Featured at the bottom right-hand corner of Northern Illinois University’s home page, are the student profiles of NIYou.

For two years the feature has displayed NIU students, who take advantage of everything NIU offers, to the NIU community and prospective students.
Jennice O’Brien, director of web communications said NIYou helps provide new students with perspective.

“When we redesigned the NIU home page a few years back, we wanted to give perspective students a sort of first-hand account of the types of experiences that NIU students have here,” O’Brien said.

The feature randomly chooses one of the current 33 NIU students part of NIYou to be shown on the home page every time someone visits the NIU Web site.

Students who have graduated are retired from NIYou at the end of the semester while new ones are posted. This fall, 18 new entries have been added.

Before students are shown on NIYou, the school approaches them to see if they would like to be featured, or students can be nominated at www.niu.edu/niyou. If the student agrees to be featured, they fill out a questionnaire and have their photo taken in a location of their choice for the Web Site.

Arielle Payne, a senior nursing major, was approached by the Honors Office before she was featured on NIYou.

“I was excited and surprised to be featured in the profile,” Payne said. “It was kind of cool because when I first came to NIU I saw the NIYou profiles and thought ‘that’s cool, I wonder how you get chosen to do one of those.’”

Jessica Berg, a senior physical therapy major, was also approached by the Honors Program and is now one of the featured students.

“I think it serves the purpose it was intended to serve,” Berg said. “I also think that the diversity of students featured represents the diversity of NIU.”

Ben Thanepohn, a junior accountancy major, was a summer orientation leader when he was approached by the school to be featured in NIYou.

“It’s sort of weird to see myself up there especially when I’m sitting in the computer lab and I see myself pop up on someone else’s computer screen,” Thanepohn said.

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