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WCU Stories

Students in a surgical room

Faculty, Students with Chinese Ties Bring Much-Needed Surgical Masks to WNC

A chat room conversation between colleagues at Western Carolina University with ties to China led to fast action that is putting surgical masks into the hands of front-line health workers in the region’s smaller care facilities. Yue Cai Hillon, professor of management at WCU, said the effort began with the simple, but the oft-repeated question of “what can we do?”  

Athletics

Time and Treasure Highlight ‘I Love WCU’

Western Carolina University faculty and staff opened their hearts as well as their wallets and calendars this year to support the university’s fourth annual “I Love WCU” campaign during the month of February. This year’s campaign, which was a joint effort from the Division of Advancement and the Center for Community Engagement and Service Learning, encouraged participants to volunteer their time to community service projects, as well as to make charitable donations.  

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Time and treasure highlight 'I Love WCU'

Western Carolina University faculty and staff opened their hearts as well as their wallets and calendars this year to support the university’s fourth annual “I Love WCU” campaign during the month of February.  

Facilities Management

Family Comes First for New Facilities Management Scholarship, an “I Love WCU” Story

Western Carolina University’s Facilities Management unit is a family, as far as members of its leadership team are concerned, so they decided to help take care of their own by establishing the WCU Facilities Management Annual Scholarship in honor of “I Love WCU” month.  

Jennifer Hinton

Recreational Therapy Director says Helping Others Helps Her; an “I Love WCU” Story

It’s hard to tell where Jennifer Hinton’s real job ends and her volunteer work begins. As program director and clinical education coordinator for Western Carolina University’s recreational therapy program, Hinton spends much of her time teaching her students about service-learning, coordinating volunteer projects for them or doing community service herself — sometimes for work, her church, her family — or often a combination of some of them, if not all.   

Amber Parker

WCU Dance Team Coaches Create Scholarship in Memory of Former Member

Funny, funny, funny. That was Amber Parker in a nutshell, say those who best knew the vibrant young woman who graduated from Western Carolina University in 2016 and passed away Nov. 18, 2018, at age 24 from a rare form of ovarian cancer.  

Student writing on a blackboard

A Hire Advantage

Working on your college campus probably won’t make you rich, but what if it offered something potentially even more valuable in the long term? Western Carolina University actually offers that – through a program designed to make student employment a more impactful experience  

Group of Animated Students

CAPS finds way to ‘meet students’ with award-winning videos

Realizing that it was time to come up with a more effective way to reach additional students, Kim Gorman, director of Western Carolina University’s Counseling and Psychological Services, and her staff decided to meet students where they were – on YouTube.  

The endangered dusky gopher frog.

Saving the Dusky Gopher Frog

Habitat destruction and degradation are mostly to blame for the dwindling numbers of amphibians worldwide, but there are other factors contributing to the overall decline—and some of these remain elusive. Joseph Pechmann's research on conservation and recovery of the endangered dusky gopher frog.  

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