On Oct. 4, 2018, a new academic program called Your Drury Fusion was unveiled to the faculty and staff of Drury University. The Mirror was invited to the event to share the new program with the current student body.

The Fusion

The concept of Your Drury Fusion began in 2016. Over the past two years, admissions interviewed more than 1,000 prospective students and spent over 605 days analyzing those responses.

The responses showed that students want to combine their personal passions with their professional interests, and that is what Your Drury Fusion is designed to allow students to do.

“All with the goal of creating one distinctive, powerful academic experience that will differentiate Drury on the landscape of higher education,” said Drury President Timothy Cloyd during his introductory speech.

Three major components

There are three major components of Your Drury Fusion: career and life credentials; hands-on, real-world experiences; and personalized mentorship. During their time at Drury, students will earn at least two certificates, have credentials in both professional and personal interests, and complete three problem-solving projects. All of these aspects of the student’s career will be uploaded to a digital portfolio.

Dr. Beth Harville, the executive vice president and provost at Drury, was one of the designers of Your Drury Fusion. Harville explained that many elements of the program will remain as they are now. Students will still earn at least one major that culminates in a capstone experience, and students still must take two first-year courses. These courses are currently called CORE classes, but they will now be called Frontiers (in the fall) and Intersections (in the spring).

“Those courses will be taught by two faculty members, each faculty member from a different discipline,” stated Harville.

Students will also be required to take courses from seven “broad and compelling areas,” stated Harville. “That will allow students to explore creativity, ethics, community and civic engagement, the natural world, narratives and text and global culture.”

Photo via Drury University.

Certificate programs

The final change is the introduction of certificates into Drury’s undergraduate curriculum. Students will be required to earn two certificates, which Harville described as “a certificate in profession and a certificate in life.”

Certificates are a new program implemented in Your Drury Fusion. One such certification is called “Get out and Plug In: Intercultural Connections.” Certificates are designed to teach students that problems have to be thought about in more than one way to get the full picture.

“The idea with this certificate is that students would take six hours of a foreign language, three hours of another class on intercultural competence, and then they would go on a study abroad for their fourth course,” said Janis Prewitt, a Drury professor of management.

“The study abroad is their capstone project,” Prewitt explained. “We would have the students do a project in their major field in that culture.”

Each capstone project will be as unique as the student. Certificates will allow students to personalize their curriculum to improve their Drury experience.

Photo via Unsplash.

Stepping up higher education, adding more student resources

Your Drury Fusion is meant to set a new standard for higher education. As such, it will take some time before all the kinks are worked out. However, Drury’s faculty and staff are more than ready to take on the challenge.

The first feature of Your Drury Fusion that will be available for students is the Compass Center, which will open with the launch of the the Fusion program. It combines academic advising, the Career Planning & Development department and the Learning Center.

There are several components to the new advising model. The new model is called an integrated advising model. In it, each student gets their own advising team to guide them through the academic program. 

Each student will get their own academic advisor and a team of Compass Center advisors to help them through the processes of Your Drury Fusion, scholarships, grants, certificates and capstone projects. The Learning Center will include tutoring opportunities, the Writing Center, peer mentors and workshops. All of this will be centralized in Bay Hall.

Photo via Unsplash.

The Design Enterprise Solution Center, kind of like Google’s HQ?

The second feature Your Drury Fusion will utilize is the Design Enterprise Solution Center. They plan to break ground on this new building in December 2019. This building is part of the Drury Master Plan and will replace the Breech School of Business.

The Design Enterprise Solution Center will include maker-spaces, a design lab, a big data analytics area, cybersecurity and much more. Cloyd referred to it as “a crossroads for interdisciplinary work” that will “kind of look like a Google office.”

Another aspect of the new plan is a redesign of the Drury website, formatted with mobile in mind. There will also be an overhaul of Drury’s ‘Digital Assets’ online. These assets will include Drury’s various social media accounts and videos on YouTube. 

While Your Drury Fusion is not a designated feature of the Drury Master Plan, which was unveiled around this time last year, it complements it well. Fusion was designed to enhance the liberal arts aspects of Drury. The new spaces provided for in the Master Plan will give students opportunities to expand and explore their interests.

The “you” in Your Drury Fusion starts in 2019

Your Drury Fusion is currently planned for a soft launch in the fall semester of 2019. However, current students who will be attending Drury next year will have the option to transfer their old curriculum to the new program.

“Your Drury Fusion will launch in 2019, but it won’t be fully released,” said Cloyd. “We’re still developing certificates, and we’ll be developing them in January and over the summer. Fall of 2020, it’ll really be taking off.”

“It’s not just something that’s invented,” Cloyd explained. “It’s something that’s already here. So when I ask someone their majors here at Drury, it’s rare for it to be biology. It’s usually biology and something else.”

As more details about the program come out over the next few months, interested students should investigate what options Fusion has in store. Currently, there are 14 finalized certificates, but several more will hopefully be available next fall.

More scholarship opportunities

There are also several grants and scholarships that will be available through Your Drury Fusion. Students will have many opportunities to apply for student experience grants that would help fund capstone projects.

The main scholarship is the Go Beyond scholarship. It will be an application feature for high school students considering attending Drury.

“To get this scholarship, they will need to demonstrate how in their lives they embody the fusion of passion and pragmatic application,” Cloyd explained.

Administrative personnel at the meeting stated that prospective students have seen more value in this program than in other schools’, especially based on the certificate opportunities. 

Your Drury Fusion is an opportunity for Drury to increase enrollment, garner attention and better define the Drury Experience. Through the certificate programs, students will learn to apply one discipline to another, whether they are connected to their major or not. This exciting new program will redefine what it means to be a Drury student.

Written by Ryan Smith and Afton Jagels.