How NKU is moving forward during COVID-19

Junior neuroscience major Katie Clough received both doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Her reasoning? Simply wanting everything to go back to normal.  “I know that the more people that get the vaccine, the closer we are to going back to normal,” Clough said. “I also want to do my part in protecting everyone else, as well as protecting myself.” Clough works in a neurotoxicology lab...

NKU COVID-19 cases have been tracked for the last year or so and have, overall, been low compared to the rest of the surrounding Northern Kentucky counties. However, steps still need to be taken to overcome this virus once and for all. According to the Northern Kentucky Health Department’s website, COVID cases within NKU’s zip code (41099) spiked in the late summer and early fall months of 2020 and again in the winter months of 2020 and 2021. The h...

NKU is returning to mostly in-person classes in the fall, but campus community members are still planning to carry impactful experiences and lessons from the pandemic with them as they return to a new sense of normalcy. Dr. Ande Durojaiye, interim provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs, described the class format breakdown for Fall 2021 as 70% face-to-face courses, approximat...

One of the biggest concerns for Amy Clark, director of Student Counseling Services, during the past year has been being able to meet students’ needs—wherever they are. Because of COVID-19 and the need to be physically distanced, the office has created new operations to help make themselves able to do so. At the beginning of the pandemic, they began offering telehealth counseling, a system w...

Senior theatre BFA major Jackson Hurt didn’t always want to be a performer, but he said there was a moment on stage during his first show that made him realize he was at home. When he entered college, he declared his major as electronic media broadcasting major but quickly changed to theatre during his first semester. “After I changed my major to theatre, I kind of went full on into the world o...

Since alumna Jasmine Watson graduated last spring with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography, she said she has felt like her life has been put on pause.  “When the pandemic hit, I was in the middle of doing my thesis work for my senior exhibition and that was about my mom and grandma, and my mom is from Louisville—I was living in Northern Kentucky going to school there and so when the pand...

What is your year/major? Freshman, dance BFA. Did you work on any projects last summer or continue dancing at all?  Last summer due to the pandemic, I was actually still teaching at The Dance Center in Independence, Kentucky. I was working with my boss and we were filming segments to send to the kids so they could keep dancing at home because at the time our studio was closed and we were pre...

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic that began to spread across the United States and the rest of the world last year, the NCAA experienced a $600 million drop in revenue from 2019, due in large part to the cancellation of the 2020 Division I men’s basketball tournament, which was a key source of revenue from television deals, marketing rights and ticketing. However, due in part to the extravagant television deals tha...

What is your year/major? Junior BFA Musical Theatre. Think back to last March. Were you in the middle of any projects or about being working on anything? We were just finishing up Dance ‘20 and the end of the year was kind of wrapping up and it was getting kind of crazy—There were some auditions happening in the city and some other big auditions that we were all preparing for and the obvi...

Last year over spring break, junior musical theatre BFA major Arianna Catalano was visiting New York with her mom to take some dance classes and watch a few Broadway performances. Little did she know, she was at some of the last performances before Broadway would shut down due to COVID-19.  “I remember being in New York and I was like, ‘oh people are getting kind of weird about this, there w...

What is your year/major? Junior, marketing and theatre double major.  What were your thoughts last spring when the university first closed?  I think my first thoughts when it first started happening was ‘oh, we get an extended spring break. We get an extended spring break, and it just got kept going’—I don’t think it even really hit me until I was moving out of my dorm like this i...