Program for non-traditional students receives five-year grant

SOU awarded $1.6 million to help first-generation and non-traditional students

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(Ashland, Ore.) — The TRIO-Student Support Services (SSS) program at SOU, which helps non-traditional students succeed and graduate, has received a five-year, $1,627,990 federal grant renewal to keep the program in operation through 2026.

The U.S. Department of Education grant will provide $325,598 per year in funding for SOU’s Success at Southern/TRIO Program, which is limited to 190 students per academic year and has served more than 1,500 since 1994.

The SOU program offers services including academic advising, tutoring, personal education plans, career guidance, preparation for graduate programs and financial aid information. The program is free and intended for first-generation, low-income, disabled or other non-traditional students.

Students must apply to participate in the Success at Southern/TRIO-SSS program and those who meet eligibility requirements are invited to interviews about their educational goals, career ambitions and academic barriers. Students who are accepted into the program must each attend a mandatory orientation session and an initial personal education plan meeting, then become eligible for all of the Success at Southern/TRIO-SSS services.

The federal TRIO programs, which were created following passage of the Higher Education Act of 1965, are intended to help disadvantaged students progress through the academic pipeline from middle school through graduate school. There are currently eight sections of TRIO, and the SOU grant is part of the Student Support Services Program. SOU also participates in the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program – a separately funded TRIO program – which prepares eligible undergraduate students for eventual doctoral studies.

TRIO’s programs help students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and those with disabilities, to negotiate obstacles that may hinder their academic progress.

Peter Wu's passion is to teach physics and do research

Peter Wu has found his calling: to teach physics and do research at SOU

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Peter Ka-Chai Wu has worked in factories and mailrooms, and has held positions ranging from security guard to researcher. But the opportunity to teach physics is what brought him to SOU as a young academic and it’s what has kept him on the STEM faculty for 25 years.

“(Teaching) is rewarding and challenging,” Wu said. “Seeing your students enter the next phase of their life and hoping that what you helped them learn may aid them in their new adventures.”

Wu teaches courses in physics, mathematics and electronics while studying biomaterials. He has served as a program coordinator for physics at SOU and is a professor on the Chemistry Department faculty.

He received his bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics at Macalester College, and both his master’s degree and doctorate in materials science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

As a researcher, Wu studied biomaterials, thin film, polymer/metal adhesion, ferroelectric materials and fullerenes.

He saw Ashland and SOU as a stable environment to raise his child, and continues to find fulfillment and inspiration.

As a teacher, Wu fosters a creative and understanding space for students to apply what they learn – where he asks students to listen, review material, ask questions and work hard. He teaches algebra and calculus-based physics classes, and general physics. And he particularly enjoys branches of physics that deal with the electromagnetic spectrum.

“If you want to achieve a basic understanding of how nature works, physics is it,” he said. “Physics opens my horizon, deepens my understanding and makes me humble.

“I like electricity and magnetism including electronics – those are my favorite subjects. As a teacher, if you are excited about the subject, it helps.”

Wu has continued his research while at SOU – filing patents, publishing scientific papers and book chapters, and speaking at numerous conferences. One of his recent papers is “Electrospun gelatin biopapers as substrate for in vitro bilayer models of blood-brain barrier tissue,” which Wu co-wrote with seven other authors.

The paper found that through a fiber production method called electrospinning a more effective material could be created on which to test the blood-brain barrier – a function of blood vessels that prevents large molecules, including many medicines used to treat brain disorders, from entering the brain. Wu’s electrospun “biopapers” were found to have improved electrical resistance, decreased permeability, and permitted less separation between cells.

Wu is currently doing research on acoustics as he continues to teach physics and other STEM courses.

Story by Blair Selph, SOU Marketing and Communications student writer

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Essential workers from SOU's MBA program

Essential workers in SOU’s MBA Program share their stories

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Joan McBee, the department chair of the SOU School of Business, asked essential workers in her graduate program this spring to share their experiences on the department’s Facebook page. Their responses are bittersweet, highlighting the strength of people in crisis and the tragedy of COVID-19.

“I know several students who are struggling to get their homework done, get their kids to do their homework, deal with working at home and all the distractions, and also have the demands of work – especially if they are considered essential workers,” McBee said. “My graduate assistant and I thought it would be good to run some stories on Facebook to honor those essential workers and to motivate others.”

One such essential worker is Sarah Wheeler, an operations specialist for Albertsons supermarket. She mentors and coaches managers, but has been swamped with other duties due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with working full-time, she’s raising her 2-year-old son and getting her master’s in business administration degree at SOU.

“I spend most days helping out wherever I am needed in the stores,” Wheeler said. “We have super-sized freight loads with the panic buying, so it has become increasingly difficult for the stores to get it all out on the sales floor before the store opens. It is incredible to see how our associates have come together as a big family, supporting each other through positive encouragement.”

While Wheeler works in retail, many of the responses that McBee received were from medical professionals. MBA students Alicia Preston, Dave Bergland and Ben Gugler all work at Rogue Valley Manor, where they support nearly 1,000 senior residents. Kylie Marshall is a respiratory therapist trained in critical care and cardio-pulmonary medicine.

