Meetings

I have been having a load of meetings lately!

Today was my first time attending the IT Steering Committee, where I learned a lot about future plans for campus technology implementation. Interestingly, my boss's boss at AV Services was there presenting a rather lengthly bit on future strategy. Apparently we'll also be upgrading to a newer version of Blackboard this January that will hopefully solve some of the unreliability issues.

I also got a chance to meet Nancy Young, the Interim Vice President of Student Affairs (I think that's her title). She's quite passionate about what she does and the meeting was interesting. I think my (and, I daresay, the SGA's) goal for the year about building community is right in line with the kinds of things she was saying, but I'm not quite sure if I was able to get that across to her or not. Her view is that you can change the campus culture by focusing on the good things and correcting the erroneous "conventional wisdom" that often floats around, like the oh-so-popular "There's nothing to do on campus!" While I think she has a point, there is also something to be said for harnessing that negative energy and trying to redirect it to something positive, as we are trying to do with the upcoming imPROVEit campaign (provided everything goes through). That idea is saying, "You have a problem with UMBC? Fine. Let us provide you with the tools you need to do something about it."

I think we need to be encouraging each other to take a real ownership in the UMBC community. We have a very unique culture here and our university is something I think we all have a right to be proud of. In the same vein, why sit around and accept things as being okay the way they are? A college community is a dynamic thing and it should always be kept moving forward, and who better to influence that process than the students who are immersed in it?

There's going to be some interesting developments in the upcoming weeks. Hopefully we'll be seeing the new SGA Newsletter circulate both internally and externally, giving everybody a clearer picture of what exactly we are doing on a day to day basis. So much of the work involves meeting with people and information gathering, looking for the right time to inject a particular student concern. Often a lot of the larger changes are in progress but will be a long time in coming, so you are working for the students of 2009.

At the Senate meeting tonight we got a chance to talk to Dr. Baron, the Director of Academic Advising. Now there's an issue I'll bet a lot of us have something to say about! He had some interesting survey results that he had taken over the summer about how the faculty members view advising. I was surprised to see how few of them actually get recognized for what they do to advise students, when that is such an important part of having a good experience at the university. He'll be presenting a whitepaper on these findings, along with the results of a later student survey, sometime this year.

Along the lines of future improvements, my meetings began to converge when Dr. Baron started talking about the new Student Administration system that is going to be put in place, that they also happened to be discussing at IT Steering. Basically it's going to make the whole Undergraduate Progress Report (try finding that, it's buried in myUMBC) thing something actually usable. You'll be able to see exactly how you're measuring up with your GEPs (since by the time it rolls out, GFRs will have been phased out), so the whole advising experience will be a lot less, "help me make sure I take the right classes" and more, "help me prepare for graduate school or a post-graduate career". I think that's the real direction advising should be moving as well, and it will help take a lot of the frustration out of the course selection process.

For the short term, he's looking at doing things like extending the period during which you can register for classes, so there can be more time for advising and planning, and also getting people's UPRs actually updated before the last minute, so we don't have seniors realizing they've missed the boat on one class and can't graduate for another semester.

On a more personal note, I forgot to update my Oracle calendar with my latest work times for AV services, so it still has me getting off at 7 PM. So, I got scheduled for a meeting tomorrow at seven to prepare for meeting Governor O'Malley on Wednesday. That's kind of a big deal, so I'm just going to have to see if I can leave work and come back later. Hopefully they'll be cool with that!