Best Wishes to the Class of 2021!
Dean's note
There is an unusual smell in the air—optimism! Blossoms and new leaves are out along College Avenue. There are more students and staff around. Many people are now vaccinated, and Rutgers itself is becoming a vaccination center. The effectiveness and safety of the new set of vaccines is a wonderful testimony to medical science. As the semester comes to an end, SC&I faculty and staff can be pleased by how well they have performed through the pandemic, sustaining their research and high-quality teaching delivery.

At SC&I Honor’s Day, I was delighted to give the Staff Service Excellence Award. Through the crisis year, SC&I’s staff have continued to serve faculty, students, and other staff in every way they could, employing a wide variety of technologies so that everyone can get the service and help they need. At the center of this success has been the Information Technology Services staff of John Bowen, Jon Oliver, Elias Tsang, Michael Souren, and George Yu.

During the virtual ceremony, I offered these remarks on the IT staff: Over the years, they planned for the challenges of business continuity during emergencies. So when one came, SC&I was in an incredibly advantageous position compared to many others at Rutgers. As the emergency unfolded, they worked with faculty to consider how to support classes that had been in the labs, they worked with hundreds of faculty, staff, and students to talk about how to get set up from home, and they immediately created backpacks of computers and accessories to lend to students and staff who were just not equipped to handle the emergency on their own. ITS is just one of several staff teams that have performed outstandingly over the last year.

We are now looking forward to celebrating another graduating class and hoping that this is the last fully virtual semester of teaching that we deliver. Although we have sustained teaching quality and have produced a prodigious amount of leading-edge research, faculty are itching to return to face-to-face teaching, to get out to conferences where they can network and plan research, and just hang out as a community. Frustratingly, planning for the fall is still hampered by uncertainty over distancing regulations and the availability of rooms. But we will offer significant face-to-face delivery as part of a much more rounded campus experience.

Looking forward to seeing you all in the fall.
 

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U.S. News and World Report Ranks SC&I's Master of Information Program Sixth in the Nation.

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