With luggage and room decorations piled into a large University Housing cart on Monday morning, freshman Mallory Kreger moved into her new room on the second floor of Bradley Residence Hall — also the inaugural home of UW–Madison’s Spark Learning Community.

“I’m super excited,” said Kreger, a rehabilitation psychology major from Reedsburg, Wisconsin, as she and her family joined the hubbub of move-in day at her lakeshore-area residence hall.

Her dad, Kevin, admitted the day was a little more “bittersweet.” As his daughter settled into her new home, he noted: “We’re on to the next chapter.”

So are the other 66 freshmen who moved into Spark, the newest of 11 learning communities on campus designed to combine residential hall living with academic discovery, heightened engagement in college life and a strong sense of belonging.

Each learning community is focused on a different theme. For Spark, it’s something of a crash course on the Wisconsin Idea — the service-minded principle that what happens on the UW–Madison campus should benefit people across the state and around the world.

A blend of learning experiences

UW–Madison’s learning communities are a partnership between University Housing and a supporting school or college. The themes are designed to bring students, faculty and staff together around a shared interest.

The choices vary widely: The Studio Learning Community, for example, fosters a creative home for students in the arts. StartUp helps students with an entrepreneurial spirit develop new business ideas.

GreenHouse emphasizes sustainable living. WISE, a learning community for students interested in women’s contributions in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, is so popular that in recent years it had to be expanded. The largest learning community on campus is the 580-student Chadbourne Residential College, which occupies all of Chadbourne Residence Hall.

About 1,350 of the 9,000 students living in campus residence halls this year will be in a learning community, according to Residence Life Associate Director Cindy Holzmann. For all of those communities, “the goal is to blend what students are learning in class with what they are doing outside of class,” she said.

Opportunities at their doorstep

Spark is brand new this year. It replaces the old Bradley Hall learning community, which occupied the entire 246-resident building and was founded in 1995 as one of the university’s first learning communities.

After 30 years, however, the time seemed right to reignite the program at Bradley Hall in a bright new way.

As part of Spark, supported by the College of Letters & Science, residents will have the option to earn one credit through a seminar focused on interdisciplinary collaboration and community engagement. They’ll work with a team of faculty and peer mentors to learn about some of the latest research at UW–Madison. And they’ll be invited to join Spark-centered activities, volunteer opportunities, and off-campus excursions to places like the Wisconsin state capitol, Wisconsin Public Radio and Devil’s Lake State Park.

“The really special thing about Spark — and the 10 other learning communities — is that interaction with faculty and the greater awareness of and access to campus resources as a first-year student,” said Mackenzie Hess, program manager for both Spark and GreenHouse. “We bring those things right to their doorstep — literally.”

Ian Stoltenberg, a freshman from Orange, Connecticut, who also moved in on Monday, said he was inspired to request a room in the Spark Learning Community for the same reason he decided to attend UW–Madison: It will connect him with a top-notch research community and provide a beautiful place to live in a residence hall overlooking Lake Mendota.

“When I was researching schools, I really liked the Midwest,” said Stoltenberg, who plans to study engineering and physics at the university. As a plus, his dad, Paul, earned two bachelor’s degrees at UW–Madison in 1998 and also lived in Bradley Hall his freshman year.

Stoltenberg and the other Spark residents are eager to learn more about how campus innovations benefit people across the state and around the world — a concept embodied in the Wisconsin Idea. They’re in precisely the right place, said Tom Dubois, faculty director for Spark and the UW–Madison Halls-Bascom Professor of Scandinavian Folklore, Folklore and Religious Studies.

“They’re coming to a Research 1 university, and they know that there’s world-class research going on, but they might think it’s all test tubes,” Dubois said. “Test tubes are important, as that research leads to cures for diseases, but there’s all sorts of research going on at the university, and it’s extremely interdisciplinary. People are reaching across all sorts of boundaries, unlike anything these students have learned in high school.”

Through Spark, “they’ll learn that they can be a part of that, and can be involved in research that directly affects communities,” he said. “I think it’s a real game-changer for a lot of students who decided to come to Madison as opposed to different schools.”

Dubois will lead a team of faculty mentors for Spark. The staff also includes two house fellows who live on the residence hall floor as well as other UW–Madison students who serve as peer mentors. The Spark students are a mix of in-state and out-of-state residents in a wide range of majors.

“Learning communities in general are just a wonderful way to get everybody equipped to make the most of their time at the university,” said Dubois. “Wherever they’re starting, it’s getting them the tools they need to move forward.”