Three reasons to celebrate this IU Day
Wednesday is IU Day, an international celebration of IU pride. Wear your cream and crimson, show your support on social media, and consider donating to the IU cause of your choice.
$490,000 in scholarships awarded
At The Media School, we’re celebrating by crowdfunding for our Media School Scholarship Fund. The impact of that fund was on full display this weekend at our annual scholarship ceremony, where students received their scholarships and connected with the donors behind them. Talk about IU pride! Thanks to our generous donors, we awarded more than $490,000 in scholarships for the 2024-25 school year. Thank you to all who have supported our students.
A few other IU Day causes to consider:
A collaborative facility dedicated to virtual worlds
This month, we’re also celebrating the announcement of the Kinetic Imagery and Extended Reality Lab, an eight-unit collaboration that will serve as a hub for the creation, use, and study of virtual worlds. The KIX Lab will open new possibilities in areas such as film, video game, and sports media production, and digital humanities and artificial intelligence research. We also see the KIX Lab as a catalyst for social good — creating assistive devices and rehabilitation for people with visual impairments, climate change visualizations to tell a more persuasive story, and spatial experiences to study mental illnesses such as addiction.
Media that change the conversation about mental health
That final example — media’s role in mental health and trauma, and teaching students how to use it for good — is emerging as an area of priority as we reimagine our identity and begin our strategic planning process. We want to turn out graduates who critically question and improve depictions of mental health in media, are conscious of the effects their work may have on the mental health of their audiences and their subjects, and are inspired to use media to normalize and foreground conversations on mental health.
Patten Lecturer Jad Abumrad showed us how that’s done earlier this month in a public Q&A moderated by Professor of Practice Tom French. I loved how Abumrad, a Peabody Award-winning radio and podcast producer best known for having created, produced, and starred in the series "Radiolab," "More Perfect," and "Dolly Parton’s America," incorporated lessons from sessions with his therapist in his responses and gave valuable advice about tackling difficult subjects with sources without re-traumatizing them. That is what it looks like to normalize and foreground conversations on mental health.
So this IU Day, there’s no shortage of points of pride here at The Media School — among them, the generous donors who support our hard-working students through scholarships, the exciting opportunities that await us in the KIX Lab, and graduates who use media to make the world a better place.
Go Hoosiers!
David Tolchinsky
Dean, The Media School at Indiana University