Our ancestors lived in a world where you often had to move somewhere to get work. We currently live in a world where you often have to move to get work or get educated. But that’s less true than it’s ever been.
I envision a future where you can get educated wherever you want to be educated (even in your own home) by the smartest people in the world, where the local community college serves as a hub of tutors and educational assistance to all of us, and where we can do many professions from wherever we choose to live.
It’s a return to community, family and connectedness.
I’m working on a project and would like some assistance. Here’s your mission should you choose to accept it:
Create a video describing the most difficult situation you’ve dealt with professionally (not something personal, but either a professional or volunteer situation). If you’re having trouble coming up with something, any situation will do. If you’re too shy for video, I will accept text, but I’d prefer video.
Post that video on youtube, and title and tag it “influenceedu”.
Make a second video with how you resolved the situation and follow the procedure above.
Send me the links.
Thanks in advance for your help. If you’d like to do this as a conversation, I’d be more than happy to, as I have software to record google hangouts or skype!
I am heading out from Boston from my visit here for the ACUI International Conference. I’ve been a frequent proponent of ACUI, the people at ACUI, the education the conference offers and the college union idea, so you would think I would have been excited. I wasn’t. Honestly, I’ve been dreading this conference. It’s really not anything to do with ACUI; I still think this association has the best people and makes the best attempts at conferencing of any of the associations. The problem has been me. I’ve been absolutely burned out for at least 8 weeks. My employer is in a state of flux, and our department has been the nexus of that flux and I’ve been exhausted by it. Part of it is a not altogether unfounded fear for my own job, as it feels that we’re persistently waiting on the guillotine to fall on some unnamed person, and part of it is that an aggressive vision for the future of the school that happened to coincide with an economic collapse has everyone, i believe, on our campus feeling like we’re scrambling. I’m excited about the future and the vision being espoused, but a time of such tremendous change has left me feeling exhausted for weeks. I wasn’t looking forward to ACUI because the college union and student activities discussions that are had there, while very exciting, just felt like more than I was ready to take.
The conference was cool, and I enjoyed hearing a lot of what people had to say. I also got a kick out of presenting a couple times and sharing about some topics that are near and dear to my heart.
What I didn’t anticipate was leaving the conference feeling slightly rejuvenated. I think I’d feel more rejuvenated if I wasn’t so exhausted from lack of sleep.
I had the opportunity, along with a crew of ACUI folks, to sit down with Dean Ken Elmore from Boston University, over some pints (okay, a lot of pints) and chat about the future of higher ed and higher ed professional associations. I’m not going to regurgitate the entire conversation at this point as I’m still processing, but it was inspirational for me.
I loved student activities as an undergrad and that’s why I went into it as a professional. I realized we could make a difference on our campus with the money and programming that you have in student activities. I’ve struggled with that as a professional because while we have the ability to make an impact on our campuses, I believe our maximum impact on an individual campus comes from connecting with students that then learn how they can make an impact on their campuses. We’re in their world and not of their world. In all reality, it is the students that define our campus.
It’s no secret to anyone that follows me on Twitter that I believe we as higher ed are heading towards an inflection point. The state governments are showing less and less ability and willingness to support us, student costs to attend higher education are skyrocketing as well as student debt, and technology is revolutionizing the way we function as a people and the seeds of it revolutionizing education are all around us. Higher education needs to be thinking about new ways to do things, and my profession needs to be thinking about new ways to do things as well.
My passion is to push higher education to where we need to be. For right now, I think that means beating that drum about where I think higher ed is going, equipping professionals with technology competency, and starting to think about how we can deliver student affairs in this new world order that’s coming quickly.
Dean Elmore wants to revolutionize our conferences, and I think he’s on to something. I’m not done chewing on this though.
But thanks to ACUI for helping me to get rejuvenated. Not in the way I expected. But seriously. Thanks.
I was reviewing my transcripts this weekend and I noticed how poorly I had done during the year I was most involved in college. My GPA up until that year sat at a solid 3.615. Given that I was taking an intensive pre-pharmacy curriculum, and had 2 president’s list and 1 dean’s list semester, I feel pretty good about this number.
During the year I did student activities, I had 30 credit hours and pulled 2.57 GPA.
