment or rejection that comes with putting themselves out there in the world. The longer people stay protected, the more comfortable they may become.
“I think that when this abates, we’re going to have a lot of work ahead of us reacclimating and coming to terms with the fact that we need one another,” he said, “and that is worth the risks that we take.”
While there are many scholarships at UNO, the UNO Fund for Student Scholarships is the only one that sees hundreds of alumni and community members come together and make gifts – last year as low as $5 and as high as $5,000 – to give directly back to students.
We’d like you to meet four of this year’s UNO Fund scholarship recipients:
Jesi Gibbs came to UNO to study biology and psychology after discovering a passion for animal cognition research. However, working 35 hours a week to support herself and pay tuition, she’s found it challenging to balance her job with her studies. She said she cried when she learned she would receive a UNO Fund scholarship. “It has literally changed my life,” Jesi said. “You’ve made it so I can pursue something I feel has meaning in the world. I am so invested in this. I am going to see this through to the end.”
Kevin Ware joined the U.S. Air Force in 2013 partly because he didn’t have the funds to go to college. In his work in environmental inspection at Offutt Air Force Base, he discovered an interest in the human body. Now a full-time student, he has dreams of becoming a physical therapist and owning his own business. He’s using his UNO Fund scholarship to finish his bachelor’s degree and apply to PT programs. “I was excited because I’ve never gotten any other scholarship before,” Kevin said. “I’m grateful for the opportunity. I’ll be the first one in my immediate family with a four-year degree.”
Reggie Croom, Jr., recalled teetering on homelessness after high school before connecting with people and organizations that helped him get back on his feet. These experiences have him pursuing a bachelor’s degree in social work, and the UNO Fund scholarship is making that dream a reality. “I am so grateful that someone saw the potential in me, because I’m determined to make a difference in people’s lives for the better,” Reggie said. “With this funding, I am able to focus on school and making a difference, and by giving to the scholarship, you are contributing to the work I plan on doing.”
David Festner has spent the last 24 years sharpening his skills – and his blades – as a competitive figure skater. Perhaps this helped spark his interests in athletics and creativity, as he now hopes to become a sports broadcast journalist through the UNO College of Communications, Fine Art and Media. UNO offers one of the best programs in the region for this field, and existing partnerships made the process of transferring credits from community college to achieve a four-year degree a smooth transition. “I just want to say thank you very much,” David said, speaking to UNO Fund donors. “You’re helping the students that need it the most avoid loans and debts and those things that make school harder for us.”
Thanks to UNO Fund donors, UNO was able to offer renewable scholarships to these students to cover much of their tuition through graduation. The more people who give, the more scholarships we can award to students who need and deserve them. Make your gift of $25, $50 or $100 to the UNO Fund today.
You can help bring more students like Jesi to UNO. The more people who give, the more scholarships we can award to students who need and deserve them. Make your gift of $25, $50 or $100 to the UNO Fund today.
The Peter Kiewit Foundation has awarded a challenge grant of $225,000 to the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) College of Information Science & Technology (IS&T) for its CodeCrush program, a series of events designed to introduce 8th- and 9th-graders to iSTEM, an integrated approach to studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The funds, which are committed to the University of Nebraska Foundation, will specifically be used to help continue the program’s biannual immersion experiences and the annual Summer Summit for CodeCrush alumnae, teachers, mentors and other stakeholders. As part of this matching grant challenge, the University of Nebraska Foundation will work closely with UNO to secure an additional $225,000 in contributions over the next three years.
“The college’s programs are bigger, and more diverse, than ever before. We know this positive shift is thanks to efforts like CodeCrush,” Deepak Khazanchi, Ph.D., associate dean at the College of Information Science & Technology said. “Today, more and more students know that they have a place in information technology thanks to the continued support from the Peter Kiewit Foundation. As we look forward to the next chapter of CodeCrush, we hope to help eliminate the gender gap for good.”
CodeCrush is part of the college’s Women in IT Initiative, a community task force of IT leaders dedicated to finding actionable solutions to close the gender gap and meet the local and national workforce deficit in IT.
“We’re honored to offer our continued support to the College of Information Science & Technology and its efforts to make the tech workforce a more inclusive and diverse space,” Wendy Boyer, director of programs at the Peter Kiewit Foundation said. “This is an urgent call to the Omaha metro to support programs like CodeCrush, and together we can help inspire a diverse student population to pursue IT and help address the critical talent shortage our community is fighting.”
This fall’s CodeCrush will be held October 23–25, with the summer CodeCrush summit and spring CodeCrush immersion experience dates to be announced soon. For more information or to contribute to the program and help meet its fundraising challenge, see codecrush.unomaha.edu.
CodeCrush combats the challenges and negative perceptions that may keep girls from pursuing IT education and careers. The immersion experience takes place over three days and three nights. Participating students take part in half-day educational workshops illustrating the diversity of IT with exposure to areas such as bioinformatics, cybersecurity, mobile application design and IT innovation.
Afternoon and evening sessions show IT in action through experiences such as tours of local Fortune 500 headquarters and an Omaha start-up company crawl, illustrating the vibrant community that is being nurtured and grown in Omaha. CodeCrush students also hear panel discussions and keynote speeches from leaders, current students, UNO alumni and many others who are mentors and role models in this domain.
Additionally, a major component of CodeCrush requires students to bring along a teacher-mentor who attends parallel workshops on how to infuse IT concepts into their current curricula and champion such skills and content in their schools.
