As students resume classes after spring break, we want to help them succeed in this tumultuous semester

Thank you for your tireless work in transitioning to remote teaching. Our faculty’s collective ability to do so in recent weeks has been nothing short of an inspiration.   

As students resume classes after spring break, we want to help them succeed in this tumultuous semester. Many of them are reeling from significant disruptions—including hasty and unplanned relocations, lost jobs, new responsibilities (such as caring for others at home) and potential sickness. In addition, many suffer growing anxiety due to COVID-19 and the faltering economy. Given the challenges facing our students, we must all teach with understanding, compassion and kindness.

At the of the page: 2018 Aerials over CU Boulder and surrounding Boulder area. (Photo by Glenn Asakawa/University of Colorado) Above: James W.C. White

It is heartening that so many faculty and staff have spent so much time researching, trying and implementing what are, to most of us, new ideas for remote education. Over the next couple of months, we will be collecting these great ideas and then sharing them with the college community. So, we welcome your ideas—feel free to send them to asinfo@colorado.edu.  

To get us started, here are some ideas that I’ve heard recently that I’d like to pass along.

• Please be mindful that students are scattered across time zones and that synchronous participation may be challenging.
• Provide as much flexibility as possible in assignments, forms of participation and due dates.
• Make students partners in their education by collecting feedback on what they find most effective.
• Treat yourself with the same generosity you extend to students. No solutions will be perfect in turbulent times.

Additionally, we've seen reports that Zoom classroom sessions on other campuses have been disrupted by unauthorized participants who share offensive material. Here are some recommended tips for using Zoom for meetings and classes, while maintaining security measures:

• Don’t post Zoom URLs in public spaces. Not Twitter, not forums, not open. Share only with meeting attendees.
• Use Advanced Settings to ensure that Who can share? Is set to Host Only.
• Don’t use a Personal Meeting ID for Zoom meetings. These are easy to find and hack. The default Zoom Meeting IDs are randomized, and difficult to find and hack.
• Use Require Meeting Password to be doubly careful. Include the password with the Zoom URL when sending invitations.
• Use the Waiting Room feature to control who enters your Zoom. 
• Use Advanced Settings to disable file transfer. 
• Lock the meeting after it starts. Look under Participants at the bottom of the Zoom window.  You can lock the door here.

Faculty make our college and university great. Together, in partnership with our students and staff, we will weather this storm.

Sincerely,

James W.C. White

Interim Dean

College of Arts and Sciences

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Serene Singh aspires to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, and she has a resume, mind and heart that could drive her there

Follow your heart. 

That’s the advice I give the many students who ask me how to choose from the diverse array of degree possibilities at the �鶹��Ƶ. When you follow your personal passion, you wake up in the morning excited to get after every day. That’s when you do your best. Do what you are passionate about doing and life seems more like a daily gift and less like a daily grind.

James W.C. White

Serene Singh is a classic example. Serene aspires to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, and she has a resume, mind and heart that could drive her there. 

She is the first woman from CU Boulder to be named a Rhodes Scholar, and she’s in good company. Former Supreme Court Justices David Souter and John Marshall Harlan II were also Rhodes Scholars. So was CU Boulder student (and football star) Byron White, who was named a Rhodes Scholar 80 years ago and was later the first Coloradan to serve on the high court.

Where is my sweet spot, and am I really being true to who I am? If I didn’t have that conversation with myself, I might be in a very different major and a very different part of my life right now.”
—Serene Singh

Following their path, she will study at Oxford University, where she will pursue graduate degrees in criminology and criminal justice. Singh, who is from Colorado Springs and is majoring in political science and journalism, has previously been named a Truman Scholar and Dalai Lama Scholar. She is president of her political science honors fraternity, chief justice of the CU Student Government’s judicial branch, and president and founder of the Sikh Student Association.

She is also president and founder of The Serenity Project, a nonprofit aimed at empowering women in at-risk communities. It aims to boost women’s self-esteem by imparting skills such as public speaking and interviewing.

These are talents Singh honed through pageantry. She was Miss Colorado Teen 2016 and America’s Junior Miss in 2017. “I joined pageantry because I had a bias against it,” she told Voice of America. Doing things she thinks she will hate, she said, is one way to challenge herself.

It’s also one way to expand one’s horizons, a principle at the core of a liberal arts education. Open inquiry is a critical value the university strives to impart, as is independent thought. Both permeate her philanthropic work and disciplinary focus.

“Going into college, there was a lot of pressure from my community and from the world around me to be either in engineering or in pre-med,” she said. “Even in high school, I really felt like in order to be successful, I needed to be in the hard sciences.”

But science was not where her passions lay: “It was in government. It was in communications like journalism, and it was in understanding our Constitution, democracy, freedom studies and learning how to reduce violence through a political lens in the United States.”

Each student choosing whether to study the humanities, STEM or anything in between, Singh said, should ask themselves this question: “Where is my sweet spot, and am I really being true to who I am?” Singh added: “If I didn’t have that conversation with myself, I might be in a very different major and a very different part of my life right now.”

Serene Singh personifies hard work, intellectual curiosity and compassion. And she embodies the wisdom of some old but good advice: Follow your heart.

James W.C. White is interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

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