The following year, as student body president, a less demanding role on my campus, I was back to a 3.66.
So, what happened? I was super involved. I always tell people that my job during that year became student activities. I was Mr. Involved Student. Hell, I apparently liked it so much that I decided not to be good at my grades.
Of course, there could be 75 other factors in there, like the ending of a long term relationship, and a lot of other personal change. But I do believe the numbers are startling. A full point down in GPA and a return to that previous position the next year.
One last option, if you’re really feeling ambitious and like me (or just like helping people), Anyone who gives a gift of at least $5 to Charity Water using my birthday page will not only make MY day, but also make someone else’s. And just for the hell of it, I’ll throw in everything I mentioned above…for free.
With an inherently serious app already available, I wanted to make something available that was a little less serious. I think everyone who works in student affairs has been frustrated with student development or students in general or maybe just working in student affairs, and you’ve wondered to yourself, what’s the big deal with this Chickering dude anyway?
Maybe it would make you feel better to Draw on Chickering.
Introducing the Draw on Chickering app! Draw on Chickering in 3 colors as well as big and large dots. Perfect for getting through those frustrating days in grad school and work! Stop posting passive aggressive posts on Twitter and start drawing on Chickering’s face (not endorsed by Chickering himself, even though that would be awesome).
Click the Buy Now button, credit cards as well as PayPal accepted and I’ll send you the APK file and installation instructions. Android only.
I posted on Twitter recently that I wanted to learn how to program phone apps. Here’s my first foray into doing so. This is an Android app specifically for student affairs professionals.
Are you a seasoned student affairs professional who needs a little theory refresher? Or maybe a grad student that’s trying to test yourself on your theory knowledge? This app is simple enough for you to pop open once in awhile as a refresher, but substantive enough to make you think about what it is we do as a profession.
I’m offering this for now for $.99. Send in a Paypal payment using the link below and I’ll send you the APK file and installation instructions for Android so you can install the app yourself.
My good friend Laura Pasquini shared this link on twitter a while back, a youtube video with people sharing their biggest regret (ok, it wasn’t this video, but I couldn’t find the original. this will do).
My initial response was that I try to not live with regrets, I just have things that I do using the information I have at the time. It’s foolish, I think, to look back and think about regrets because you’re viewing it through a lens that was different than the one you had that you used to decide to do whatever you did that you regret. It’s unfair.
So on the surface, I hate this question because it’s unfair and it’s filled with people being unfair to themselves. I’ve seen too many people in my life get so burdened down with regrets of things they did, things that they wish they did and things they shouldn’t have done. They stop functioning and stop living forward. To quote Don Draper, do what you have to do in life, move forward and you’ll be surprised by how much these things didn’t matter.
However, I was surprised to find myself at the orientation presentation I give for students, starting to realize something I regret. I was giving three presentations, off and on, during orientation sessions, one which focused on parents and rallied them to get their students involved with campus, one on campus events and our campus activities board, and one on the offices in student affairs and how we provide life-changing experiences and resources for students. Two of these sessions, the ones that weren’t about campus events, were presented with other offices, including the career center. The funny thing is that I found myself mentioning, quite specifically, the career center in the other session. But why? I wonder if I didn’t see myself quite a bit in their 18 year old faces, making me feel that I needed to tell 18 year old me a story.
Let’s backtrack.
I started off college as a business major. During the first week of school, I changed to pre-pharmacy, presumably because I wanted to make that bread (academic advisors will find that familiar). I did well in pre-pharm, and was admitted to pharmacy school after my sophomore year. While working in the pharmacy, I realized that I hated it, so I drove back down to my college the summer before pharmacy school, dropped out and re-enrolled in undergrad as a chemistry/biology major. After one semester, I dropped the bio major to a minor and would eventually graduate as a chemistry major. Somewhere in there I got wrapped up in student activities and we know how that ended (if you don’t, check my about page).
So, not knowing what to do with myself at this point, I left to live in California for the summer, while I waited to hear back from the bizarre collection of graduate school applications I’d submitted (phd in chemistry, mba, divinity school (yes, i said that)). I was admitted to all and decided that the phd in chem was the best financial path since I’d be making a whopping $24k per year and have my tuition covered. I would end up leaving the program after a semester with terrible grades, complete disinterest in my classes and the stink of failure. I would have left in September, truth be told, because I hated it, but I couldn’t give up on my teaching obligations.
