FALL QUARTER 2017
DEANS’ UPDATE
Images from 2016 Wildcat Welcome events
TABLE OF CONTENTS 02 | Message from Student Affairs Vice President Patricia Telles-Irvin 04 | New Places and Faces on Campus 06 | NCA overviewrecap of successes
STUDENT AFFAIRS
08 | Student Engagement Data Capture Initiative 10 | Leadership Framework 12 | Wildcat Welcome preview
Division of
STUDENTAFFAIRS Deans’ Update FALL QUARTER 2017 Dear Colleagues, As we prepare to embark on a new school year, it is important we take time to reflect on the previous year, acknowledge our progress, and appreciate our successes. I am proud of the growth within our community over the past year and look forward to the year that lies ahead. I would first like to extend a warm welcome to Jennifer Luttig-Komrosky, our new executive director of Residential Services, and Valronica Scales, our new director of Residential Life, who will be instrumental members of our team as we continue expanding and improving our campus through the undergraduate residential experience.
Vice President for Student Affairs Patricia Telles-Irvin
The Northwestern Career Advancement (NCA) office has had another successful year of helping students achieve their career goals through developing new tools for students and amplifying existing programming. The Summer Internship Grant Program awarded a record number of grants this year, and Summer Career Treks provided students with industry insight. NCA’s recently released First Destination Report details where the class of 2016 were six months after Commencement. Other updates this fall include the implementation of Leadership Development & Community Development’s Leadership Framework to foster a fuller leadership experience for our students and the launch of the Student Engagement Data Capture Initiative to track students’ out of classroom learning experiences and involvement. We are so excited to introduce a new class of Wildcats to our thriving community during Wildcat Welcome this month. I know each new student will contribute to our campus community. I look forward to seeing where this year takes us, and I have faith that it will continue the positive trend of creating a better and stronger Northwestern community. Warm Regards,
Patricia Telles-Irvin
2
Vision WE WILL BE FULL PARTNERS IN THE STUDENT LEARNING EXPERIENCE. The Division of Student Affairs partners with the academic schools/colleges and other University Divisions in allegiance with the University’s vision and mission to advance student learning and success.
Mission THE MISSION OF THE NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY DIVISION OF STUDENT AFFAIRS IS TO EDUCATE STUDENTS, ENGAGE THE COMMUNITY, AND ENRICH THE NORTHWESTERN EXPERIENCE. We pursue our mission through providing learning programs, services, and mentoring to maximize students’ potential, removing barriers to learning, strengthening readiness to learn, and sustaining a safe and healthy Northwestern community.
3
NEW PLACES AND FACES ON CAMPUS The Class of 2021 has moved in but first-year students aren’t the only Wildcats who will encounter new places and faces on campus. With the completion of 560 Lincoln Street Residence Hall, the first new residence hall envisioned in the Housing Master Plan, and numerous improvements to the residence halls and dining commons, it may be time to take another Evanston campus tour.
A better undergraduate experience isn’t created through brick and mortar alone, and the changes to campus housing highlight the new direction toward a more social, collaborative and community-driven campus life. Residents can also look forward to a new Engagement Center, the second on campus, when Willard Hall opens in the winter. The center provides distinct spaces for students to connect with fellow residents, University staff and faculty outside of the lecture hall, and features the latest classroom technology and versatile furniture. Faculty and students can meet for a science class and eat in the dining hall together afterward, and students can do yoga or rehearse a song in the same room later.
It’s all part of the ten-year, $500 million Plan — overseen by the new executive director of Residential Services, Jennifer Luttig-Komrosky, and assistant vice president, Paul Riel — to improve the campus housing experience through renovation and construction projects. In January 2018, an upgraded Willard Residence Hall will open and join the growing list of fully renovated facilities, including 1838 Chicago, Shepard Hall, Allison Hall, Goodrich House, and the North and South Mid-Quads.