During the summer, CodeCrush hosts an annual Summer Summit, which brings together all past CodeCrush participants, students who may not have been able to attend the immersion experience and the IT community. The day-and-a-half conference celebrates diversity in IT and helps introduce the audience to even more role models with varying tracks centered on leadership, technology and inclusive spaces.
CodeCrush has made significant strides in helping bring more awareness of IT careers into classrooms:
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs in computing and IT are expected to grow 13% from 2016 to 2026, faster than the average of all other occupations. The bureau reports the median annual wage for IT positions was nearly $90,000, compared to $40,000 for all occupations. Despite this expected growth, the number of available, qualified IT professionals is low, and women comprise just 26% of all computing-related occupations in the United States. According to Girls Who Code, the largest drop in participation of girls in computer science happens between the ages of 13 and 17.
For information about the Women in IT Initiative, or how to support it, contact Amanda Rucker, communications specialist for the College of Information Science & Technology, at 402-554-2070 or visit codecrush.unomaha.edu.
Have you ever wondered what your dog is thinking when she stares at you with those big eyes? Or how that squirrel in your yard will remember burying that acorn in your potted petunias? Ever thought twice before adding those extra slices of bacon to your sandwich? Ever wondered why it always seems like the octopus at the zoo is sizing you up, too?
Jesi Gibbs hopes you do.
“My overarching goal is to make people think about animals not just because they love them, or they’re pets or they’re cute or they’re food, but to respect them as other cohabiters of the planet,” she said. “There are plenty of other animals that have high levels of intelligence, and we as human animals do not necessarily treat them that way.”
An Omaha native and 2009 graduate of Burke High School, Jesi is on a mission to change our relationship with the animal world. She’s at the University of Nebraska at Omaha pursuing a degree in biology with a minor in psychology. She hopes to spend her life researching animal cognition. She’s one of seven promising students who received assistance from hundreds of generous alumni and supporters of the UNO Fund. Thanks to a scholarship from the UNO Fund, she’s driven to pursue her dream.
But her story didn’t start with such clarity.
Upon graduating from high school, Jesi attended Metropolitan Community College and earned an associate degree in business with vague ideas of starting her own company.
“I kind of wanted to be an entrepreneur,” she said, “but I kept putting together business plans and just not starting the business. I feel like I just knew that it wasn’t going to make me happy.”
“I started getting really interested in biology through a friend of mine who was here at UNO. She was in ecological sciences, and it just made me think, I could be a scientist if I wanted to! I feel like that’s something a lot of people feel is out of reach or is only for certain people who do science or math. But I was just kind of like, well, I could be a biologist, so I’m just going for it.”
Jesi knew nothing was out of reach if she put in the effort, and after reading works about ecology, marine biology and animal cognition, she discovered a drive to research how animals think and experience the world.
There was just one problem: Attaining a bachelor’s degree can be cost-prohibitive, especially for a nontraditional student who has been out of high school for 10 years. In addition, Jesi works 35 hours per week at a local floral company to support herself. Finding the time, money and energy to pursue her degree was going to be a challenge.
That’s where the UNO Fund came in. While there are many scholarships at UNO, the UNO Fund for Student Scholarships is the only one that sees hundreds of alumni and supporters come together and make gifts – last year as low as $5 and as high as $5,000 – to give directly back to students. Thanks to UNO Fund donors, UNO was able to offer Jesi a renewable scholarship to cover much of her tuition through her expected graduation.
“It was absolutely amazing – I cried,” she said, describing how she reacted when she got the scholarship letter. “It means I don’t have to work every extra minute of my time, and I can actually put forth the effort that I need in school, because otherwise, just in order to pay for myself living, I would have had to take out loans just to live on. I don’t have any help from family or extra people. I just support myself and am paying for school. It took so much stress off.”
Thank you so much for your contribution. It has literally changed my life. You’ve made it so I can actually pursue something I feel has meaning in the world and accomplish that while not having to pay that off for my entire life after school. I don’t know a better way that you could spend your money than on students.
Jesi is now in her second semester at UNO, and she’s found the school to be filled with faculty, staff and students who are willing to ensure she is successful and achieves her goals. While she’s not sure exactly where her studies will take her after graduation, she’s committed more than ever to impacting the world with her work. She especially wants UNO Fund donors to know the difference they’ve made for her.
“Thank you so much for your contribution. It has literally changed my life,” she said. “You’ve made it so I can actually pursue something I feel has meaning in the world and accomplish that, while not having to pay that off for my entire life after school. I don’t know a better way that you could spend your money than on students. It’s just awesome. I’m just so grateful and humbled by that. I was not expecting it, and it changed my life.”
Particularly, she said, she appreciates that the UNO Fund scholarships have given a chance to nontraditional students, who often don’t get as many scholarship opportunities as fresh high-school graduates.
“Something like this UNO Fund scholarship is so important for people like me,” she said. “Being an ‘older’ student, you don’t really have the support systems you do when you’re young, and there’s kind of no one that’s going to give you money. Having this scholarship to help people specifically in my circumstance that don’t really have other avenues is super, super important.”
Jesi said she hopes to pay back these gifts to UNO Fund donors – by being the best student possible and ultimately by changing how we think about the natural world.
“I know what I want to do, and I feel like this money is being well spent,” she said. “I am so invested in this. I am going to see this through to the end.”
You can help bring more students like Jesi to UNO. The more people who give, the more scholarships we can award to students who need and deserve them. Make your gift of $25, $50 or $100 to the UNO Fund today.
2285 South 67th St
Suite 200
Omaha, NE 68106
800-432-3216
info@nufoundation.org
