Madeleine Coles
Life Editor
For many ISU students, finals means poring over your books in preparation, but for students in Professor Alex Bolinger’s honors course, the final is making the book.
Bolinger created the idea of the class, where students spend all semester making a historical book to be published, last year and set forth turning his idea into a reality.
“I approached [the honors program] and had this idea, and I really wanted to work with the honors students. We took a course number within the college of business, and they created an honors course around it,” Bolinger said.
The course is cross-listed as a graduate course; however, students range from first semester freshmen to graduate students.
This is the second year that the class is being held and the second book being published. Last year the class published a book about Garrett Freightlines, a Pocatello trucking empire.
This year, the book will be about the experience of ISU students throughout the years, dating all the way back to the university’s beginning as the Academy of Idaho in 1901.
Bolinger said he chose this topic for a variety of reasons, including the fact that this year celebrates ISU’s 115 anniversary.
“ISU is really a product of its students. They were a driving force in getting us to become a university to begin with, so we’ve really been interested in the experience of students through the years,” Bolinger said. “And there’s really no better way to understand that experience than to have students writing the book.”
Jordan Withers, a student in the class who also worked on the Garrett Freightlines book, said that this particular subject is also a way to increase the impact of the book.
“ISU’s influence and impact is far more expansive and long-lasting. This year we have to be able to encompass over a century’s worth of culture and academics within the same length of book that we did last year,” Withers said.
The book will primarily feature historical photos with captions written by the students, but the class is also planning on interviewing ISU alumni.
According to Bolinger, the topic of the book lends itself to multiple resources and collabrations, including working with Head of Special Collections and University Archives, Ellen Ryan.
Ryan, who provides all the photos for the book project, said that the project is quite an undertaking.
She, with the help of multiple interns, has been working on cataloguing and digitizing photos for the project since January.
Despite the work, Ryan said the project has its perks, one of which is watching the students work with the historical photographs.
“Students are coming to a place where they’re seeing things for the first time that they’ve never seen before, especially looking at historical photographs and how much has changed over the years,” Ryan said.
Bolinger agreed that student discovery is one of the best parts of the project.
“What I find really interesting is when students uncover information I had no idea about,” Bolinger said. “These little nuggets that really capture what that experience must have been like are just really fun to me.”
