The water along the shore of Marquette Park’s swath of Lake Michigan and its lagoon hasn’t been perfect in six years, but it lifts Indiana University Northwest Summer Bridge students into college life prepared for the experience. Four different IUN student groups — one from STEM, one from the Humanities, one from Health Care and one from Business — converged on parts of the Indiana Dunes National Park to take part in collaborative learning with incoming students the week before classes start. Some of them, like the incoming STEM students, took water samples in the lake and lagoon to see how healthy the water is, while Humanities students took a hike through the Tolleston Dunes and, using sensory perception, worked on writing, Associate Dean and Geology professor Kris Huysken said.
Whatever project they were working on, it followed the school’s theme for 2024-2025 — Sustaining the Beauty, Health, and Prosperity of Northwest Indiana: People and their Environment. Incoming students Faith Denman, of Portage, on left, and Isaiah Wilson, of Hobart, mix an E. coli culture to measure the amount of the bacteria in water from in and around Lake Michigan during Indiana University Northwest’s Summer Bridge program for incoming students on Tuesday, Aug.
13, 2024. (Kyle Telechan/for the Post-Tribune) “It’s a student showcase whose goal is to prepare incoming students for navigating college courses,” Huysken said. “They learn, in our example, what do scientists do?” .