While students will rejoice at the return of late-night favorite Fran’s Café to Willard, they can also enjoy the changes to the residential meal plans this year. The new Open Access Meal Plan provides unlimited swipes per week at any of the five dining halls, and is open to all students, faculty, and staff. Diners can swipe in any time of day for a cup of coffee or an entire meal without worrying about wasting a meal on a quick snack. In a change to all meal plans, Dining Dollars replace equivalency meals and points. Dollars can be used at any campus dining or retail location — for Frontera guacamole and chips or some much-needed laundry detergent — and unspent Dollars roll over to the next quarter, allowing students greater flexibility throughout their on-campus living experience.
The dust settles just in time for another big change this September: the first phase of the new Two-Year Live-on Requirement, in which first- and second-year students will be required to live on campus. Though nearly every Northwestern first-year student chooses to live in one of the 25+ residence halls, in the fall of 2018, sophomore students will also join their first-year counterparts. The requirement ensures that students are supported throughout their transition to college, while fully enjoying the ample social, co-curricular, and academic opportunities provided by the on-campus residential experience. Most recent to join the robust campus community are the residents of 560 Lincoln, as they will enjoy its suite-style housing options, common areas for meeting, studying, and socializing, airy two-story lounges, and the multi-purpose rooms that populate the ground floor.
4
Jennifer Luttig-Komrosky, Executive Director of Residential Services
Valronica Scales, Director of Residential Life
Jennifer has served as the executive director of Residential Services at Northwestern since February 2017, and manages a staff that provides comprehensive programs and services for all students who live on campus through the department’s five principle offices: Residential Life, Residential Academic Initiatives, Administrative Services, Budget, and Facilities & Construction.
Valronica has served as the director of Residential Life at Northwestern since August 2017, and develops the goals and objectives of Residential Life. She will also work closely with residential staff to enrich the social, personal, cultural, and intellectual growth of students living in campus housing. Previously, she served as the associate director of Residential Life at Washington University in St. Louis (MO). In addition to her work at Wash U, Valronica has served in a number of roles with NASPA, ASCA, and ACPA.
Prior to this position, she served as the executive director of College Housing & Residential Services at the University of Chicago. She also has served the campus housing organizations at DePaul University and Illinois Institute of Technology and continues to contribute to the field of Higher Education through her involvement with ACPA, NASPA, and ACUHOI.
5
NCA FOSTERS POST-GRADUATE SUCCESS Summer Internship Grant Program awarded record number of grants
The success of Northwestern students as they transition to alumni is one of our most important goals as a university, and Northwestern Career Advancement (NCA) plays an instrumental part in helping students achieve such success after graduation. NCA provides students with a wealth of resources throughout their undergraduate and graduate careers, including career advising and counseling, graduate and professional school advising, employment databases, on-campus recruiter visits, and career fairs. NCA widened the reach of its services during the 2016-17 school year by introducing a targeted outreach program to first-year students and small group sessions based on industry interests.
Every May, NCA’s Summer Internship Grant Program (SIGP) provides grants of at least $3,000 to undergraduate students participating in unpaid summer internships. In its 10th year, the program awarded a record number of students with grants, helping 394 students finance their summer internship experiences. NCA also provided career development support for the students throughout their summers. This summer, students held internships at Los Angeles Magazine, Red Hour Films, Prague Shakespeare Company, The Field Museum, the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, and many more. Past years’ grant recipients said the experiences SIGP afforded them have helped shape their career goals and provided a strong foundation upon which to build their futures.
Total student contacts continued to climb in the last year; NCA met with a record number of 3,500 students in more than 10,500 appointments, walk-ins, and express advising meetings. NCA also facilitated new employer connections and supported existing relationships to broaden opportunities for students, welcoming more than 400 employers to campus for interviews, career fairs, or information sessions, and supervised more than 3,800 interviews in the NCA Interview Center. Here are a few more highlights from NCA’s successful 2016-17 year:
2017 Summer Career Treks brought students to cities across the U.S. To help students explore their industries of interest, NCA facilitated its 2017 Summer Career Treks. The program brought a total of 130 students on treks that focused on startups and technology; marketing; media; film and television; government, law, and policy; and investment banking. These visits allowed students to gain an insider industry perspective through a series of panels, networking discussions, office tours, and other
6
hands-on activities on treks to Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. Throughout the school year, NCA continues to lead groups of students on career treks to various employers in Chicago and other major U.S. cities.
