This Western Kentucky Senior Created “The Encyclopedia Of Adulting” For College Students

In my experience through high school and college, I’ve found it’s not uncommon for institutions to cover academic topics in great depth at the expense of actual life skills training. While it’s great to solve a derivative without a calculator or identify the mitochondria as the powerhouse of the cell, those skills won’t necessarily give you the type of knowledge you’ll need to prepare yourself for adulthood. Nessa Unseld, a senior at Western Kentucky University, took it upon herself to create that resource she wished she had as an adolescent. “There’s that abrupt cutoff of 18 years old where you’re expected to perform as an adult… but there’s also not really a succinct infrastructure in place to make sure every 18-year-old gets that knowledge [on how to do so],” Unseld says in an exclusive interview with Her Campus. 

Have you ever googled a topic, like doing your taxes, but nobody online could seem to explain it to you in simple terms? That’s where Unseld’s Coleus Academy comes to the rescue. Describing the platform as “the encyclopedia of adulting,” Unseld sees the layout of Coleus Academy as a hybrid between Wikipedia and Khan Academy. It contains a mix of articles, interactive videos, and quizzes that users can work through at their own pace, and each module should take under 10 minutes to digest. “In its most basic form, it’s a catalog of things to help you be less confused. And then from that base, you can further build your knowledge,” Unseld says. Topics range from finances and media literacy to raising children and pets.

Unseld came up with the idea for Coleus Academy in November 2021. Despite her lifelong passion for coding, creating the Coleus Academy website still presented Unseld with some challenges.“I’ve been coding since I was in fifth or sixth grade. My dad was a computer scientist, and he got me interested in coding [when I was] really young. But I didn’t know how to do web design or web development,” Unseld says. 

She acknowledges that her university played a central role in helping her bring Coleus Academy to life  — they let her incorporate the platform into her studies, and she utilized her minor in nonprofit administration to get it off the ground. “Western [Kentucky University] and the greater Bowling Green area have done a lot in these last few years to incentivize innovation,” Unseld says. “I was able to work with the Honors College at WKU to work on Coleus as a thesis, and after that [I participated in] the Collaborative SmartSpace program… [which is] now called the Innovation Campus. They take in entrepreneurs of small businesses. You can get a space there, and they connect you to a community.” 

Coleus Academy will launch in full this summer 2024. In the meantime, users can see a framework of the branding and a few snippets of the modules on the academy’s website. 

Ultimately, Unseld aims to get Coleus Academy included in high school programs across the country. This way, young adults can start to learn life skills “before even graduating, so they’re not having to play catch up,” she says. For secondary education, laws on college and career readiness education standards have recently been passed, but schools still have a long way to go.  

Unseld hopes Coleus Academy can become a staple in society as an accessible database of insight. “Right now, the idea is ‘I don’t understand this… hopefully someone on Reddit whose credentials I can’t verify knows it!’ And that’s great if you can find it, but what if you can’t?” Unseld says. “In five years, I would hope [Coleus Academy] is that resource for people to lean on.” 

• academics
• college
• life