Blogs

Attention Students: Know Your Professors! Educators, you can use this as a tool to show your students. Spice up your syllabus a bit perhaps. They should read this so that they know it is OK to get to know you. As a student myself, this would have helped me my freshman year in college. It’s your freshman year, at a new school, in a new city. Everything is new. The teachers you have known from the past four years are still back home. It’s a whole new ball game now and you are intimidated. If you are not now, you will be at some point. No matter how independent or optimistic you are about...

C ommunity Service plays an important role in helping students learn that what they are doing is making a difference. Sometimes, they don’t realize that they really can help their community and have an impact. Many students want to get involved in the community, but sometimes don’t know where to look. Give students a clear way to find these organizations and groups that are doing great things. So how do we let them know what opportunities are out there? I’ve said it before and I will say it again! Publicity! This is the main tool for anything. This generation is so influenced...

My recent nuptials have me thinking long term. I started thinking about buying a house, getting a dog (as practice for), raising a family, and soon found myself thinking about student activities. Perhaps your brain jumps around quite like mine does, so this leap from raising my own kids to developing the ones I work with on campus everyday makes sense to you. Here I am wondering: how to we get our students thinking long term? How do we get students to focus on the bigger picture when ultimately, they won't' be around to see the effects of their hard work? A few things come to mind that...

So, at this point, I have talked a lot about the periphery I feel like so let me talk a little bit about actual engagement with the students. There is a lot to learn there as well and after all, if you aren't learning every day, well, then I would suggest some deep thought. For the new advisors out there, probably the best lesson to learn is you are not a do’er anymore, you are now a facilitator. That, in and of itself, can be a hard transition. I was lucky that the first board I worked with I had literally “moved up” from that board. Several of the students sitting on the...

I have to admit to a bit of uneasiness in agreeing to write this column initially once Chris requested it. I think it is human nature that we all want to try and move past mistakes once we have fixed/gotten over, etc. whatever the appropriate word is here and when I first agreed to do this my first reaction was good gosh I have to relive ALL of this? But you see I dated someone once who told me she had “never changed and was the same person she was in high school” and, on more than one occasion, I called her a boldfaced liar. Whether we admit it or not we are all a product of our experiences...

Ok, if getting students involved was this easy we would have all of this mastered by now! The quest to get students involved on campus seems like a project that we will never “finish,” so the thrill of the process has been where I have spent a good amount of time and thought. The process of fostering student involvement can always benefit from some examination, so let’s focus on ten things your department can do today to maximize student involvement on your campus! 1. Understand How much do you know about the level of involvement on your campus to date? Citing numbers of student...

If you're like me, you visibly cringe when you see a mom hand her little three-year-old daughter FOUR paper towels to dry her tiny hands rather than using the hand dryer. Your heart sinks a little when you see lawn sprinklers spewing water like mad during a torrential downpour, and you find yourself picking 20 ounce coke bottles out of the trash in a classroom only to carry them to the recycling container in the hallway. You'd consider yourself a eco-concious guy or gal. But you look around (your office, your neighborhood, your campus community) and you know we all could be doing more....

I just got done reading an article on InsideHigherEd.com about the recent college student suicides at Cornell University (you can read the full article here ) and obviously my first reaction is to be sad, about the desperation that some people go through and the results of that desperation, especially for those at the student level. My second reaction is to wonder if there was anything that could have been done about these tragedies before they happened. I know that's a common response to have, and we all look back on instances like this and wonder what could have been done differently. Looking...