Katie Samek – Staff Writer
As spring semester passes its halfway point, students are encouraged to start making plans for registration – not only for fall semester but for summer term as well. After a successful pilot program last year in 2022, Summer Term is back again and ready for a full rollout.
Summer term 2023 will run from June 5-30, a total of nineteen days. Registration for summer term opens on Monday, April 3 through MyGustavus, which students can access by going to the main page, clicking on Student Planning, “Go to Plan and Schedule”, and then accessing the summer term calendar. To look for the specific summer term courses, students should go to the Course Information tab, open the Advanced Search filter tab, and then select “Summer 1 2023”.
While the main registration period for summer term opens on April 3, there will be an approximate two-week closure to allow for fall course registration, which runs from April 17-27. After that, both summer and fall term registration will be open for students to access. Any summer term course changes that need to be made during the two-week closure on MyGustavus should be brought to the Registrar’s Office in person. Summer term registration officially closes on May 31. While there is no limit to the number of courses a student may take during summer term, the recommended course load is 2.0 credits or less.
This year, there are fifteen different courses offered for summer term, with different departments across campus being represented. Furthermore, every course offered for summer term fulfills at least one general education requirement. All but two courses are offered synchronously online, with BIO-245: Conservation Bio and GEO-144: Guide to the End of the World both being held as on-campus, in-person courses.
On-campus housing will be available for students taking summer term courses. Students who stay on campus will be housed in the same apartment complex-style housing as summer research students. However, students are responsible for making their own housing arrangements for summer term, including filling out and submitting the summer housing paperwork on time. Students should also be made aware that certain on-campus resources will not be available to the same extent as they are during the school year: the library will only be open on weekdays, the Academic Support Center staff will have limited availability, and the Counseling Center will be closed.
Summer term at Gustavus is a fairly new program, first introduced last year as a pilot program in the summer of 2022 which proved to be a great success. Plans for a summer term, however, have been in the works since long before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the program likely would have been implemented a year earlier had the pandemic not happened. Dr. Elizabeth Kubek, Professor of English and Director of Summer Term, works closely with all professors involved to help coordinate both classes and resources for all students involved with summer term.
“Last year was a good success,” Kubek said. “We had about 50 students sign up, and their feedback shaped a lot of how summer term will run for this year. We hope to see more interest this year – we didn’t have a lot of time to get the word out about summer term last year, so the hope is that announcing it earlier will help students plan ahead for their registration.”
Dr. Vera Foley, Professor of English, is teaching the summer term course ENG-101: Fairy Tales and Film, which will run from 10:30 AM – 1:00 PM on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, with asynchronous assignments on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This course, along with fulfilling major requirements for students in the English field, counts as a WRITL credit for non-English majors.
“One thing that makes this course especially exciting is that students get to put the analytical skills they learn in the first half of the course into practice. The second half of the course is devoted to students working in teams to create a film proposal based on one of the fairy tales they’ve just read,” Foley said.
Not only does summer term allow for students to stay on track for graduation, but it also allows them to fulfill credits in a familiar environment instead of having to go through the hassle of transferring credits from other universities’ summer programs.
“Many students already take summer courses elsewhere, but that requires you to transfer credits back to Gustavus,” Kubek said. “Summer term at Gustavus allows students to interact with faculty you already know without having to transfer credits. Plus, you can take classes at home since most of the courses offered for summer term are online.”
Students with further questions about summer term may reference the online FAQ on the Gustavus website, located at https://gustavus.edu/summerterm/.