“We’re the first ones in the room when you come into the ER short of breath and exposed,” Marshall said. “We’re the last ones you see when we’re intubating you. We’re the ones managing your life on the ventilator. We’re the ones who pull the tube when you’re awake or the ones who pull it to let you go.”

However, the most dramatic of McBee’s collected stories comes from Ryan Lilley, a bachelor of applied science student and the operations manager at Mountain Medics. Lilley started by detailing the event that caused him to get into health care in the first place.

“I was 5 years old and there was a car accident up the street from my grandmother’s house,” Lilley said. “My mother was a nurse and my father worked for the Forest Service. We briskly walked up the street to a crowd of 15 to 20 bystanders looking over … a man lying lifeless on the ground. My mother immediately began CPR and my father assisted.

“The gentlemen recovered and immediately vomited and rolled over… I knew from then on, I was going to be like my mother, and not a bystander.”

Lilley has jumped around a number of healthcare professions, from Ski Patrol to wilderness EMT to paramedic to lab assistant, before joining his friend’s company, Mountain Medics.

“Mountain Medics performs essential duties for the state of California, federal government and large corporations in reference to medical response for disasters, wildfires, rescues, along with COVID-19 screening and testing sites,” he said.

“Now more than ever the relevance of our company has become increasingly obvious. These crews need our help, and communities need our help.”

McBee found all of the stories she received emotional and motivational. Everyone who responded to her call for stories is working as hard as they can to keep themselves and their communities safe, and working toward their master’s degrees at the same time.

“This situation will change us forever, from our families to our jobs, from our small towns to our great cities,” Lilley said. “Our response is what will define us and this pandemic.”

Story by Blair Selph, SOU Marketing and Communications student writer

Sean O'Skea

SOU’s Sean O’Skea: from historic preservation to theatrical scene design

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After moving back-and-forth – between the East and West coasts, and between theater stage design and historic preservation – Sean O’Skea has settled into his role at SOU as a professor of scenic design, which he’s held for the past 13 years.

O’Skea became interested in scene design after taking drama classes in high school and realizing he was more interested in creating evocative environments than in performing. To that end, he worked toward a bachelor’s degree in theatre at the University of Portland. But he started to have a change of heart while working on his graduate degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, deciding to work instead toward a master’s degree in historic preservation.

“My degree in historic preservation was a bit of a rebellion against working in theatre,” O’Skea said. “I had worked my first year in grad school at University of Wisconsin-Madison and was really having second thoughts. I’ve always been interested in history and architecture, and so jumped into the program at Ball State.”

He worked in Indiana for about a year as a historic preservationist, but found after moving back to the West Coast that historic preservation work is rarer than it was on the East Coast.

“While I was trying to find more work in historic preservation, I kept getting offered design jobs and adjunct teaching in theatre, and after a while I just sort of found myself back in theater full-time again – so I went to University Portland to finish my MFA,” O’Skea said.

“I was accepted for a tenure-track job at Alfred University in New York,” he said. “So we moved back across the country. I was at Alfred for three years when my wife was offered a fantastic job in PR for Microsoft. Our life has been alternating between my school and jobs taking us east, where we were never really happy, and my wife’s jobs bringing us back to Oregon.”

In Oregon, O’Skea spent a couple years raising his daughter as a stay-at-home dad, before applying for teaching jobs at nearby universities – including SOU, where he was eventually hired.

“My wife has always dreamed of living in Ashland, and Southern Oregon felt very familiar to my Sonoma County (California) childhood home,” O’Skea said. “(SOU is) big enough to have a real college experience but not so big that you get lost. Ashland has the best of both worlds – great culture, progressive community, much that you’d find in a big city, but we are minutes away from some of the most beautiful landscapes in the nation.

“I was impressed with the department and hit it off with the faculty, I met some students that were really excited and committed to their studies and we decided to just go for it.”

O’Skea teaches courses in the SOU Theatre Program including elements of design, which introduces the digital and hands-on processes of design; scenic design, which explores the principles of scene design in enhancing theatrical performances; computer aided design, which focuses on digital modeling and rendering techniques in the creation of physical artistic spaces; and drafting, which examines the techniques of drawing stage scenery and properties.

O’Skea uses a direct teaching style, assigning projects in his classes that get his students to develop the technical skills required in set creation. He advises students to be determined if they want to find academic success.

“Self-motivation is essential; your professors can only be your guides, you have to take the lead on your learning,” he said.

O’Skea enjoys gardening and traveling, when not working. While much of his travel to the East Coast is for work, he also vacations with his family during winter breaks – recently going to England and Italy. His travels help inspire his work as a scene designer.

“Everything influences my designs and as most of our travel is to historically juicy places I spend a lot of time filling sketchbooks, and taking reference photos,” he said. “It drives my wife and daughter crazy as we will be walking somewhere and suddenly I’m not there and they find me half a block back taking a photo of an interesting door knocker or a picturesque cracked wall, or something.”

O’Skea has published “Painting for Performance: A Beginner’s Guide to Great Painted Scenery (Routledge-2016),” an educational book that focuses on giving beginners the terms and techniques to paint stage scenery.

Story by Blair Selph, SOU Marketing and Communications student writer