(L to R): Sophomore Stephanie Trypuc looks at Junior Becca Borchardt’s cellphone as they figure out which workshops they want to attend for the week at KCACTF.
(L to R): Sophomore Stephanie Trypuc looks at Junior Becca Borchardt’s cellphone as they figure out which workshops they want to attend for the week at KCACTF.
(L to R): Senior nominee Kayla Nelson rehearses an Irene Ryan scene from the play “This Flight Tonight” with her partner Junior Becca Borchardt on the second floor of the Marriott Hotel in Des Moines, Iowa as part of the activities on Monday Jan 23. for KCACTF.
(L to R): Senior Adam Calcagno, Sophomore Stephanie Trypuc, Junior Becca Borchardt and Senior Bekah Bailey practice a clapping cheer during the Tech Team showdown final round to support the Warrior Wombats with school pride in the Stoner Black Box Theatre in Des Moines Iowa.
Winona State tech team Warrior Wombat Andy Glischinski (left) sophomore quick dresses Lance Urbick into dress pants during the Tech Team Showcase final round on Monday Jan 23. in the Stoner Black Box Theatre in Des Moines, Iowa during KCACTF. Glischinski was surprised to make it into the final round since their team placed 7th the previous year. Glischinski explained that if Warrior Wombats place first he would be excited and said, “It would be the cherry on top of the ice cream at this point.” Glischinski and the other Warrior Wombats had to wait till Wednesday night to receive the results.
Becca Borchardt junior performs in a student written 10 minute play called “Truth or Dare” during a KCACTF event at Temple Theatre in Des Moines, Iowa.
Irene Ryan nominee Senior Cody Anderson performs a scene from the play “Little Details” in the final round of the Irene Ryans at Hoyt Theatre in Des Moines, Iowa on Friday evening during KCACTFs closing ceremony. Cody has participated in four KCACTF festivals, once as a partner and the other three times he was a nominee. Cody said, “ I honestly didn’t think we would make it that far and when we did, the nerves were pretty much gone, because at that point, it was all about going out there and having fun.”
Winona State Theatre Professors Jim Williams and Heather Williams-Williams pose for a photo with Sam Scherrer and Bekah Bailey as they hold their awards for Bekah as best stage manager and Sam as best supporting actor during the Irene Ryan Final round at Hoyt Theatre in Des Moines, Iowa on Friday during the KCACTF closing ceremony.
Winona State University students participated in the annual Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival Region 5 for a week in January. Winona State has been a part of the festival for 17 years. This year, 17 WSU students traveled to Des Moines, Iowa, to attend workshops, compete for scholarships and submit their talents for feedback.
KCACTF is an opportunity for networking in the theatre community with six surrounding states, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. Winona State Theatre Professors Jim Williams and Heather Williams-Williams selected students to participate in festival activities.
Musical Theatre Intensive participant Kayla Williams-Schwarze has been attending the festival for the past three years. Kayla said KCACTF is a place to get to know the people from the department. Kayla auditioned for the category Musical Theatre Intensive and made it into the final round with a song called “Nothing Short of Wonderful” from the musical “Dogfight.”
KCACTF had an attendance of about 400 students across the region. Winona State Theatre Professor Williams-Williams said that this year went better than she expected.
“…students were highly successful in all aspects.” Senior, third time Irene Ryan nominee Cody Anderson presented his scenes for the judges at all three rounds and snatched a seat on the final round list. Heather said, “efforts put forth before the festival were rewarded.”
Heather mentioned that Winona State Theatre department requires students to submit something in order to go to KCACTF. This allows students to be more motivated. Students are required to submit scenes they wish to present at KCACTF before winter break. After winter break students attend strict scene rehearsals with feedback from Jim Williams and Heather Williams-Williams.
Anderson said, “Their dedication to the process is the reason that anyone from WSU ever advances in the Irene Ryan competition.”
Throughout the week Cody Anderson and his scene partner Sam Scherrer worked diligently to perfect their scene for the final round. While Cody waited for the lights to go up on the stage to perform his scene he reflects on his favorite parts of KCACTF. He said, “Making the audience laugh and making our professors, peers, and WSU proud was all the fantastic part of an amazing final KCACTF.” Although WSU did not have an Irene Ryan placed winner, students had a week full of making connections and learning from their peers in their field of study.
The transition from a hard-earned education to stable source of income can be a daunting task for students. For the purpose of networking, ice breaking, and resume’ passing, the Career services department arranged for 55 companies to attend the career fair in the East Hall of the Kryzsko Commons.
