This time I am going to talk about how the time is spent for a student in EPIC. Being in EPIC we have worked on some major community as well as school enhancement projects.

I can honestly tell you that during presentations of our projects you can tell the amount of hours that went into the creation of these projects. Even with school being a top priority, a lot of time and energy is spent to make these ideas come alive.

The dedication and teamwork is by far the best I have ever seen in my college career thus far. Looking to be a part of a winning team? EPIC is the way to go.

As an EPIC student you are allowed to “think wrong” or think outside the box in order to make a difference the may impact others in a way you may have never imagined.

My favorite project thus far has been our recruitment/retention project last semester. We had eight teams total. Four were given recruitment and asked to come up with ways to improve it and 4 were given retention. My team got retention. Needless to say I was a little tumped at first on how I would go about it. But after a few weekends of research and team meetings we came up with an idea.

From that time on our goal was to improve and see how we could adapt it this school as well as make it seem like a plausible solution. After we had come up with a possible way to implement it we did 2 surveys of random students, the first survey was kind of a get to know  our population and the second survey to the same students was a simple yes or no question of if our idea would indeed help with retention. Off the top of my head I can’t remember the specific percentages but I know that the majority of the students said yes.

So we put together a PowerPoint and prepared for our presentation. My belief level in our idea was through the roof now not only because I had experienced something similar to it before but the more research I did the more I saw the possibility of it acttually working.

We gave the presentation and got 1^st place in the first round which allowed us to present our idea to the president of the university. I tell you what an honor.

We got third place in the last round but still left with a prize. That is just one prime example of the hard work that goes into making this and all the other projects work.  I am excited about the other projects coming up in the near future.  The definition of EPIC is success… in EPIC proportions.

One of the core focuses of academics at UCA is integrity for students and their work.

Academic Integrity here is basically a huge accountability system that keeps students honest in their work.  Teachers hold students to high standards and do not tolerate cheating of any kind.  This includes plagiarism.

One of the resources provided to students at UCA is the Writing Center, which has writing-majors available to help students with their work.  This way, students have an opportunity to have guided help in writing and revising their work, without plagiarizing.

Residential Colleges provide advocates who are trained on academic integrity.  Part of this training focuses on academic honesty and confidentiality.  In this, students can seek help from an advocate and trust them not to share where they are struggling in class.  UCA students are given so many opportunities for help elevating their work to the highest standards.