By Stephanie Smith, Building Kentucky
A humble, yet passionate energy surrounds Nessa Unseld, a 20-year-old Western Kentucky University student, as she describes her new business. Unseld founded Coleus Academy, a non-profit e-learning platform that focuses on practical knowledge and life skill education.
Unseld received the inaugural Buckman Prize recently at the Summit of the South Conference hosted at the WKU Innovation Campus. Named for Dr. Bill Buckman a former physics professor and entrepreneur at WKU’s Innovation Campus, the Buckman Prize is awarded to outstanding student entrepreneurs at WKU who exemplify an entrepreneurial spirt and a commitment to making a positive impact.
“We created the award to give students with ideas and big dreams the ability to accomplish their goals,” Buckman said. “Nessa is so deserving, and her platform will help many others learn the practical skills they need for success.”
She got the idea for the Coleus Academy because she wanted to share life skills with fellow young adults, 18 – 24 years old such as career readiness, health and wellness, financial literacy, housing and home ownership along with topics such as diversity and inclusion, education and more. In her early research, she discovered various websites and other resources that proved cumbersome, difficult to navigate and were not accessible to all.”
Unseld said that this new venture is a way for her to help her peers learn how to function in the real world — and even learn how to “adult.”
Unseld, a behavioral digital experience major, says, “Coleus Academy is my way of putting ‘real world’ information that people my age can use for ‘adulting,’” Unseld, a behavioral digital experience major, said. “I am learning myself as I go; my initial lack of knowledge was one of the factors that precipitated this endeavor.”
In her abstract, Unseld, a distinguished scholar in WKU’s Mahurin Honors College and graduate of The Gatton Academy, describes a platform that addresses the deficits left by the de-emphasis of practical skill-centric education in American curriculums.
“There is a gap between the degree of knowledge necessary to engage with adult life and the extent of knowledge possessed by emerging adults.” Unseld said.
Her capstone project, Coleus targets the skills essential to adult competency and effective citizenry and is “an encyclopedia of adulthood,” she adds.
With graduation coming in May for Unseld, she says she plans to continue to grow Coleus from its current soft launch phase, with the site housing some 40 articles to a consumer facing full launch with more than 200 of these helpful resources.
Learn more about the Coleus Academy HERE.
