The Foundry, a Chambersburg art cooperative located at 100 N. Main St., will host Wilson Students at The Foundry, an exhibition of artwork by Wilson College studio art students. The exhibit, which is free and open to the public, opens Friday, April 6, and runs through April 30.
Participating students, who range from freshmen to seniors, will exhibit works in a variety of mediums, including drawings, paintings and photographs.
The exhibition is the second in a partnership between The Foundry and Wilson College. The partnership provides opportunities for exhibition exchanges and possible studio/workshop opportunities. Foundry artists will have the opportunity to exhibit their artwork at Wilson College this year.
Wilson College will hold a reception from 4:30 to 6 p.m. on Wednesday, March 28, to mark the opening of the Annual Juried Student Art Exhibition. The exhibit will continue through April 27 in the Bogigian Gallery, which is located in Lortz Hall.
The show provides a venue for Wilson students to share their work with the community. The exhibition will feature drawings, paintings, prints, ceramics, photographs and mixed-media artwork with a wide array of subject matter and content.
This year’s juror is Holly Shearer, a local artist and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) faculty member at Greencastle-Antrim Senior High School.
The Bogigian Gallery is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Admission is free. For additional information or an appointment, contact Professor of Fine Arts Philip Lindsey at 717-264-2783 or philip.lindsey@wilson.edu.
The Wilson College Child Care center recently received a $12,920 Keystone STARS Quality Improvement Grant, which will provide stipends for child care center staff in recognition of educational achievements. The grant was awarded by the YWCA of Greater Pittsburgh through the Keystone STARS program, an initiative of the Pennsylvania Office of Child Development and Early Learning to improve, support and recognize the continuous quality improvement efforts of early learning programs in Pennsylvania. The YWCA of Greater Pittsburgh serves as the funding partner and the Southwest Regional Key for the STARS program. Wilson’s child care center is located in Prentis Hall and accommodates 36 children ages 20 months to 5 years, year-round. The center provides early care and education for children of Wilson College students and staff, as well as those of Chambersburg families, through a curriculum that is child-centered and developmentally appropriate.
Wilson's modern dance ensemble, Orchesis, will present its annual spring performance on Friday and Saturday, April 6 and 7, in Laird Hall. Performances will be held at 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, with a Saturday matinee at 2 p.m. The performances, which are open to the public, will feature dances choreographed by Wilson faculty, students, alumnae and guest artists, including New York City choreographer Teresa Fellion. Tickets are available at the door and prices are $10 for general admission and $3 for students with I.D. and seniors. Children under 12 get in free.
A $1 million gift for a new veterinary education center at Wilson College has been committed by Margaret Hamilton Duprey, a resident of Wellington, Fla., and member of the college’s Board of Trustees.
With other major gifts for the veterinary education center from two Wilson alumnae, including contributions totaling $975,000 from Susan Breakefield Fulton, Class of 1961, and a $100,000 bequest from the late Eleanor Martin Allen, Class of 1949, Duprey’s gift brings the total raised for the new veterinary facility to $2,075,000. The total estimated cost of the project is $2.8 million, officials said.
While the college continues to raise money for the new facility, which will replace the 20-year-old Helen M. Beach ’24 Veterinary Medical Center, Duprey’s gift will allow Wilson to break ground on the new vet ed center sometime in June, with completion expected in January 2019, according to Brian Ecker, the college’s vice president for finance and administration.
“We are deeply grateful to Margaret for her leadership as a trustee and her commitment to the institution,” said Wilson Vice President for Institutional Advancement Camilla Rawleigh.
The veterinary center—which houses surgery suites, skill labs, dog kennels, offices and other spaces—is a hub for students in Wilson’s four-year veterinary medical technology (VMT) program, one of the college’s most popular majors.
A lifelong horsewoman, Duprey contributed $500,000 to Wilson in 2015 to establish an innovative home healthcare nursing program for horses called Equi-Assist®. A focused concentration within the college’s VMT program, Equi-Assist® trains students to provide home healthcare to horses, under the guidance of a veterinarian.
Replacing the outdated Beach veterinary facility is important if Wilson College is to remain in the forefront of the veterinary medical technology field, Duprey said. “In order for Wilson to expand and excel in the vet tech program, the Equi-Assist® program was needed as the first step. This was a very important gift to advance one of the best teaching programs in the country,” she said. “The reason I decided to support the new veterinary education center is to make sure the vet tech program has the finest learning facility for students and for the treatment and care of all animals—small and large.”
Duprey joined the Wilson College Board of Trustees in fall 2017. She and her husband, Bob, own and operate Cherry Knoll Farm, which is the home of dressage, open jumpers and hunter competition horses, as well as prize-winning Black Angus cattle. The farm has locations in Pennsylvania and Florida.
Wilson officials recognized the need to significantly upgrade or replace the veterinary facility after the American Veterinary Medical Association’s reaccreditation process identified deficiencies in the modular facility—including an inadequate heating, ventilation and air conditioning system, according to Ecker.