“My goal is for students to find internships and full-time positions,” Associate Director Deanna Goddard said. “The hope is that they get to network with employers.”
There were 240 students that turned out to meet the company representatives, with some job searchers utilizing the event to its full potential.
Fastenal, one of the companies visiting Winona State, had representatives from several departments scouting for fresh talent. In the crowded hustle of hungry students with bundles of applications, recruitment could depend heavily on first impressions.
Corey Grebin, a Fastenal IT manager and web development specialist, was enticing two students pursuing degrees in management information systems, or MIS.
“If we can get our name in front of them five, six, seven times before they graduate, it’s going to help with recruiting,” Grebin said. “I know some of the MIS professor require students to come down and interview two or three companies, and that’s awesome for us.”
Other students manage to take their own initiative. Dakota Smith, a junior who currently works in Winona State’s IT department, was clearly interested in what he heard from Grebin about Fastenal.
“I’ll have to keep my eye out for Fastenal Day,” Smith said. He then discussed the specifics of troubleshooting with Fastenal’s web specialist, and how it applies to the job they are hiring for.
The organizations were set up in long rows of tables within a few feet of each other, with retail, insurance, and software companies presented in a fair booth fashion. There was also a photobooth and a Linkedin service where applications could be fine tuned and profiles could be professionalized. Focusing the students’ skills to the right profession was made easier by the listing of job titles next to the respective company.
Another company, Buckle, an American fashion retailer, had a booth that was busy in its efforts to reach out to students with marketing and management skills.
“You get to run the whole business the way you want to,” Buckle representative Lacy Koss said. “It’s a business run source, not a franchise. So we make money off of what we sell. You get a salary, you make commision, it’s nice.”
Goddard said the Warrior Success Center plans to make more sessions like this available for the student body. The Summer Opportunities Fair will be held Feb. 16, from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. in the East Hall of Kryzsko. The Minnesota Education Job fair will be held at the Minneapolis Convention Center on April 21.
Last year was the last time a university consortium called the Minnesota Job and Internship Fair was held in the Twin Cities. Due to high cost and low turnout, faculty in charge of the coordinated effort decided not to hold one in the following year.
The construction in Winona State’s gymnasium prevented the space from being utilized for the fall career expo, limiting attendance to 45 organizations in the smaller East Hall. Goddard, however, decided that students should not miss out on the opportunities of other potential employers, and launched Winona State’s first spring career expo.
The next phase was interview day, the schedule of which was posted on Warrior Jobs for the month leading up to the event. Some employers also had schedules for interviews that could be filled at the day of the job fair.
“I would say the majority of students on campus have a company or two that is seeking them out,” Goddard said.
A wide variety of companies voicing their needs was met by a wave of undergrads conveying their abilities.
When Darrell Krueger began his presidency at Winona State University in 1989, he had big plans for the campus – plans that earned him the title of “absolutely crazy.”
The vice president of university advancement at the time, Gary Evans, said he and Krueger would often walk around campus, speaking to people and looking at the grounds. During the early 1990s, the streets bordering the university ran through the campus.
“I remember he and I were making that walk one day when he stopped and said to me, ‘We need to close all these streets,’” Evans said. “I remember saying specifically to Darrell, ‘You’re absolutely crazy… the city of Winona will never allow that to happen.’”
Krueger said he simply saw the need for the campus to match its surroundings.
“The river and bluffs are so beautiful, yet the campus had streets all the way through it,” he said.
Evans said once Krueger developed what campus would look like without streets, resources were needed to make it happen. After people began to support Krueger’s vision, Winona State went to the state university board for an allocation, and it was approved.
Since then, campus beautification at Winona State has been of high importance to faculty, staff and students.
While Krueger took the initiative to change the campus, he said when the first street was transformed into a wide sidewalk, “People started to see other possibilities.”
Over the next few years, donations were received from alumni, community members, faculty and staff to further beautify the campus. Krueger said some of the most well-known and enjoyed elements on campus were donations: the benches, gardens near the Performing Arts Center and Gildemeister Hall, Lauren’s Pond, gazebo and many trees.
After Krueger retired as Winona State’s president in 2005, Evans, who left Winona State in 1998, said the campus fell into “pretty serious neglect.” Eight years later, Evans returned for a three-year stint as interim vice president and heard the current president, Scott Olson, discuss the beauty of the campus in a university meeting.
“It was no question – the campus was, and is, beautiful,” Evans said. “The fact also remained that it was a pale resemblance of its former self.”
Olson made sure a budget was available for the maintenance department to transform the campus back into its previous state and maintain its beauty.
Evans explained upholding the image of Winona State to future Warriors as an “extremely important component” to future enrollment.
