we are educators.
All The World’s A Stage
When Cody Jarman (UT Martin, ’15) traveled to Ireland in 2013, he had no idea that trip across the Atlantic would change his life.
Now, a Fulbright Scholarship, one of the first awarded to a UT Martin graduate, is sending Jarman back to the Emerald Isle to study Irish literature and film at University College Cork.
“Being able to see firsthand Ireland’s struggle to find and define itself through its art drew me in,” he said. “From Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde to James Joyce and William Butler Yeats, it’s difficult to study English without being inundated with Irish literature.”
The Cumberland Furnace, Tennessee native began his journey in September and will return to begin a doctoral program in English at the University of Texas at Austin in fall 2017.
“I actually hope to end up teaching at a small, primarily undergraduate university, ideally something like UT Martin, where I can be the same kind of supportive mentor that many of my UT Martin professors have been to me,” he said.
“The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.”
Transformative Power of Support
“Without the Disability Resource Center, I definitely would not be employed as I am and as successfully socially as I am,” said UT Chattanooga senior engineering major Cody Barnes. “I was quite an anxious person, nervous about everything, horribly terrified to even speak to people.“
Today, Barnes is on schedule to graduate in May 2017 and works a new job in the IT department at a Fortune 500 company.
Success stories like Barnes’s landed UTC’s Disability Resource Center national recognition for the services it provides to all students. The College Choice recently ranked UT Chattanooga among the top 50 universities in the country—and the only Tennessee university to make the list—for serving students with disabilities.
College Choice particularly noted UTC’s MoSAIC program, which serves students with Autism Spectrum Disorders. MoSAIC provides mentoring and academic/life coaching and prepares students for careers beyond the classroom.
“The curriculum was a transformative process. Basically I didn’t have any innate tools that most people have for social interactions—reading body language, being able to hear things in people’s tone, things of that nature. Over time, they helped me create tools that I could use to succeed,” said Barnes.
“They will absolutely never give up on you, even if you have given up on yourself. There were times that I went through some very traumatic situations. And despite everything that I might have felt about myself and my situation, they would always assure me that there was a future for me.”
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
freshmen welcomed onto UTK campus fall 2016
28,000
2020
largest first-year class in at least three decades
27
average high school GPA of incoming freshmen
Changes in the East
Students and staff returned to Rocky Top, this fall, to find the $1 billion campus makeover still going strong. Two new residence halls opened, another neared completion while two new academic buildings took shape, and the second phase of the Student Union rose at the corner of Cumberland Avenue and Phillip Fulmer Way.
Also taking form is Experience Learning, a new campus-wide initiative that will provide students with an increasing number of courses that use real-world problem-solving and hands-on experiences to enhance learning. The key agent of all this change—the campus’s Journey to the Top 25—marked its five-year point in 2015 with significant success in key areas, including a 9 percent increase in the six-year graduation rate and a 3 percent increase in retention.
A refreshed version of the plan, Vol Vision 2020, sets goals for the next five years to continue improvement in undergraduate and graduate education, faculty and staff, research and engagement, and resources and infrastructure. It also adds diversity and inclusion as a new priority area and emphasizes the “Volunteer Difference,” the unique set of strengths that sets UT Knoxville apart from its peers.