He said the new veterinary education center will be 9,000 square feet compared to the 5,400-square-foot Beach facility, which will be razed after the new veterinary building is completed. The new center will be built on the west side of the Brooks Science Complex. Plans call for it to include two surgery rooms, a dental room, recovery room and isolation room, as well as kennels and an indoor run for dogs, a cat room, office, lounge, clinical practice area and laundry facilities, Ecker said.
The college has retained R.S. Mowery & Sons of Mechanicsburg, Pa., as the general contractor for the project and Benedict Dubbs of Murray Associates Architects of Harrisburg, Pa., as the architect.
Wilson College sophomore Pratikshya Gaihre has been named a Campus Compact 2018 Newman Civic Fellow, an honor given to civic-minded students who have demonstrated “an investment in finding solutions for challenges facing communities throughout the country and abroad.”
Gaihre, one of 269 Newman Fellows named across the country, is an international student from Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal. She is a Wilson College Curran Scholar who volunteers with the college’s tutoring program for children from migrant worker families, as well as with Menno Haven’s Elder Day adult daycare program at Penn Hall. She is parliamentarian for the Wilson College Government Association and is a member of Wilson’s international student club. She also works as a resident adviser (RA).
Gaihre, who is majoring in accounting and financial mathematics, has a history of civic engagement activities in high school. As president of a social service club, Gaihre—with the help of her parents—raised $15,000 to buy and install solar panels to provide electricity for 14 families and a school in the remote village of Bhojpur in eastern Nepal.
“I did it because there are so many students, especially in rural areas, that help their parents with households or take care of their farms,” said Gaihre, adding that they are only able to study at night—which is difficult without electricity. After a bus ride of more than 12 hours, Gaihre and the installers from the company she purchased the solar panels from had to walk seven more hours to get to the village. “It was hard, but it was worth it,” she said.
When Gaihre was in 11th grade, she was part of an effort that donated computers and books to establish a library in a poor village in the western part of Nepal.
“It just makes me happy,” said Gaihre of helping people. After graduating from Wilson, she wants to continue her studies and get a master’s degree in the same field. Then she plans to return to Nepal and find a job—perhaps with the United Nations, a UN-based organization or an international corporation—and continue helping Nepali people in need.
“I’m interested in providing service to the people. There are rural places in Nepal that need to be helped,” she said. “I would also like to do something related to accounting.”
Gaihre is Wilson’s third Newman Civic Fellow. The fellowship, named for Campus Compact co-founder Frank Newman, is a one-year experience emphasizing personal, professional and civic growth. Through the fellowship, Campus Compact provides a variety of learning and networking opportunities, including a national conference of Newman Civic Fellows in partnership with the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. The fellowship also provides fellows with access to apply for exclusive scholarship and post-graduate opportunities.
Campus Compact is a Boston-based, nonprofit coalition of more than 1,000 colleges and universities committed to “the public purposes of higher education.”
“We are thrilled to have the opportunity to celebrate and engage with such an extraordinary group of students,” said Campus Compact president Andrew Seligsohn. “The stories of this year's Newman Civic Fellows make clear that they are bringing people together in their communities to solve pressing problems. That is what Campus Compact is about, and it's what our country and our world desperately need.”
For more information about Campus Compact, visit www.compact.org.
Wilson College has been awarded a $25,000 grant from the Eden Hall Foundation to fund research on the effects of taking part in the Student Parent Scholar program on the children of program participants. SPS, formerly called the Women with Children program, allows single parents to live on the Wilson campus with their young children while they pursue their degree.
The grant will allow Wilson and an external research partner to conduct interviews with current and former Single Parent Scholar program participants, as well as current and former program directors, to develop an exploratory research study on outcomes for children who lived on the Wilson campus while their parent attended college.
Wilson was invited to apply for the grant by the Eden Hall Foundation, a private Pittsburgh-based foundation that helped launch the Women with Children program in 1996, providing $946,000 in 1997 and 1998 to renovate Prentis Hall as housing for program participants.
In 2015, the program was opened to single fathers and renamed the Single Parent Scholar program. Currently, 13 single parents are enrolled in the SPS program. Over the past 20 years, the program has touched the lives of 120 student-parents and at least that many children, according to the college.
In 2016, Endicott College published a research study that examined eight undergraduate student-parent programs, including Wilson’s, and recommended further research on the effects of such programs on participants’ children. “While the positive impacts on single parents may be more apparent in terms of the increased earnings, independence and stability associated with college degree completion, impacts on children of these single parents are more nebulous,” Wilson’s grant application states. “Positive impacts may be academic, social-emotional, physical and/or behavioral in nature.”
Anecdotally, the effect of living in an academic environment has been positive on the children—with some even returning to Wilson to seek their own degree—but no formal research has been conducted.
Findings of the new research study would be shared with the Eden Hall Foundation, as well as potentially with other stakeholders, including the higher education community. In addition, study results may be used to help identify improvements to the Single Parent Scholar program at Wilson.
