Gosh, it was nice to host The Great Haunt once again before Halloween! I want to thank all fiendish and fabulous merrymakers for their fun participation. The costumes and ghoulish treats from the café were very creative and tasty. The winner of the intensely difficult horror movie trivia contest was CEDI. Look out for them in dark hallways! They know too much. Marketing and Events won best group costume for “Zooming in slippers,” Erica Zajac won for best attention to detail for her “Dia de los Muertos” costume, and Chris Garrett was the coolest cat in the joint as “1968 John Lennon.” Honorable mention goes to Jo “Wonder Woman” Meuris. I want to thank Sita Sales, Leo Pena, Christine Gonzalez, Laura Hinojosa, Pam Ball, and Danette Barber for planning and executing a super fun party!

A Happy Hallows Eve was had by all!

You know it has been a long day when you need to look at your own file folders for a reminder of what you’ve been working on. “I worked on that recently? Wait, I worked on it this morning? That was me??” Granted, it wasn’t a bad day, just a long one, capped by a wonderful opportunity to see some faculty and staff in person at our first non-virtual Open House in over two years (some of whom I was meeting face-to-face for the first time, which was nice).

Some of my other preoccupations over the preceding two weeks – when I wasn’t busy forgetting what I had worked on – include:

I’ll spare you the finer details, but we worked with various stakeholders to significantly improve our system for collecting and reviewing student vaccination records. Ripping off the figurative band-aid of the prior system was not easy, and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to a bunch of folks (including the entire registrar’s office, Mick Haney, Gwen Sharp, and Janice Le-Nguyen), but the net result is a process that should be faster and easier to navigate for our students.

For the last several years, we’ve conducted a robust outreach and retention campaign via Academic Advising, typically with encouraging results. We recently launched our fall campaign, which includes emails, texts, and direct phone calls to students who have not yet registered. The new and unprecedented wrinkle, of course, is the challenge of helping students navigate the vaccine mandate, and we will be closely monitoring and adapting our process – as needed – over the course of the campaign.

I’ve been consulting with Tom Nicholas, our Director of Workforce Development, on the next steps for his division. The key highlights include a formal definition of what we mean by “workforce development,” a thorough, multi-faceted assessment of prospective workforce development programs, and the development of program “profiles” that provide a concise but informative outline of potential programs for internal and external stakeholders.

The dual enrollment space has become a hotbed of activity in recent years, with even UNR extending its reach to establish programming in Southern Nevada, so one of the major aims of the Nevada System is to develop a more complementary and collaborative working relationships among the NSHE institutions. We’re beginning to do our part to advance this goal and recently orchestrated a productive meeting with both UNLV and CSN about how our different dual enrollment programs can effectively coexist.