Vickie Shields

I would like to thank everyone who helped organize the Staff Professional Development Day as well as the speakers and all who participated. I was honored to give a welcome for the day and to participate in most of the sessions. In my remarks, I put out a challenge to all of us at NSC to thoroughly examine our commitment to student-centeredness. As we do our jobs, as often as possible we need to try and imagine an individual student’s path through a typical day where he or she is navigating both academics and student support services. Individual units are stops along the path. As units we need to ask ourselves: What kind of experience is the student having at each one of his or her stops? Who is the first person they encounter at my stop? Is this person friendly? Are they helpful? Can they get the student to the help they need? And as a College we need to take up the same challenge by asking: How easy or difficult is it for a student to complete his or her path in a day? Do we put up physical barriers for them to move easily from office to office? Do we put up scheduling barriers? Do we give them consistent advice from unit to unit? Have we inadvertently created policy or procedural roadblocks to student success in navigating their path? This type of questioning serves as a gentle reminder that in order to be truly student-centered we must be willing to walk a student’s path.

 

In the category of great news from NSHE: For the Gateway Course Success Project, as of the Spring term NSC achieved our math and English benchmarks (85%) with 95.1% and 96.9% respectively.   According to the System office we “knocked it out of the park.” We can breathe easy for the summer because any extra summer enrollment will push our numbers that much higher. Congratulations to all who made this success possible. Nice job!

Tony Scinta

First, I want to thank the teams in Recruitment, Advising, ITS, and IR for helping us stage a comprehensive communication campaign for enrollment and retention. It is the largest I have been a part of at Nevada State, and I want to give a special thanks to Bree Pitkin for helping us effectively leverage Mongoose, our fancy text messaging platform. Hopefully, this campaign will succeed in what it set out to do – increase the re-enrollment of continuing NSC students and the new enrollment of first-timers.

Second, I just returned from a Complete College America summit where NSC attended as an invited guest of the College of Southern Nevada. I’m looking at collaborations between the two institutions that will increase associate degree attainment at CSN and the matriculation of their students to NSC. We’ve already made significant progress in recent months in several areas, including improved articulation agreements (thanks, in large part, to Transfer Coordinator Erin Hall), and there is tremendous potential for enhanced collaboration between the two institutions.  

Laura Naumann

STAFF DEVELOPMENT 

Staff Development Day was held today. The NSC community came for lunch, a welcome from our new Provost, a Workday demo, and workshops on various topics. Thank you to unit heads for encouraging your staff's participation. Follow this link to complete our evaluation survey and to download slides/handouts from today's breakout sessions.

 

Interested in helping plan Fall Convocation? Our first planning meeting will be Wednesday, July 19th from 10 - 11 am in RSC 303. Email Laura.Naumann@nsc.edu if you'd like to attend.

Gregory Robinson

It’s been a busy few weeks! Some highlights include:

• In-person interviews for the Director of our TRiO-SSS program. We hope to make a decision soon.
  
• Working with Dr. Sharp to lead Top Gun, our first online class about online teaching. The participating faculty are doing terrific work, including creating online course greetings and doing assessments of their courses. 

In other news:

• Dr. Tucker led an intensive three-day assessment workshop, where English faculty evaluated over 120 composition papers. Congratulations to Dr. Tucker and the faculty who participated: Ivonne Baxter, Nichole Bratsouleas-Urias, Tiffany Briggs, Laura Decker, Myra Infante-Sheridan, Gregory Kompes, Heather Lang, Francesca Marineo, and Joan Robinson.
  
• Chris Garrett attended two conferences, including an Assessment Institute at Alverno College. Dr. Garrett will be leading the effort to complete an assessment of our core curriculum in the fall. 

I’m off to the Western Academic Leadership Academy this week, where leaders from various states look at the major challenges affecting their institutions and higher education in general. 

Rich Yao

Our New Student Orientation (NSO) sessions have been a huge success thus far, and we’ve seen significant growth in the number of students attending. Last year, we had a total of 379 students RSVP for the NSO. This year, we have far outpaced that figure, and due to high demand, we had to open an additional NSO session on August 12th. Thus far, we’ve had 271 students attend one of five NSOs we’ve hosted, and 224 students RSVP'd for the remaining three NSOs. Our advising team would like to thank everyone who is actively involved in these events, including our facilities team, IT staff, academic deans and faculty, recruitment and admissions, the registrar’s office, and the financial aid staff. 

Lastly, I’d like to commend and recognize our academic advising team: Elizabeth Brandise, Anam Qadir, Angie Freeman, Alicia LaMotte, Karla Mitchell, Alex Kunkle (Director), and all of our student workers and peer mentors. They are currently understaffed by four advisors, and we also lost our orientation coordinator shortly after the first NSO. Their hard work and dedication to our new students is evidenced by the success and growth of the NSO in spite of a major staff shortage. Help is on the way, as we are hosting 10 applicants on campus this week in hopes of hiring four new advisors.  We are looking forward to a fully-staffed advising center for the first time in quite a while, and are excited to improve our service to students and collaborations with the faculty.

Sandip Thanki

Starting fall 2017, NSC is offering a BA in Deaf Studies.  As of July 16th, we have 12 student enrolled in the major and we expect this number to grow significantly.  Last fall, the Deaf Studies minor had reached 66 students, and 89 are already registered for the upcoming fall.

School of Liberal Arts & Sciences Updates

Dr. Sam Oliphant recently received official word that NSC has been awarded a National Science Foundation Mentoring to Accelerate Retention & Change Outcomes in Sciences (MARCOS) grant. Sam is one of our biology faculty members and serves as PI on the grant (LAS Dean Andy Kuniyuki is Co-PI); the award is $650,000 over five years. The grant will fund programs that support biology majors who are talented but low-income; program initiatives will include financial aid, intensive mentoring, blocked scheduling for participating students, grade school preparation, and research and internship opportunities. We're exceptionally excited to be able to provide this support to our student body, and appreciate the willingness of NSC faculty and staff members Sandip Thanki, Alex Kunkle, Anthony Morrone, Tony Scinta, Chad Cross, Aaron Wong, and Qingmin Shi to sit on the advisory board for the program.

Staffing Changes

Recent Hires 

Recent Departures

The following faculty and staff members recently left their positions: Stephanie Durfor and Cathy Adams (SON); Ted Mitchell (SOE); Brian Gleason (SOE/LAS); John Laurie (LAS); Sam McCool (ITS); Cheyenne Rogers (Advising); Chris Nickerson (Marketing & Events). 

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