A rich and rewarding residence life is a sterling feature of the AUN experience, and the Spring 2022 semester students enjoyed a splash of opulence when they were ushered into the AUN Student Activity Hub during their orientation. The Student Activity Hub, officially opened by President Margee Ensign on December 3, 2021, offered its welcoming ambiance for the first-year students to open their accounts in campus connections.
At the commissioning of the Hub, Vice President and Dean of Students Byron Bullock had noted that students spend more time out of school than in class.
"We at AUN believe in a holistic approach to education. This is the backdrop for the Student Activity Hub. It is a place where students can be themselves and create their realities".
And that was precisely what the new students set out to do. First on Friday, January 21, the Student Affairs' Orientation Team hosted the highly anticipated WOW-A-RAMA, the get-to-know-you-social mixer forum. There the new students got to know each other and begin the process of familiarization with a new culture in a campus where students are expected to be very well-rounded and responsible.
All the student organizations concerned with social, intellectual, vocational, and religious have offices in the Hub, and their posters and signs indicate their presence.
The new students returned to the Hub the following day, Saturday, to get to know their Resident Directors (RAs) and Resident Assistants (RAs), who ensure round-the-clock supervision of the students' residential space and monitor student behavior, ensuring that everyone is safe, feels safe, and that no one is abusing their freedom to the detriment of the rest of the community's wellbeing.
Inside the sprawling Student Activity Hub, Dean Byron's eternal motivational messages ring out loud and clear. The returning students live by those inspiring words, the Alums sorely miss them, and the new students would be hearing them for the first, but not the last time, at the Pledge Ceremony.
"We are an institution committed to the values of excellence, integrity, and service. There is excellence in everything that we do.
"We are a campus capable of preparing individuals that set the pace for service, role models for our students. We are a premiere university built on a foundation of excellence. Our commitment is not to be better than others; our commitment is to better than our best. We are an institution committed to our value of integrity. There is integrity in all that we do. Corruption, academic dishonesty and incivility have no place at AUN. We treat each other with common respect. We value each other. And we have the highest amount of respect for ourselves. We are an institution that demands the highest integrity of everyone who dwells in this learning community. We hold our heads high and march to a different drummer".
Reported by Bitwul Dashe