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Delaney Wilson grew up hearing about South Dakota State University. Her mother is a Jackrabbits alumna. Plus, being in South Dakota led to several brushes with yellow and blue.

But she said all those good things didn’t sink in until she visited campus herself.

“I didn’t know what it all meant until I went on the tour. It opened my eyes to why people say such great things about SDSU,” she said.

Several of those “great things” helped her get the most out of higher education.

Wokini Initiative

Wilson is a junior pharmacy major with a psychology minor. The Rapid City native is a member of the Yurok and Hoopa tribes of Northern California, which qualified her for the Avera Wokini Scholarship at the university.

That came with some financial assistance — which she said was great — but what really helped her was the community the Wokini Initiative offered. The initiative is SDSU’s collaborative and holistic framework to support American Indian student success and Indigenous nation-building.

She and the scholars came to campus a week before other students. They spent the extra time participating in bonding activities with each other and learning about on-campus resources.

“I think I would have had a culture shock going into college if I didn’t have an adjustment period,” she said. “Plus, it was really fun to get to know each other.”

AISES Chapter

Wilson is also part of the institution’s Advancing Indigenous People in STEM (AISES) chapter. She’s been a member since she was a freshman and is now the chapter’s treasurer.

She went to AISES’s National Conference in October 2025, where she and the other members received the Stelvio J. Zanin Distinguished Chapter of the Year Award.

The society connects Wilson to other science, technology, engineering and math-minded Indigenous students and with presenters in STEM topics at their biweekly meetings.

“I’ve learned what my peers are doing and understand more about health care and other people’s roles in it now,” she said. “That’s really important when working on an interprofessional health care team.”

South Dakota State also has an American Indian Student Center, which hosts all of AISES’s meetings. Student success advisors and financial aid office representatives are there regularly.

There are also tutors available, like Derek Brandis, who does chemistry tutoring. He is an SDSU assistant professor and Wokini mentor. He’s also been her guide to undergraduate research opportunities at the university.

Fire(works) and ice

During the summer between freshman and sophomore year, Wilson worked on an environmental project with Brandis.

She compared water samples from around South Dakota before and after the Fourth of July, including Winner, Box Elder, Sioux Falls and Brookings. In particular, she was testing to see if there was an increase in perchlorate, a firework propellant, in natural waterways.

Perchlorate exposure is harmful to the environment and to human health, especially to young kids’ development.

“On average, there was a 128.4% increase across samples — but only if you exclude the Sioux Falls sample, since that was a really large increase,” she said. “The Sioux Falls one was an increase of 66,774%.”

It was her first time doing hands-on research and compiling data herself. It was also her first time interpreting the data, presenting it and explaining it to others.

“The research you do is only as good as you’re able to articulate it. It’s only as good as what people can understand,” she said.

Brandis helped her take all the information she gathered and put it on an easy-to-understand research poster.

If her research career began with a bang, it kept getting cooler and cooler (literally).

Last year, Wilson helped Brandis and Jihong Cole-Dai, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Physics, study how long cylinders of ice could hold the secrets of climate change.

“We would go into this huge freezer with ice cores drilled from Greenland,” she said. “We’d saw it at specific lengths that correlated to specific seasons and years, and we’d melt it down to analyze it.”

Ice cores can reveal clues about the planet’s climate hundreds or thousands of years ago. Conducting chemical analysis on layers of ice over time shows how the atmosphere, temperature and snowfall has changed in that period.

“It’s insane to be able to interpret. It’s very surreal,” Wilsons said. “Doors that I never thought would open for me have opened for me here. If you told me three years ago that I’d be able to do all of these things, I would have never believed you.”

That’s part of her advice to prospective South Dakota State University students.

“SDSU has so many great opportunities that I wasn’t sure I’d be a good fit. But you can’t pass up on them just because you’re scared,” Wilson said.

That’s a philosophy she’s carrying with her over the next few years as she continues her pharmacy education, stays involved in the American Indian Science and Engineering Society and completes more research projects.