The Eden Hall Foundation was established in 1984 in accordance with the will of Pittsburgh philanthropist Sebastian Mueller, who had been vice president and a director of the H.J. Heinz Co. Mueller provided substantial financial support for: improving conditions for the poor and disadvantaged, promoting sound education and benefiting health facilities and projects. Today, foundation trustees continue his stewardship in the areas of social welfare, health, education and the arts.
A new educational partnership between Wilson and New York Chiropractic College will guarantee qualified Wilson graduates who receive a bachelor’s degree in exercise science admission to NYCC’s Doctor of Chiropractic program. Under an articulation agreement between the two schools, exercise science majors who graduate from Wilson with a cumulative 3.0 grade-point average or above are assured admission into the three-year NYCC program. In addition, Wilson graduates with a minimum 3.0 G.P.A. will be automatically awarded a $1,500 merit scholarship by NYCC. “The partnership with NYCC came out of a desire to support Wilson’s goal of enhancing academic opportunities for students and to answer an increased national demand in allied health and complementary medicine,” Tonia Hess-Kling, assistant professor of exercise science, said. “As our program continues to grow and prepare students for work in these fields and for graduate school, this partnership ensures that students who want to study chiropractic can continue their education at a premier school.” Within their first two years of study at Wilson, interested exercise science majors will be asked to submit a letter of intent to NYCC, asking to join its chiropractic doctoral program. Each student who signs a letter of intent will then be assigned their own NYCC admissions counselor for ease of transition from Wilson to NYCC. Under the agreement, students interested in the NYCC program who graduate from Wilson with a G.P.A. of 2.5 or greater will - while not guaranteed admission - receive special consideration for admission to NYCC. Wilson’s bachelor's degree in exercise science is designed to prepare students for careers in the fitness and wellness industries, personal and group fitness training and exercise physiology. It also prepares students for graduate programs in athletic training, exercise physiology, cardiac rehabilitation, physical therapy, chiropractic, occupational therapy and recreational therapy.
Wilson College's international student organization, the Muhibbah Club, will host a spring dinner featuring dishes from around the world on Saturday, March 3, in Jensen Dining Hall in Lenfest Commons. Doors open at 5:15 p.m. and dinner begins at 5:30. It will be followed by entertainment presented by the students at 7:30 p.m. in Laird Hall.
The dinner will feature a variety of international foods, including:
• Entrées — Butter chicken (India), samosa (Pakistan), Scotch egg (Uganda) • Side Dishes — Potato bake (Australia), rice, salad • Desserts — Lamingtons (Australia ), bakewell tarts (England)
After dinner, members of the Muhibbah club will provide entertainment, including traditional dances from Ghana, Australia and Armenia, and more.
The public is invited to attend the dinner and/or the performance. There is no cost to attend the performance, but tickets for the dinner are $10. Reservations are required for the dinner only and must be made by Monday, Feb. 26. To reserve dinner tickets, contact club adviser Crystal Lantz at iss@wilson.edu and provide a phone number, name and number of tickets needed. Payment (cash or check) for tickets will be collected at the door.
The Muhibbah Club will also accept donations at the performance. All donations, as well as a portion of the proceeds from ticket sales, will be given to South Central Community Action Programs (SCCAP).
The word "Muhibbah" means unity among nations. This year's Muhibbah Club president is Brooke McLachlan. Wilson's international students this semester come from more than 15 different countries, including Albania, Ghana, Nepal, Vietnam, Armenia, Australia, South Korea, Pakistan and Uganda.
As the college continues planning for a new veterinary education center first announced in summer 2016, the project has received a boost with gifts from two alumnae totaling $575,000.
Longtime Wilson supporter Susan Breakefield Fulton ’61 has added to her $500,000 lead gift for the veterinary education center, with a second donation of $475,000. A $100,000 bequest has also been received from the late Eleanor Martin Allen ’49, a former Board of Trustees member and chair who died last year.
The cost of the new veterinary center is estimated at approximately $2.5 million, according to Vice President for Finance and Administration Brian Ecker. A committee meeting to confirm the programming needs of the center was expected to complete its work in January and soon thereafter, the design should be finished, Ecker said. “Then after that point, we’ll get estimates on the construction cost and then we may need to go back and revisit some of (the design elements),” he said.
The new veterinary education center will be built on the west side of the Brooks Science Center. Plans call for it to include two surgery rooms, a dental room, recovery room and isolation room, as well as kennels and an indoor run for dogs, a cat room, office, lounge, clinical practice area and laundry facilities, Ecker said.
The college has retained R.S. Mowery & Sons of Mechanicsburg, Pa., as the general contractor for the project and Benedict Dubbs of Murray Associates Architects of Harrisburg, Pa., as the architect—the same team that worked on the John Stewart Memorial Library project.
The new veterinary center will replace the 20-year-old Helen M. Beach ’24 Veterinary Medical Center, which will be razed once the new facility is completed.
The college administration expects to seek Board of Trustees approval of the project design and cost at the board’s May meeting. The timeframe for construction will depend on when funds are in place, according to Ecker.
Anyone who is interested in making a gift to the veterinary center should contact the Office of Institutional Advancement at 717-262-2010 or advancement@wilson.edu
