As we continue to celebrate the achievements of the Class of 2020 and the successful end of the semester for our students, I want to share this video about our student-athletes. The Academic Committee of Student Government and the Media Team at Wake Forest produced it; watch it here.
As an academic adviser, I have seen firsthand how our student-athletes are juggling what essentially feels like two full-time jobs: being a college student at Wake (which in an of itself is not easy) and being a member of a team (which has all kinds of responsibilities: practice, games, community service, travel, etc.). My hat is off to our student-athletes because I know they have far more demands on their time than I had as a student!
This has been a semester unlike any other. There is a story online about the process of going remote but staying connected, and it highlights some of the creative approaches faculty members took:
For math professor Jason Parsley, adapting to teaching from home meant beginning each class with high-quality computer animations. His favorite: a mathematical representation of a shape without an inside or outside called a Klein bottle. With photos of mac ‘n cheese and birthday cake, a well-stocked refrigerator and an empty grocery aisle, students in Amanda Gengler’s Sociology of Food class captured their experiences during the pandemic through the lens of food and created a website. Philosophy professor Emily Austin shifted away from group class meetings and replaced them with individual weekly Webex meetings with each student to discuss topics in morality and ethics one-on-one.
You can read the full story here. At the bottom of the website are profiles of some of our faculty. I especially love this picture and what it says about the ways our campus community pulled together in this crazy time.
