Huskies Showcase celebrates student research, creative and scholarly works and community engagement campus-wide. The showcase innovated to move online during the pandemic and was back with in-person presentations and engagement this spring.
St. Cloud State University’s Huskies Showcase launched in 2018 with the vision of celebrating undergraduate and graduate research, creative and scholarly works, and community engagement campus-wide.
In 2022, Huskies Showcase continues to expand and grow.
“To me, the most valuable part of Huskies Showcase is that students share their research and creative activity with the public,” said Kristian Twombly, Faculty Fellow for Our Husky Compact. “After all, a critical skill in research is being able to relate your findings to the world. Huskies Showcase gives these students a platform to share their amazing work.”
The goal of Huskies Showcase is to celebrate Huskies and the experiential learning, research and other high-impact practices taking place across campus, also highlighting collaborations between campus and community partners throughout the area and state.
Students present projects from academic to co-curricular forms of engagement centered around their research, creative works, applied experiences, volunteer and service projects, academic service-learning, internships, and more. Huskies Showcase strives to ensure every student has an opportunity to demonstrate the work they have completed during their time at St. Cloud State.
Each year, the Huskies Showcase planning team selects a dimension of Our Husky Compact as a focus and asks students to reflect on their educational journey that led to their project. Not only do students relate their work to their classroom, but are also asked to indicate other spaces that impacted their research or creative work.
Awards recognize students who choose to participate by demonstrating what they learned in conjunction with one or more of the dimensions of Our Husky Compact.
“We’ve had some really dynamite projects over the years that were selected as winners. One that’s always stuck out to me is a project that actually failed in its hypothesis,” Twombly said. “The student ended up proving through their research that their initial conclusions were incorrect. In their reflection, they spoke honestly about the research process and clearly had learned a lot from the experience.
“Another project drew upon old copies of the University Chronicle as source material to paint a picture of student life at St. Cloud State nearly 70 years ago. This project required deep research into the Chronicle as well as contextual research into the lives of Minnesota students at the time.”
During the pandemic, Huskies Showcase moved to a virtual format due to COVID-19, but expanded to a “hyflex” mode in 2022, offering both in-person and virtual options.
“Despite the challenges of a global pandemic, the 2020 and 2021 events were both a huge success in a virtual world,” said Megan Robillard, Associate Director of Research Development. “We were excited that the 2022 event was able to be held with both in-person and virtual options. There had always been the goal of including virtual options for St. Cloud State online programs, and now that campus has the technology widely available and we are all used to using virtual platforms, we were excited to offer that option for students.”
For five years, Huskies Showcase has featured all the work being done by students both inside and outside of the classroom. As it evolves and expands annually, the goal of showcasing that work and research will only continue.
“There are so many great people that work on this team to plan the event. It’s such a great collaborative effort,” Robillard said. “We would be remiss not to thank the amazing team of staff and faculty who lead the planning and implementation of this event, as well as the number of graduate assistants and students who help make everything happen.
“We also have worked closely with the University Library to include the Showcase winners and their projects in the SCSU repository, and have plans for this to continue into the future.”
