Student Affairs Committee
Director: Barbara Awad, ()
Associate Directors: Adele Smith ()
John Saad ()
Minute Taker: Nicole Nygard
Meeting Location:HUB 322
Friday, October 7th, 2017 (Morning)Call to Order: 11:00am
- Barry Bram
- Student Engagement University Wide Initiative
- Service Learning and student engagement task force
- 19 members
- Student success is related to study abroad, freshman seminars, etc
- Goal is to have every student participate in at least one engaged scholarship program (internships, study abroad, etc)
- Engaged scholarship imitative
- President Barron
- Identified 6 imperatives: one being student engagement
- He has given us money to do this
- Student Engagement Network
- Administrative structure
- Early and Often
- The earlier you start to engage the better grades you will get and the more marketable you will be for a job or graduate school
- Core Competencies
- Civic responsibility
- Ethical reasoning
- Multicultural awareness
- Systems thinking
- Understanding how all the parts contribute
- Professional skill development
- Anyone can be trained for day to day tasks, but learning to work with people is needed to be successful
- Learning outcomes
- Intellectual development
- Personal development
- Stronger sense of self esteem
- Strengths and weaknesses
- Change of Campus Students
- Adjustment challenges
- In a new environment and that can be intimidating
- Academic Challenges
- When people come to UP, GPAs tend to go down because they are not used to the higher-level courses and they are dealing with the adjustment
- Engagement Challenges
- Hard to stay involved or start getting involved because it is all new
- Ten Student Engagement Types (Some of these can overlap, so do not get caught up on definitions of each type)
- Undergraduate Research
- Get connected with faculty and engage in this
- Professional Experience
- Going to conferences, presenting at exhibition
- Travel-related Experience
- Study Abroad, Study Away programs (domestic travel)
- Community-based Learning
- Creative Accomplishments
- Cocurricular achievements
- Studying and coming up with your own ideas and then getting feedback on those ideas
- Course with out of class component
- Take classes during spring and then during spring break they go abroad and then continue class upon return
- Organizational experience
- CCSG, SGA, BOT member, other org involvement
- Realize that org involvement is just as important as our learning experience
- Peer mentoring
- Self-directed student engagement
- E.g. Accounting major, did not get an internship, but developed a new business model for his parent’s local business over the summer
- He had the opportunity to write a paper and get it published
- Volunteer
- Programs
- Student Engagement Grants
- Sites.psu.edu/engagepsu/students
- If you have an internship in NY, and want help funding that, we can do that through these grants
- Average grant was $2800 last year
- Moustafa (Behrend): You can be a first year student and still apply for this?
- Yes, any year student can apply
- Student Engagement Interns
- Sites.psu.edu/engagepsu/students
- If you are changing campus, we would welcome an opportunity to have you on board
- If we hire you on a campus, we will be wanting you to work to engage students on your campus
- Faculty Academy
- Training faculty and staff on how to take advantage of these opportunites
- Get students more involved in the work they are doing
- Fayette: If we wanted to bring travel-related experience to our campus, would faculty go through that website to do so?
- They could go through the student activities office at UP
- If it is for a course, they can use that link
- Moutstafa (Behrend): Innovation commons (Launch Box) fall under that grant?
- Yes, giving student seed funding for entrepreneurship experience
- Student Engagement Portal
- Engagement opportunities will all be in this portal that all Penn State students will have access to
- Will be asking companies, such as IBM or Google, to develop this portal for us
- No other University is doing this right now
- Not a lot of universities have as many engagement opportunities as us
- Harrisburg: Will clubs be able to have access?
- Build an API (probably Google) that will be able to link to any other database you have for your clubs
- What my job is at UP
- Every undergraduate student should have a meaningful arts experience (playing an instrument, going to a museum, going to concerts, etc)
- Performing Arts Council- umbrella org for over 70 other orgs of the arts
- Stand for State (supervisor for this org)
- Always looking for people to lead our student engagement team
- Oversee student activities office
- Coordinate break trips
- Weekend leadership emerging experiences
- Campus programing
- Student programming association
- Homecoming
- THON
- Center for Arts and Crafts
- Non-credit bearing courses
- Sculpting, belly-dancing, etc
- Oversee student engagement network
- University Park Opportunities
- Academic Opportunities
- You can continue things easily
- Work with a faculty member and ask them if they know anyone you can talk to
- Affiliate organizations
- UP allocation committee, Lion Scotts, etc
- We manage them
- Fraternities and Sororities
- Enhanced eligibility requirements
- You cannot go through recruitment unless you have 14 credit hours at UP
- Multicultural and Orgs
- Almost all of campuses have diversity related orgs
- Contact Info:
- 814 863 0638
- Questions:
- Altoona: How do we compare to other universities with undergraduate research?
- Kind of lower, came to the game a little later than other schools
- Altoona: How does UP compare to the rest of the commonwealth?
- Naturally, we probably have more students engaged up here
- More facilities up here for research and more grants given
- Beaver: What do you think is the biggest impact and has studen
- 95% of students were engaged, we found in a UP survey
- More students have been able to talk fondly about student engagement
- Behrend: Has it ever been in consideration, student mentors that have been in the same position that would help with transition students?
- Someone is responsible for Change of Campus students (creating a council)
- Schulykill: What would you suggest for students that change campus to another commonwealth campus?
- Align what you have done or what you are interested in
- There are a lot of opportunities at commonwealth campuses
- How can that campus get you to where you want to be?
- New Ken: Regarding multicultural student engagement, when there is a need for it but there isn’t very much representation, what do you do?
- If the raw numbers are so small, maybe have an umbrella org for multicultural orgs
- Response: We do have that right now and Student leaders want to participate but they are too involved
- Consider partnering with other campuses
- Fayette: Let everyone who is not a minority know that they can join too
- Debellis: If you are creating a diversity umbrella, remember to include disabilities, and other not commonly talked about diversity categories
- Fostering dialogue between people that have different experiences is very important
- Fayette: Can you talk more about the portal?
- Going to be an app, consider it one large database
- We will have profile info about you: your name, what you are studying, org involvement
- Will have some options such as: study abroad, student org, or theme-based
- You will be able to see which things students
- Kiersten, Fayette: Transferred to Fayette and was not able to finish research, she was turned down, are professors able to turn students down?
- They have the power to turn students down
- There are no specific requirements
- Moustafa (Behrend): Would it be possible to have alternative spring break that is connected with multiple campuses?
- Yes, we are trying to get something together for hurricane relief with a couple of campuses
Adjournment: 12:00pm