Fueled by that experience, I somehow acquired a teaching position teaching 7th grade science that I would leave at the end of the school year. After that, I got a CNA certification and got a job at a small surgery center. During the course of that year, I decided I wanted to do student affairs, but couldn’t apply. So I left this job when my lease ran out and was able to acquire a job working in the mortgage industry with Wells Fargo. During my time there, I’d be admitted to grad school and the rest, as they say, is history.
So, why did I tell you all this? Other than self-mutilation?
The truth is, I was a complete idiot. I hope that the seasoned career folks and student affairs pros can see the foolishness in my path there. I entered college with no direction, left college with no direction and spent the next four years doing the career exploration that should have been done as a college student, if not as a high school student. In truth, I didn’t realize how lost I was. My parents weren’t able to help, even though I know they really wanted to, and I wasn’t wise enough to seek professional help at that age.
My biggest regret is that I didn’t know how lost I was. I wish that I’d had the intelligence and foresight to go ask a seasoned career pro to help me through how lost I was, maybe to give me a career inventory or something (oddly enough, one of these landed me in student affairs). I wish that I hadn’t spent three years wandering around lost. It cost me a relationship, friendships, three years of earning potential, a lot of emotional distress, and a lot of time doing something I love.
So, I think that’s why I felt compelled to reach out to these freshman. I don’t want them to end up like me, someone who just blindly stumbled into his vocation. All of the resources I used to get here are available to anyone on the internet or in a career services office. Don’t be a moron like me and not take advantage of it if you find yourself lost.
Truth be told, I’ve seen a career professional 4 times since I started my masters degree in 2007, and I plan on going back the next time I feel a little bit lost. They’re good at it, and I trust that they have my best interest at heart.
That’s the thing about regrets. As long as they inform your future, and move you on towards something positive, they’re worth your time. Just remember, as the avetts say, when you run make sure you run to something not away from. I think I’m running the right way….for now.
When we last left the tale, I had been given notice by our IT guy that not only were we capable of storing and saving the data that I wanted, we already had the software that we needed present on our computers and, not only that, we were already using it, just not correctly. I was more amused than anything, but not overly surprised. Given an environment of high turnover, a system that is fairly complex, and an overall student affairs fear of data, I found it not altogether shocking that this information would have disappeared somewhere along with the names of the guys who shot Tupac and Biggie and the Iraqi WMD’s.
So, Chapter 3 starts where the IT guy warns me that he was nearing the end of his effectiveness, as, most likely, we didn’t have access to the student database that we needed to cross reference the IDs that we swiped so that we could actually make something reasonable out of the data other than just a collection of scrabble like number combinations. Quite literally, the data we were collecting would be useless without access to this database.
Let’s pause here for a little personal interlude. After we’d figured out that we could in fact collect the IDs with our swipes and save the information, I was feeling particularly empowered. I went across the hall to @curtistmed’s office and immediately told him that, not only were we good to start collecting data, but that we would eventually be able to use it. Frankly, I had nothing to back this up at the time. However, we all know that the university is largely about politics. Going into an assistant vice president’s office and saying “we need to collect some data and use it” is a far different than “we’ve been collecting this data all semester but IT won’t let us use it”. Huge difference, in fact. Question 1 is complex and multi layered, Question 2 is not complex. My political clout, if you will, to get what I need, would ultimately be in the data that we were going to collect and I knew we would be able to collect it.
Personal interlude 2 – I’m relentless. Keep turning me down and I will keep knocking at your door. Acting like that is a stupid philosophy when you’re being selfish. Acting like that when you’re trying to do the best job possible at work, and the thing that you’re trying to get will make you better at your job is smart. Play your political cards correctly, push when pushing is wise, and step your game up when pushing isn’t wise. I should explain the step your game up piece – going and whining to your AVC when you haven’t done your research and due diligence is foolish. If you’re going to appeal to a higher power, then at least do your due diligence. I’m reminded of the story about the man drowning on the roof of the house and praying for God to save him and he sees a man with a raft, a man with a plane and a man with a hot air balloon (or was it a jet ski or something? I swear I’ve never seen a hot air balloon just randomly flying over a flood. Maybe it was a dinghy), but he turns down all three rides . When God comes back, the man says “you didn’t save me” and God says “who do you think sent the boat, the plane and the balloon?” Don’t be that dude. Regardless of your religious affiliation, I hope you understand that the idea is about using all the resources at your disposal before you start wasting your AVC’s time. The AVC is the nuclear option. If you play your cards right and utilize all your resources, you shouldn’t need to use them, unless you get to the point you really can’t do anything else. Then it’s time to push the red button.
