If you haven’t seen the trailer for WAITING FOR “SUPERMAN” check it out at WaitingForSuperman.com and pledge to see the film this fall. The film, directed by Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”), examines the crisis of public education in the United States through multiple interlocking stories. The “Take the Pledge” campaign aims to inspire everyone [...]
Archive of entries posted on July 2010
Deconstructing Barriers to College Completion
In one of my first graduate-level classes, I wrote an essay about the “digital divide” with a thesis that lack of access to technology was limiting certain students’ abilities to gain entry to higher education. The College Board recently released, “The College Completion Agenda: 2010 Progress Report,” and made mention of the importance of access [...]
Managing Student Emails
A recent post at On Hiring by Blogger Gabriela Montell of The Chronicle elicited several recommendations for dealing with student emails, specifically around setting limits. I appreciate the convenience of email and have even modified my voice mail message encouraging people to email me if they need an immediate response. Another reason I like email [...]
Do you think summer break is a waste of time?
There is quite a heated debate going on over at the Brainstorm blog of The Chronicle over whether summer breaks are wasted time. Blogger Diane Auer Jones argues that, “The problem with summer break is that resources are wasted and many students lose valuable time, just because once upon a time all hands were needed [...]
Are You Ready to Scale Up Your Student Development Programs?
I have been thinking a lot about program improvements and organizational structure as we prepare for the upcoming year and the addition of two full-time staff. One of my colleagues is preparing to take a leave of absence, and she has reorganized many of her files for her interim replacement. She and I were comparing [...]
Are you a 24/7 Student Development Professional?
As student development professionals, we work long hours, nights, weekends, and the occasional holiday. There is as much work as we create and there is always more to be done. For the most part our students are students 24/7, but as working professionals where do we draw the line? Last quarter I was invited to [...]
How are Student Development Professionals Going to Stay Ahead of Technology?
A short trip down memory lane takes me back to the small liberal arts college where I earned my undergraduate degree and to the two large public institutions where I earned my advanced degrees. While I am grateful for the technological advances that allowed me to email my professors, scan in my assignments, and research [...]
10 Tips for Interviewing in Student Development
In the past two months I have participated in over 30 interviews. Our department is recruiting two full time staff and our AmeriCorps program is recruiting 14 members. Each interview has been an opportunity to see into the life of another professional, learn more about the interpretation of these positions across the field, and clarify [...]
Student Development Happens Over the Summer Too
Our department is fortunate to have several students working over the summer. There has been surprisingly little down time in our office lately. We are all busy closing out budgets, evaluating last year’s programs, and projecting and planning for next year. I think there is sometimes an assumption that over the summer schools close down [...]
Keeping Up With Social Media
One of the summer projects in my office is unifying our Facebook presence. Facebook is quickly overtaking email as a primary means of communication among college-aged students. The online statistics about Facebook and college students are outdated, but even five years ago over 85% of college students were using Facebook. We had a group of [...]
