Utah State University Eastern recently issued a press release announcing how they will conduct face to face classes for the Fall Semester. Associate Vice President, Greg Dart took time to come into Castle Country Radio to speak about the announcement and other news taking place on campus.

“Yea, a couple of big changes, so we’ve been talking about quite sometime that our intentions were to have face to face classes in the Fall and that is not one of the changes, we will have face to face classes in the Fall. But to do that we were looking at all the different ways we can mitigate risks and one of the big changes that you’re seeing at quite a few schools and Utah State has made the determination that makes the most sense is that face to face instruction will end in November,” stated Dart. As students leave for the Thanksgiving Break, they will not come back for face to face classes after the holiday. Generally, after the holiday its usually about two weeks of instruction then finals so it made sense to allow students to remain at home after the holiday. The university’s administration thought this was the best decision to keep not only students safe but faculty and staff.

“One of the things that we’ve been spending quite a bit of time on at the university over the last few weeks and months has been figuring out what our classroom capacities will be when you account for physical distancing. So a classroom that might have been able to hold up to 50 students might only hold 22 now and so we’ve went and put classroom caps on all those classrooms and then we’ve asked faculty on their preference of how they want to teach. You’ll see more online classes than we’ve had in the past but we have a significant percentage of our classes that are face to face,” explained Dart. For the larger capacity courses, there will be hybrid instruction which means some of the instruction will be taught both online and face to face.

The university’s Student Support Services will reopen next week for potential students. “At our one-stop Student Services, you can get an appointment for a face to face meeting by calling 613-5000, they’ll schedule and you can come in. Advising appointments are being done through lots of different ways, you can do it through email, you can have video appointments. A lot of those offices that have not been operating in a face to face way will be repopulated in the next week,” said Dart. Both faculty and staff are looking forward to having that face to face interaction with potential students again.

Scholarship deadline is coming up very quickly and any students who wish to apply must do so immediately. “Anyone who applies for admissions prior to July 1 will be eligible for scholarships. Those scholarships, some of them are based on academics, there’s other scholarships available as well for both incoming new freshmen and for returning students. So July 1 is kind of that date you need to have on your mind to get those applications in by then,” said Dart. Students can get more information about the scholarship process by visiting Student Support Services.

To learn more about USU Eastern visit their website at https://usueastern.edu/