Anyway, back to the story.
So, the IT guy sets up another appointment to come by and check out whether we had access to this student database on Banner. I’m going to spare the argument that I think could (and maybe should) be made about whether all of us should have access to these files. He was surprised to find that our office did, in fact, have access to all of the student records through Banner, and within about five minutes of clicking around in Microsoft Access, we had a query set up to pull student data like Year/Classification/Age/Housing Status/Meal Plan/Major from the student files. The one piece we don’t have access to was, this is slightly hilarious, the file that actually contains the data we’re collecting. In IT guy’s opinion, this was not especially secure information and he saw no reason that we shouldn’t be able to get access. I concur. It would be even more fun to go into our AVC’s office and say “i’ve been collecting data all semester, can i please access it?” The access has been requested, though, so we’ll see how it goes.
At this point, I felt comfortable to approach our interim director, the Assessment Director for our Student Affairs Department about the process I’d been going through and how far I’d made it, and I think it’s fair to call her reaction complete and total shock. I won’t go into the details of the conversation because that’s for her to share, but suffice it to say, she was shocked that I’d been able to get this access to data and the ability to swipe cards to tally who was attending events. My reaction “i really wish I could tell you this was complicated and I’d done something magical, but I genuinely think people had had difficulty getting access to the student data that they need, so they just started telling people they couldn’t event track attendees at all and shouldn’t waste their time”. Obviously, that statement was complete conjecture on my part, but it’s my best guess to why I got to where I did and others haven’t. I should add that the overwhelming assistance from the man in IT was a huge help. IT man, if you read this, I owe you a beer (or six).
We need to track individual student’s attendance at events over the course of their time at the school. I’m not particularly interested in doing this for any purpose other than to see that student affairs programming is actually reaching all of the students. I suspect we’ll find that we’re hitting a small portion of the population. To my knowledge, the infrastructure does not exist to do this, but what I’m seeing in my head is an enormous spreadsheet with individual student ID #s and tracking of what events they attended. Frankly, this could be an entire student affairs (as well as athletics) effort to figure out what experiences our students are actually attending.
Learning outcomes listed and justified for EVERY event. I posted about the CAS standards here previously, and i’m thinking that you could list out individual learning outcomes for each event and then track these over the course of the year. In theory, each office (even better if this was a collaborative SA effort) should be hitting all of the learning outcomes repeatedly. Being able to cross reference these to determine what portion of our students are getting hit (not just shots in the dark, but actual individual students) by each learning outcome will give you some idea of what’s actually happening.
Cost per student for each event. If you’re tracking who attends, you should be able to get actual attendance numbers instead of estimates as well. Calculating cost per student will help to determine whether students are actually getting the value that they should be getting out of their student fees. A healthy look is to determine how much a similar experience might cost elsewhere; if cost per student is lower, you’ve done your job.
A few thoughts:
This plan places the responsibility on staff for accountability instead of surveying students to determine whether they’re engaged. We’re responsible for creating an environment for student learning and this plan tracks whether we’re actually creating that environment.
For the most part, student affairs learning/community building is tracked over a longer time frame than classroom learning. You can definitely learn chemical structures (okay…maybe you can’t…but i did) over the course of a day of studying. You can’t learn how to have meaningful relationships over the course of a day. Short time frame assessment, in light of this thought, is rather pointless and this system would provide the infrastructure to do a more meaningful long term study.
Self reported assessments of students are of marginal value anyway. Incentive exists for students to either not take these seriously, say what they think the surveyor wants them to say, or outright lie. In light of the incentives, the data received from these assessments (unless you’ve managed to limit these incentives somehow) is questionable.
Tracking financial expenditures with more accountability for said expenditures is imperative. I’ve heard SA folks refer to activities fees as “play money”. Please.
