Screen Play

SHU Student Nate Adams Is Making a Name for Himself as a Movie Reviewer

Nate Adams ’17 has been a movie buff since childhood. Now, the Siena Heights University junior theater major is The Movie Buff.

He currently has a budding career as an Internet movie reviewer. After starting a movie review blog in high school, his web site host noticed that traffic to his site was “abnormal.”

“I was averaging 75 visitors a day,” said Adams of his web site, which is hosted by Weebly. “(Weebly) took notice of that. And I wasn’t going out of my way to tell people, either.”

Adams is now paid by Weebly to review movies of all kinds, which gives him special viewing privileges.

“I get to see movies early all the time,” said Adams of the pre-screenings he attends sometimes weeks before films hit the theaters. “That would be enough for me. It’s kind of cool to see a movie weeks early before the general public can see it. Then, I can tell people about it.”

Personal Trainer

Three-Time Rice Award Winner Carl Kaster Helps Biology Students Take
‘The Next Step’

Carl Kaster’s father wanted him to be physician.

“When I was a college under-
graduate, if people asked me what I wanted to do when I graduated, I always said ‘medicine,’ ” he said. “If I said medicine, I didn’t have to talk about it any more, because they all knew what that meant. You wanted to be a physician.”

In fact, after working as an extern at an internal medicine private practice for a couple of years, he was ready to enter medical school at the University of Louisville.

“I met with the medical school dean,” Kaster said. “When we got through with that interview, he gave me the best advice I had had at that point. He said, ‘Stop thinking about doing what your family wants you to do. Do what you want to do. … You don’t want to be a physician, you want to be somebody who is training physicians.’ So here I am.”

Collaborative Creativity

SHU Nursing Program Teams Up with Social Work, Theater to Earn National Innovation Award

SHU Director of Nursing Dr. Sue Idczak (second from left) as well as SHU nursing faculty member Kelli Kusisto (second from right) and SHU theater faculty member Mark DiPietro (far right) accept the Innovations in Professional Nursing Education Award Oct. 26 from American Association of Colleges of Nursing representatives during AACN’s fall meeting in Washington, D.C.

Siena Heights University’s nursing program was the recipient of the Innovations in Professional Nursing Education Award from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

SHU earned the honor in the Small Schools category. The awards program recognizes the outstanding work of AACN member schools to re-envision traditional models for nursing education and lead programmatic change. Innovation awards, including monetary prize of $1,000, are given annually in four institutional categories: Small Schools; Academic Health Center (AHC); Private Schools without an AHC; and Public Schools without an AHC.

According to Dr. Sue Idczak, SHU’s director of nursing, the program was honored for a unique series of live training simulations conducted in 2013-14 that involved students from nursing, theater and social work programs. Under the faculty’s guidance and supervision, specific scenarios involving the care of older adults were recreated.

“Inter-professional education is becoming such a big thing,” said Idczak, who credited SHU Assistant Professor of Nursing Kelli Kusisto for the creation and development of the simulations. “It really brought liberal arts into the nursing field.”