A new Residence Life living-learning community is in the early stages of development for the upcoming academic year, beginning in the fall of 2017. The community, called Find Utilize Share Expand (FUSE), will be open to students with at least one year of in-hall living experience and will explore the several tiers of personal wellness.

Personal wellness includes, but is not limited to, physical, mental, environmental, social and intellectual wellness. Similar to the Wildcat Academy of Leadership and Knowledge (WALK), FUSE students will all live on the same floor of one of the residence halls and engage in activities that will garner the most out of their college experience. The dorm selection is still being determined.

“The goal is to formulate a community of students who want to expand their mindset in college,” said Lexi Neemann, Assistant Director of Residence Life. “It’s for people who want to find out different things about themselves or utilize talents they didn’t know they had.”

Neemann said the spirit behind FUSE is the idea that college shouldn’t be an isolated experience.

“It goes back to that ‘it takes a campus’ mentality,” she said. “No one goes through college alone, and everyone’s experience is different, but there is something to learn from everybody’s experiences.”

In addition, Neemann cites the importance of engaging outside of the classroom and exploring vulnerability.

“It’s important to learn outside of the classroom, because that’s ultimately the college experience,” she said. “(I’m looking forward to) giving students the opportunity to be themselves and allow them to have strength and vulnerability, because I think everybody struggles through college.”

She also said that FUSE aims to bring light to the reality that college can be a trying time and students don’t have to endure that alone.

Information will be available on the housing application, when the application goes live, in which students can indicate if they are interested in FUSE. From there, an application will be distributed and the selection process will take place. Sophomores through graduate students qualify to be a part of FUSE as long as they have lived in the residence halls for at least one year.