Tremendous research opportunities would be made available by tracking all of this data. I think we all know that’s needed.
I’m genuinely looking forward to reading the comments.
A huge part of the reason I got into student activities and student center work is that I want to help others realize their dreams and passions. More than that, I want my life to be about helping others find and recognize the freedom that comes from finding one’s passion and pursuing that passion. You can read more about my ideas in this vein in my previous post here.
It’s for that reason I invest countless hours listening to students talk. It’s for that reason I stay in constant contact, it seems, with students and friends that I very rarely or may never again see listening to them talk and giving advice.
It’s for that reason that I support 3rd world citizens through Kiva (making micro-loans to help fund businesses in the 3rd world) and through Charity:Water (a huge first step to pursuing dreams is having the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid). These organizations help to set people’s dreams and goals free from the bounds of their situation. (full disclosure: i actually had tears running down my cheeks typing that last paragraph. I really believe in these causes. If you can participate, you should.)
And it’s for this reason that I’m supporting breakdrink.com. As a blogger and website maintainer and podcaster, I feel like I understand the incredible amount of work that Jeff and Gary put into their site. These guys aren’t just pushing a product though, they’re trying to help our profession to find it’s way through a dark hour and to emerge stronger and better. I can get behind that 100% as someone who not only believes in helping others to pursue their dreams and goals, but someone who personally benefits from the service that breakdrink.com provides and will provide.
That being said, go to indiegogo.com and donate to breakdrink.com’s future. Help push student affairs and higher ed forward. Help someone make their dream and passion a reality.
I feel like I must defend cost per student as a method of assessing the quality of programs. I feel that I must defend it because I was told it was worthless and “not worth digging into”. Frankly, I disagree with this view and I think this view (at least partly) arises out of desire to run from the accountability and fiscal responsibility that said metric demands.
During my grad school internship in assessment, I stated that the currency of student affairs was learning outcomes. After thinking about this comment for almost 2 years, I’ve realized that I was wrong. Our currency does certainly lie in outcomes and the assessment of those outcomes, but more than that, the currency lies in a need to provide the best possible efficiency, and it follows quality, of programs with the dollars we’ve been provided.
At it’s root, looking at cost per student is at the root of what we should be understanding, no? The current calculation is to use the overall cost of a program and divide that by student attendance and that gives you cost per student. My analytical mind tells me that this is grossly oversimplified though and does not measure all of the metrics needed to determine success in a program. Shouldn’t learning outcomes also be included in the equation? I say yes.
Another question…can we figure out a way to estimate attendees for a particular program, as well as cost and thus in theory determine whether we SHOULD do an event? If we can apply learning outcomes, get an estimated attendance figure and an estimated cost per student, then shouldn’t this allow us to ask the “should we do this?” question a little more clearly? I think so.
Either way, if we’re looking into the question of whether an event is worth it (either pre or post event), cost per student is a key efficiency metric that we need to make better decisions about the true cost of our events and programs.
So, being unemployed in a couple weeks has me thinking about what exactly I’ll be doing with my time. Here’s what I’m thinking right now…
Most of my work centers around community building through programming and student events, as well as developing student leaders. Can’t this transition into something in the larger community? Community building where I live and where I work – volunteering with the Boys and Girls Club to develop those students, these are all ways to still do what I do, but in a different context.
I would challenge all of those students who are graduating and having a difficult time in a terrible economy to look at what they do that makes them excited to get up in the morning, and continue to do things that make that possible. A volunteer position or a part-time position (or even just an activity) where you do what you do best will serve not only to supplement your resume, but to help you to feel like you’re not wasting away, even though you’re having a hard time finding a job.
Our department has been working on revitalizing it’s web presence – ok, it’s mostly me working – for about a year now. The web site for our particular student activities board (we call it UAB – union activities board) is out of date at best and completely useless at worst – for a look at the devastation, visit http://uab.ncsu.edu. The students do not employ a webmaster, so most of the work for creating and updating the website has fallen to the staff.
Strangely, our department has some similar issues ( http://www.ncsu.edu/activities/), the website is not very well put together and, in my opinion, is out of date in the age of new media and social networking. People want to be connected to the web not have to search the web. It sounds geeky, but searching for things is something we did in 2004 not 2009. Now things and people should come to us.
