New to campus or just finding it tough to plan your time? Check out these helpful tips to get your life in balance.

When Steven Just takes stock of his high school experience, he admits that because of some personal struggles, he did not achieve the highest grades or have the best attendance. In fact, sometimes he clashed with the principal and teachers. But the advice he gives today — even to students who aren’t enjoying high school — is apply to college. “College is so different from high school,” he points out, “and you can choose to study subjects that you find interesting.”  

For Dr. Henrietta Mann, stressing the importance of education has been a lifelong mission. At a very young age, she developed a passion for learning that blossomed into an unrelenting quest to promote education — for Natives and non-Natives alike — and led to a career of teaching at the pre-college, community college, undergraduate, and graduate levels.

As a little girl Kaitlin Russell had a big imagination. Her father fueled it by sharing his love of science-fiction movies, so for young Kaitlin, colonizing Mars wasn’t far-fetched and, she reasoned, there would have to be pets on Mars when people lived there and someone had to take care of them. “I knew I wanted to do something with space,” she recalls. “Space veterinarian?”

It was well after midnight when Corey Gray got home from work at the California Institute of Technology’s and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Hanford, Wash. After getting some sleep, he checked his emails and one jumped out. His first thought after reading it: “It must be a test! This can’t be real!”

Indigenous people have long planned for the seasons. Whether storing food for winter, burning strategically to clear debris and ensure continued habitat for both wildlife and humans, or migrating between winter and summer camps, Native people think — and plan — ahead.

The current national unemployment rate, hovering below 4 percent as of June, gets a lot of attention in the press — and from politicians touting a “great” economy. But the picture is not rosy for all Americans. According to the December 2018 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report Broken Promises: Continuing Federal Funding Shortfall for Native Americans, approximately 12 percent of Native Americans are unemployed.

Dr. Wendy F. Smythe, Haida, never thought her career would veer into the world of public policy.

Dr. Otakuye Conroy-Ben’s environmental consciousness was awakened at a very young age. Growing up in Porcupine, S.D., on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, she could literally taste and smell the impacts people were — or were not — making on the natural world around her.

Sheila Lopez still vividly recalls the first time she fully shared her life story in front of an audience. A member of the Navajo tribe, Lopez was the first in her family to attend college. While an undergraduate pursuing a degree in electrical engineering at Northern Arizona University, Lopez worked in the school’s multicultural engineering program office.