The Importance of Mentorship

“I’ve always been interested in how things worked,” he said. “As a kid, I’d break my toys on purpose to see what was inside.” At Weber State, Twagirayezu found an engaging, reasonably priced college education with plenty of faculty and peer support. “Weber’s mechanical engineering program honestly met and exceeded my expectations,” he recalled.

However, shortly before Twagirayezu’s scheduled graduation, the COVID-19 pandemic halted his paid internship and, simultaneously, he lost access to a crucial source of private funding.

“At that point, I wasn’t sure I would ever earn a degree,” he recalled. “I had worked so hard, but I didn’t have any way to pay for the rest of my education.”

Luckily, Twagirayezu’s classmate, who worked in WSU’s financial aid office, suggested he apply for a ’CATapult Scholarship, which is designed to help students who suffer financial setbacks in the last stretch of their educational journey. It proved to be the perfect backup plan.

“The scholarship really catapulted me to the finish line, and I was able to graduate,” said a grateful Twagirayezu, who recently joined the engineering team at Cirque in Sandy, Utah. “I’d like to thank everyone at Weber who made that scholarship happen — donors, professors, staff — because they’re the people who really changed the world for me.”

With the price of a single publication averaging $134, textbooks are among the most chronically unpopular expenses borne by American college students. A recent survey conducted by the university’s Affordable Course Materials Task Force found an alarming number of WSU students on limited budgets aren’t purchasing new textbooks. Instead, they’re sharing books or buying old, discounted editions.
 
Meeting in fall 2021 to explore ways to reduce financial barriers to student success, the task force discovered that enterprising WSU instructors had already succeeded in providing students with more affordable textbook options. With generous donor support, the task force created the Course Materials Affordability Award to recognize these instructors and highlight the positive impact their efforts have had on students.
 
Two faculty members and two departments were honored at the “Finding Joy in the Journey” Faculty Symposium in March 2022.
 
Since 2021, students enrolled in history professor Vikki Deakin’s courses have enjoyed free access to the EBSCO Information Services e-book database. (EBSCO e-books are online versions of printed textbooks and other materials from top publishers that Stewart Library has purchased with a perpetual license or annual subscription.) Deakin is deeply committed to ensuring student success, especially in introductory courses.

“The battle for student retention is most often won or lost in ‘gateway’ courses,” she said. “Students who do well in these courses tend to re-enroll; students who do not, tend to drop out.” Most of the textbooks used in Deakin’s upper-division courses are also free.
 
Stephanie Wolfe, associate professor of political science, was among the first WSU faculty members to adopt no-cost Open Educational Resources (OER) for her general education courses. (OERs are either in the public domain or have been released under a license that allows them to be freely used, modified or shared.) Currently, 75% of Wolfe’s teaching load consists of OERs. She also spearheaded an initiative to make the women and gender studies minor an exclusively OER program and has received funding to create an OER textbook chapter.
 
With 100% of its faculty participating, the Department of Communication has switched to low-cost or free materials in five entry-level courses. This transition represents an estimated savings of $891,480 since 2017. This academic year alone, six communication faculty completed OER training, paid for with Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund money, and have eagerly shared their insights with colleagues.

Starting in 2019, the Department of Health Sciences began collaborating with Stewart Library, various campus committees and outside vendors to find alternative educational materials to replace textbooks and lab software that were costing each integrated anatomy and physiology student $270. This initital effort has since expanded to include six more courses in the program. To date, an estimated 6,962 students have saved about $1,089,063.

As more Weber State University faculty work to lower the cost of required course materials, the Affordable Course Materials Task Force hopes to present the Course Materials Affordability Award every year.

If you ask Stéphane Glynn MBA ’22 what he does, he’ll tell you it’s a little bit of everything. 

The senior vice president of operations and post-production at Vavani Productions in Salt Lake City has produced documentaries, edited marketing content and worked in project management, research and analysis, just to name a few.

“I love doing different things all the time,” he said.

Glynn started working as an in-house editor for the socially ethical production company in 2017. Their projects include the documentary Quiet Heroes — about the AIDS crisis in Salt Lake City — which screened at the Sundance Film Festival and won a daytime Emmy, as well as the documentary No Crime in Sin about child sex abuse.

“It’s this idea of eating your vegetables with the sweets,” Glynn said, “entertaining people while also informing and educating.”

Glynn had already earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia in 2013 and Master of Fine Arts in Film & Media Arts from the University of Utah in 2016, but decided to pursue a Master of Business Administration at Weber State to gain more experience as he took on more responsibilities at Vavani Productions and became senior vice president in 2019.

He graduated in only about a year and a half in December 2021. The program usually takes twice as long.

“The professors do a great job of bringing you where you need to be,” he said. “If you can’t remember, say, math you did years ago, they give you the resources to kind of refresh your memory and bring you back up to speed.”

Glynn said what he learned at Weber State aligned perfectly with his job as he went from film editing to an essential operations production role and VP.

“I was already doing my fair share of expenses and tracking receipts but certainly having that accounting class experience really elevated my work,” he said.

Shaun Hansen, former WSU professor and MBA program director, said he doesn’t believe there’s a program in the Intermountain West that has faculty more dedicated to student success and learning than at Weber State.

“The most rewarding thing for us is to see our students succeed in their careers after graduation,” he said. “Nothing else matters quite as much.”