I wanted to try a different method of marketing so I set up a departmental Twitter (http://twitter.com/ncsucampusactiv) and Facebook account (Facebook) to see if we couldn’t better approach our communication through the use of New Media. I’ve been using this account to update students on upcoming events (that I know about) for our department and for the Union Activities Board.
I try to friend students with the account, using the “people you may know” tool, a friend suggestor. The account gets friended without my assistance by about 10 students a week. There are currently over 900 people that are friends with the account, but I see this number continuing to grow in a viral fashion as we are able to connect with more students.
One particular event that I wanted to talk about was the aforementioned comedy show. Here were some things that I was able to do using Facebook that I would not have been able to do without a great deal more trouble on a personal website.
1 – solicited student feedback twice when we were looking at which comedian to bring. The first time, we looked at all the suggestions the students had and let them know that either availability didn’t work or price was too high. The second time was to ask them specifically what they thought of Ralphie May. We got several responses – all very positive.
2 – created an event invitation and invited 900 students to the event in a matter of about 20 mins. Through the viral nature of Facebook and social media, almost 2000 students were personally invited to the event. We had 650 students indicate that they were wanting to attend – the venue only held 430; we figuratively had a sellout in a matter of hours with no publicity other than Facebook.
3 – Sent a request to all people on the guest list for post event feedback. We received about 50 responses within a couple hours with direct feedback on the event, both positive and negative. The student who runs the committee I work with (and ran the event) was able to compile the feedback into a brief summary, which he then sent back out to the entire guest list and to administrators.
The beauty of this case is that we were able to communicate quicker and more efficiently than we have for many of our events. I hope we can take this model and implement it elsewhere.
As a self and other described Twitter junkie, I’ve been trying to figure out the applications for Student Affairs professionals.
According to my brief survey of one person, @saragregory, a member of the Twitterati and staff member at UNC’s Daily Tarheel, not many students are really using Twitter. I’ve found this to be true as well with the students I work with on a daily basis. I don’t think that Twitter appeals to normal student communication and feels a little bit superfluous with the prevalence of Facebook on campus.
I think there’s a certain amount of crossbreeding that’s going on though as Twitter becomes more prevalent in the mainstream media and the most curious students are starting to venture into the Twitter-verse. Vice versa, Facebook is becoming less exclusive every day and ironically becoming more like Twitter with their revised feed and updated design.
So, here’s the question…how do we use Twitter in student affairs?
After being a Tweeter for nearly a year, I think the main usefulness of Twitter is as a conversation tool. This is the way I’ve found the most enjoyment and functionality on Twitter. It enables personal connections to be fostered that may be difficult in other ways and maintains a connection that may be difficult on Facebook. This is one reason I maintain such a small group of people that I follow on Twitter – I want maximum connection with the people I do follow.
I think using Twitter as a billboard is only effective if you have an enormous number of followers. With the minimal number of students on most campuses using Twitter, I don’t see that the Billboard usage is effective.
However, as a conversation tool with the students who are using it, Twitter MAY be effective. I think it allows people who are using it to quickly communicate with the students who are following your office and is a rapid response tool for immediate student feedback. Just like the notion of using Twitter in a classroom, Twitter may be an effective tool for weighing potential programs or discussing in real-time an event going on campus.
From my experience though, Facebook can be effective on the same level and has many benefits that Twitter does not.
I had a consulting appointment with another department on campus about their social media presence and advised that I don’t think Twitter is THERE as a technology for student affairs and will be contingent on how many students are on Twitter. As this point, I advised them that Facebook may be the best option. As always with new media though, we need to be responsive and proactive to what best communicates with students and creates an environment where we can communicate with students.
Draw on Chickering (FREE) 
Let’s backtrack.
mortgage industry with Wells Fargo. During my time there, I’d be admitted to grad school and the rest, as they say, is history.
something I love.
So, Chapter 3 starts where the IT guy warns me that he was nearing the end of his effectiveness, as, most likely, we didn’t have access to the student database that we needed to cross reference the IDs that we swiped so that we could actually make something reasonable out of the data other than just a collection of scrabble like number combinations. Quite literally, the data we were collecting would be useless without access to this database.
