Winter mini-term, just 2 years old, gets glowing reviews from professors

ABBIE SMITH Staff Writer

UT completed its second winter mini-term, with its first session being introduced in January of 2022. According to One-Stop’s Winter Mini-Term FAQs, this session is designed to provide students the opportunity to get ahead or catch up on courses they need within a threeweek period rather than a 15-week semester. Each student is allowed to take one course over the winter mini-term, but if they want to take more classes, they must get permission from their college. These classes are offered online, in-person and abroad.

While being well worth its time, winter mini-term is also cost effective. The estimated cost of Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 is $33,950 for in-state students and $52,370 for out-of-state students. Meanwhile, the total costs of 2023’s winter mini-term for undergraduate students is $1,365 for in-state students and $3,681 for out-of-state students. These are the hourly rates for students taking a three credit-hour course.

While these facts and numbers look good on paper, is the winter mini-term really as worth it as it seems? Two associate professors, Amber Roessner and Kandi Hollenbach, believe that it is.

“For students, I think that mini-terms potentially can be a relatively time efficient, lowstress opportunity to pick up course credits for graduation, particularly for general-education courses and electives within their majors,” said Roessner, an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Electronic Media, who taught JREM 367: Mass Communication History this term.

“I believe that winter mini-term courses are designed to cater to the emerging needs and desires of our students and that they help the university in terms of increasing its four and five-year graduation rates.”

Kandi Hollenbach, an associate professor of anthropology who specializes in archaeology, agrees that the winter mini-term is beneficial for students. Hollenbach is teaching Anthropology 430, a local field work class at the site of Dunford and Henson Halls. The class focuses on field work and has found artifacts from the construction of Henson Hall– nails, broken glass and a lot of bricks. Hollenbach also noted that the class had found a blue glass button. “That was pretty cool,” she said.

“It’s really hard to do a field school during a full semester because students have so many other classes,” Hollenbach said. “That really limits students who have a lot of other classes that they need to take. It can make it a really hard window for students to do. So these kinds of mini-terms are really nice ways to kind of cram that field experience in.”

Hollenbach also weighed in on how these mini-terms (both winter and summer) have benefitted her as a parent.

“I have school-aged kids. They’re in high school now, but the summer mini-term overlapped nicely with their last bits of class until they got out of school for Memorial Day. Same thing with the winter one. It starts up right, pretty much when they go back to school. In both of them I’m able to hang out with them during their breaks, summer break or their winter break, and then when they go back is when I start the field school.”

Overall, it appears that the summer miniterm and winter mini-term do not differ from each other in substance.

“It doesn’t really differ, except that the gloves that I get for the students are nice and warm. I really don’t have to worry as much about the students getting heat exhaustion or anything like that,” Hollenbach said.

“I did not teach in our inaugural winter mini-term, but I did teach an online media history course during this iteration of winter mini-term, and I appreciated the experience much as I do when I have taught mini courses in the summer months,” Roessner said. “Other than the timing on the calendar, winter miniterm really isn’t different than summer miniterm.”

Professors agree winter mini-term is some- thing to be taken advantage of, whether it be to catch up on classes or to get ahead. Not only that, in some cases (such as when doing field work), it’s better to take a class during the mini-term.

The timetable for summer classes is typically posted sometime in February. If the winter mini-term is cost and time effective, then summer mini-term is bound to be the same.

Headlines run above the entrance to classrooms in the Communications and University Extension Building in Circle Park.

File / The Daily Beacon