Official SLCC Blog

Untitled, Aïsha Lehmann. Salt Lake Community College’s Facilities Services staff recently installed artwork in the Huval Student Center’s Lactation Space, thanks to the Worksite Mini-Grant for Lactation Accommodations. The grant from the Utah Department of Health’s HEAL program intends to alleviate any financial constraints that may prevent an organization from creating or improving its lactation spaces. Caleb Prusso applied for the grant after learning about it from Campus and Site Services Director Shannon McWilliams. As the College’s Facilities assistant planner, Caleb works with the Interior Design, Architecture and Construction Management teams to select and implement furnishings for all College campuses. The team opted to use the grant funds to improve the existing lactation space in the Huval Student Center with untitled artwork by local artist Aïsha Lehmann. “Selecting artwork, particularly by a Utah artist, seemed to align with the College’s culture of fostering tale...

SLCC student Valene Peratrovich and KRCL's Lara Jones collaborated to produce an award-winning show. The Radio and TV Production student Valene Peratrovich took first place at the Utah’s Society of Professional Journalist Headliners Awards in June for best "public affairs talk show" with Lara Jones, executive producer of KRCL's RadioACTive. The award-winning talk show was a Thanksgiving special that Valene hosted and largely produced that included local indigenous leaders and community members who “explored the truths” about the holiday. “I’m honored by this award, but I just got lucky with the incredible panel involved, who were so honest and truthful. They were the magic. At the end, all five of us were ‘whoa.’ It just felt like magic,” says Valene, who is Tlingit - Eagle Clan, Unungan + Athabascan, from the Anchorage, Alaska area. The panelists could speak personally to the Native American experience, all of whom ...

July 25 marked National Hire a Veteran Day, a period that raises awareness of employment for transitioning U.S. servicemembers and veterans after completing their military service. Veterans bring competitive skills to jobs, like dedication, teamwork and good communication; yet, finding and competing for civilian positions can be challenging for transitioning veterans. Many may not know of Salt Lake Community College’s longstanding history with student veterans. In 1948, the Salt Lake Area Vocational School expanded its educational programs and resources financed by the Montgomery GI Bill. Today, SLCC serves approximately 1,100 veterans and is ranked 16 on the Military Times Best for Vets: Colleges 2020 as a two-year college. Career Services is the perfect one-stop-shop out of the many job readiness resources Salt Lake Community College offers student veterans. Career coaches can meet with students and help them map their professional needs. Career Coach Dan Hooten says an i...

It’s summer, and that means construction everywhere, from big and small projects inside and out; there’s no avoiding it. From parking lots, roads, stairs, offices, a building, and even an entirely new campus, much is happening at SLCC. As much as we hate having to take the long way around, we love a newly paved parking lot, an air-conditioned building on a hot day, and better access to higher education for students in rural places. Here are the construction projects taking place now or scheduled to start this fall and continue into 2023. Juniper Building (Herriman Campus) There’s been much buzz about the new Juniper Building at Herriman Campus, and rightly so. This partnership facility with the U will allow students to start their studies at SLCC in a specific program and then transfer right into the same field of study at the bachelor's level at the U, all from the same campus. SLCC, with Big D Construction, contracted to do the work, broke ground last summer in an em...

Stock image: Kayaking at Lake Martin, a bald cypress swamp, Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, USA. Salt Lake Community College students traveled to New Orleans on July 10 for the College’s first interdisciplinary domestic study trip, A Taste of Louisiana. Professor Jeff Zealley instructed the class and co-led the trip with Engaged Learning Specialist Jenny Huynh, with President Huftalin joining the group for the first few days of their travels. About SLCC’s Domestic Study Programs A Taste of Louisiana falls under DSD 2900 , the new designation developed by SLCC Engaged Learning Director Lucy Smith in collaboration with Jeff. Unlike study abroad or discipline-specific domestic study programs, DSD 2900 is an interdisciplinary designation, meaning a student in any area of study may enroll in the program and complete two general credit hours. The designation creates a new program structure through the lens of experiential learning, the process of learning by doing. While enrolled in the c...

SLCC accepts high school seniors into its Surgical Technology program and also provides an accelerated program in which students graduate one to two semesters faster than other AAS programs in Utah. SLCC is one of only 10 community colleges across the country awarded a $100,000 grant for workforce education from the All Within My Hands (AWMH) Foundation as part of its Metallica Scholars Initiative . Among the 10 recipients, SLCC was one of only two community colleges in the West to receive this grant. The grant will primarily be used to support students pursuing an associate of applied science degree in SLCC’s Surgical Technology program through scholarships and micro-awards for students facing financial challenges. The grant will also provide valuable professional development for program instructors and will be used to promote this career path to the local population. “We are extremely honored to receive this award and are e...

  “I propose that, when the sickness that is nostalgia comes to visit, I invite her in, serve her tea and cake, before I bid her go.” This line and many other lines of poetry fill the pages of three published books by Lisa Bickmore, who was recently named Utah’s new poet laureate. A role she served at SLCC as well, where she was the college’s first poet laureate and where she taught English for 29 years before retiring in 2021. “I’m deeply honored, excited, and a bit daunted by it [the appointment],” says Lisa. “Utah is full of so many wonderful writers whom I admire.” One of the primary roles of the poet laureate is to promote the literary arts in Utah over a five-year stint. Lisa plans to build on the annual poetry festival started by her predecessor, Paisley Rekdal. She also plans to create a mobile micro-press where writers and writing groups across the state, including middle or...

   School of Arts, Communication and Media at SLCC's South City Campus.                                                            A $1.3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation will expand the very successful University of Utah Presidential Leadership Fellows pilot program to Salt Lake Community College, Utah State University and Weber State University. The program aims to increase the number of academic leaders from the arts and humanities, specifically those historically excluded and underrepresented from the ranks of chairs, deans and university presidents. In addition to training and mentorship, the fellows will attend a series of high-level meetings to simultaneously learn and apply new skills and observe how seasoned leaders engage.   A generous three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation lau...

While middle school students are too young to drive, on a recent summer afternoon more than a dozen students were driving cars in a parking lot at SLCC’s Redwood campus. The students were driving autonomous rovers that they had programmed; it was the culmination of a week-long STEM camp in which they learned scientific and engineering topics related to developing a self-driving car. "Did you know there are 22 satellites, and my car is connected to three of them? The more satellites your car is connected to, the more accurate it will be,” explains 14-year-old Aliyah Melgoza, who added she liked designing 3-D models and soldering to make her own circuit board. SLCC faculty help design the week-long Slick Science STEM camp, which runs three sessions each summer. The curriculum and activities include: computer programming, 3-D computer modeling, 3-D printing, engineering design, calculating direction and distance using GPS/GIS (Geographic Informati...

The price of textbooks can be a barrier for some SLCC students and cause financial challenges. However, since the introduction of the Open Educational Resources (OER) in 2014, there has been an estimated $21 million in cost savings for more than 243,000 SLCC students.   OER are free or low-cost, high-quality resources for teaching and learning. Instead of purchasing a textbook, students access OER that professors have developed and customized for their class, which can include chapters, key terms, interactive exercises, and can be downloaded.   Currently, one in three SLCC faculty use OER.  “Faculty enjoy the flexibility within the resource to adapt it to real time so they can include relevant, current content. Unlike a static textbook, the content in OER can evolve,” says Andrea Scott, OER coordinator. She mentions while other Utah institutions of higher education use OER, SLCC was one of the first to broadly adopt it.     The bulk of SLCC’s OER offer...