“It’s been proven over and over again that prospective students that come to look at Winona State are stunned by the beauty of campus,” Evans said. “That, combined with the beauty of the community, is responsible for recruiting a great deal of students to the university.”
As Olson began to place emphasis on the appearance of the campus, Jim Reynolds, a now-retired Winona State sociology professor, was placed as co-chair of the WSU Landscape Arboretum Committee.
Until the early 1990s, roads cut through Winona State’s campus. Wide sidewalks now replace the roads as part of the university’s efforts to beautify campus.
According to Reynolds, the Arboretum is concerned with campus beautification as well as developing the campus to be representative of the diverse southeastern Minnesota biome.
The Arboretum’s goal is to promote this unique landscape on Winona State grounds, create opportunities for the campus to be used as a living classroom and laboratory, continue to develop the native species on campus and model ethical use of land and practices.
Reynolds said a big accomplishment for the committee was appointing an Arboretum director and landscape architect, Lisa Pearson, who has a “wealth of experience.”
At the start of January 2017, Reynolds passed his committee chair position to Pearson and Allison Quam, a Winona State faculty member. These women now manage a staff that includes a senior groundskeeper and horticulturist, turf and irrigation specialist, certified arborist, and student landscape workers.
Evans recalled a Winona State maintenance employee (Bill Meyer, a now-retired groundskeeper) telling Krueger, shortly after the street transformation, that he thought Winona State was close to having every tree native to Minnesota on the campus grounds. This thought turned into another campus goal for Winona State.
As the number of native trees grew over the years, a complete tree inventory has recently been done of the campus. The inventory reveals there are more than 1,500 trees on Winona State’s campus comprised of 143 species. Reynolds said it is important to maintain diversity in the university’s tree stock.
“We don’t want to develop a monoculture of one type of tree,” he said. “That’s not healthy.”
Two years ago, a rapid restoration of the entire university landscape was conducted. Reynolds said the majority of the funding for these significant expenditures came from a settlement with the DuPont Corporation.
Prior to the restoration, Winona State had used lawn fertilizer from DuPont that was mistakenly toxic to trees. Reynolds said Winona State lost around 100 trees due to the use of this fertilizer, and Winona State received a sizable settlement from the corporation in the nationwide lawsuit. The Arboretum used the settlement for the restoration, which involved hiring a Rochester firm to assess and prune the trees across campus.
Reynolds said the rapid restoration was “such a mammoth undertaking that our staff just wouldn’t have had the time to do. It involved a couple dozen people from firm devoting an intensive amount of time.”
The time and effort the university’s Landscape Arboretum has put into planting and maintaining the trees on campus, combined with involvement in Arbor Day activities, earned Winona State recognition as a Tree Campus USA the past three years.
In an effort to educate the public and its students about the trees on campus, the Arboretum sponsors tree tours in the summer and fall months. Many of the trees on university grounds display a label with its respective popular name, scientific name and a QR code to scan and give smartphone users more information and photos about the species of tree.
While strides have been made in beautifying Winona State’s campus, Reynolds explained the Arboretum is a long-term project that will continually evolve. This includes using an organic approach to maintaining the university’s landscape, transitioning away from commercial flowers to more native plants of southeastern Minnesota and developing a river landscape feature in the central part of the main campus.
Reynolds said these changes would enhance students’ learning in the landscape as an outdoor classroom and appeal to the public.
“We want to see Winona State’s campus become a destination point for travelers passing through the area,” Reynolds said.
Today, as tourists, community members, students, staff and faculty walk the sidewalks on campus to admire the bio-diversity and beauty, Evans emphasized the importance of Krueger’s definitive words during their stroll on campus in 1989.
Evans said there is no question that removing the roads was “the first critical step in beautifying the campus.”
While Krueger may have started the campus beautification initiative, he said it has taken “a whole community to make the Winona State campus as beautiful as it is now.”
Krueger said, “I’m very thankful to have been able to serve and have the support we had during those times from the city, state, faculty and staff, and the students. The students led a lot of these changes.”
Reynolds said the Landscape Arboretum Committee would like to see more student-engagement regarding projects related to their academic programs. He suggested there needs to be a new culture and attitude on campus about maintaining the landscape.
He said, “Everyone has to pitch in on this. Not just the landscape staff, but students, faculty and staff as well.”
With a tight budget and recent cuts, Evans said this is a threat to the Landscape Arboretum, just as any program.
“I would hate to see any less spent on campus beautification than is currently being spent,” he said. “I certainly hope that campus beautification is never again allowed to become deficient.”
