IUPUI Honors College: creating the blueprint for a virtual community

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, many communities within IUPUI have struggled to find ways to maintain connections between students. Despite this, the IUPUI Honors College has been able to create a virtual community that supports students as they learn and participate in virtual events. 

Kristy Sheeler, the IUPUI Honors College executive associate dean, said that they have always given their student leaders the opportunity and responsibility to develop events and activities for their peers. Although that responsibility was heightened over the past year, Sheeler said returning scholars felt a duty to help the incoming class feel welcome and find their way. 

According to Sheeler, while the student council stepped up by encouraging all student organizations to connect via social media to amplify all honors events, the peer mentors worked hard to engage incoming students in virtual and safe face-to-face events. 

Sheeler emphasized that they gave students freedom to lead events of their choice and listened to the honors students to learn more about the events and the topics that would be interesting to them.  

Those who are interested in building a virtual community like the IUPU Honors College did should follow their lead by increasing the overall number of events and engagement activities with both face-to-face and virtual options so students can find something of interest to attend. Sheeler also stressed that they trusted their students to organize events and be creative.

“We transitioned all our signature Honors College events online such as our Honors College Open House and our Emerging Leaders Workshop. We experimented with different platforms such as Kahoot and Glimpse. Whenever possible, we said 'yes' to an idea, and our students certainly delivered,” Sheeler said. 

One of the students who was able to attend the events was Faith Prochaska, a junior with a dual major in biology and neuroscience, who found that she was “in awe of the amazing organizations in the Honors College that were still making efforts” to maintain community safely. 

Prochaska attended the IUPUI Honors College open house, virtual yoga workshop, and ALDPES holiday project and not only plans to continue to attend them when she can but also found that with the culture at IUPUI, it would be helpful for these types of online events to continue after the pandemic to help students who live off campus get easily involved. 

With the virtual yoga workshop, Prochaska felt relaxed after she attended to de-stress from classes. She also attended the ALDPES holiday project, where she felt she was able to give back to her community during a time where many are struggling financially. 

Molly Pederson, the president of Academics for Civic Engagement (ACE) and a triple major in forensic and investigative sciences, biology, and chemistry, emphasized that with their in-person and virtual volunteering events, students were able to safely give back to both national organizations and to the Indianapolis community. 

“We have, I think, 10 virtual volunteering events every semester. . . . So, at those, we just kind of have everybody get on a Zoom call and then they can volunteer at whatever website they want. But then we do check-ins every hour where people can share what they've been working on,” Pederson said. 

Pederson said they also had a couple of in-person events where they cleaned up at the Cultural Trail while being masked, socially distant, and outside. In this way, ACE and IUPUI Honors College were still able to have students build community in-person.  

Even with the virtual volunteering, Pederson believes there was more member participation during the past semester than they had ever seen before. This is most likely in part due to their increased e-mail communication and direct communication with students. 

“This past semester was the first time we've had a meeting with our general members included. Usually, the exec [sic] board just meets a couple times to plan the events, but this time we wanted to get feedback directly from students and hear what they thought worked and didn't work,” Pederson said.  

According to Pederson, she believes this helped students feel they have more of an active role and voice in the organization and have continued doing these types of meetings. 

Unnati Nayak, a management and marketing major who works as the marketing intern for IUPUI Honors College, has also been able to assist in getting students involved in IUPUI Honors College. Along with doing their #MondayMotivation series, IUPUI Honors College has been featuring a variety of stories on their social media. 

Sheeler said Nayak’s social media campaigns she developed featured “student voices during special times of the year such as First-Gen Student Week and International Week, weekly motivational and self-care advice, virtual study tips, and ways to stay organized.” These campaigns helped students stay engaged with the IUPUI Honors College. 

Nayak felt that since students continuously get updates from the IUPUI Honors College about announcements and upcoming events, they have been able to build their virtual community while also continuing to support and motivate students.

“It feels great to see that so many students are interested in being a part of a virtual community,” Nayak said. “The transition from an in-person experience to a virtual platform was big, and initially, students felt disconnected, but through the virtual events we have helped create a strong virtual community for our honors members to learn and grow together.” 

One way they were able to help IUPUI Honors College members learn and grow together was through their mentorships. Myra Hussain, a mathematics teaching major and student leader of the Honors College Peer Mentor Program, helped facilitate the mentee welcome event and the mask making event, which kicked off the beginning of mentees and mentors learning and growing together. 

“The welcome event was a great opportunity for mentors to be introduced to potential virtual activities to participate in with their mentees,” Hussain said. “As far as our social events [such as mask making], we had mentees who wanted to get out of their dorms have an opportunity to get to know others in a socially distanced and appropriate way, and some of our mentees definitely took advantage of that.” 

For Hussain, she was able to both build community with the mentors she oversaw and with her mentee. The mentors she oversaw participated in small group meetings where she would check in with them and talk through any needs they had. With her mentee, she regularly checked in with her to ensure everything was going well. In this way, IUPUI Honors College was able to make sure that both mentors and mentees were listened to and heard.