Beyond Northwestern: The first destinations of the undergraduate class of 2016 NCA is proud to report that within six months of Commencement, 96 percent of the undergraduate class of 2016 was employed, attending graduate or professional school, or engaged in other career-related activities. This information is from NCA’s recently released First Destination Report, which provides detail on graduates’ industries of employment, salaries, and geographic locations based on data from 81 percent of the undergraduate members of the class of 2016.
7
DATA CAPTURE INITIATIVE GAUGES STUDENT INVOLVEMENT In July of 2015, Vice President for Student Affairs Patricia Telles-Irvin charged a small committee with the big task of understanding student engagement within Student Affairs.
educational experiences outside the classroom. The initiative aims to gather information about students’ campus involvement and explore how it impacts students’ classroom learning and overall Northwestern experience.
Assistant Vice President for Student Engagement Kelly Schaefer was a part of that team. She said that TellesIrvin “wanted to know not only how it works across the division, she also wanted us to understand how that gets measured.” Since then, Student Engagement and Student Affairs Assessment & Planning have been working to create the Student Engagement Data Capture Initiative to do just that.
“We needed some kind of central repository for participation data, much like the registrar is capturing data for all students that register for classes,” Robert Aaron, executive director of Student Affairs Assessment and Planning, said. “We want to be able to do that for students out of class in the educational realm.” The departments worked with Student Affairs Information Technology to create their own adaptation of a registrar. Across all departments, administrators
The Student Engagement Data Capture Initiative will launch this fall to track student participation in
8
“We want to support students’ out-of-class learning so it enhances their in-class learning.”
“In our departments we are doing things in a way that is a little bit siloed; we’re each doing our own assessment, our own measurement, our own research,” Schaefer said. “I think that this initiative aims to broaden that altogether. We can look at things from a slightly bigger picture. We can take the foundational things that each of the departments are doing and understand what that means division wide.”
can enter an event into the web-based application. Students that attend these events will swipe their Wildcards upon entry, and the application will input the attendance information collected into the large collective database. There are two main benefits that come from collecting data of this variety: first, it allows event organizers to follow up with attendees and encourage them to reflect upon and assess the activities. Second, it allows administrators to evaluate how student involvement shapes their individual relationship to campus culture and community.
Data will only be collected at appropriate events, and it will be voluntary for students to participate. For example, students who attend leadership development activities will be asked to swipe in, but students who attend counselling sessions, are involved in support groups, or seek medical care will not be tracked. “We do want to respect privacy and do this in a safe way,” Aaron said.
“We want to support students’ out-of-class learning so it enhances their in-class learning,” Aaron said. “If we can develop profiles and understand the students that are involved at a certain extent and doing really well, we might be able to understand a little bit better how their involvement interacts with their other skills and help the student understand what those are.”
Right now, the data collected through this initiative is intended to be for staff and faculty use only; however, Schaefer said she thinks there is potential for this information to be useful to students too. “Down the road I think there’s definitely room for students to use this to learn about their own involvement,” she said.
Not only will this initiative create a fuller picture of students’ time at Northwestern, it will also help each department within Student Affairs better understand the effect it has on students within the context of the division.
9
LDCE INTRODUCES LEADERSHIP FRAMEWORK
Northwestern offers extensive opportunities for students to broaden their range of leadership skills throughout their time on campus and beyond. To aid in this development, Leadership Development & Community Engagement (LDCE) has created the Leadership Framework. This framework outlines the core pillars of leadership that faculty and staff should focus on in conversation and programming with students and provides ways to measure students’ leadership skills and knowledge. The new framework aims to amplify the existing leadership development work with students. The entire framework is based on the importance of understanding self, supported by the core concepts of justice and ethics, strategy and reasoning, building and maintaining relationships, and executing change. These core skills and values intersect to create stronger group dynamics, structures and culture, and ability to adapt. LDCE director Kelly Benkert and the rest of her team have been hard at work over the past two years collecting data, student feedback, and existing research to create the system, which is tailor-made for the Northwestern community. The ultimate goal of framing the discussion around leadership in this way is to foster an environment in which students are able to grow in their efficacy and deepen their authenticity in leadership. “The idea is that each department will be using these concepts as they design and build out their programming and curriculum with students,” Benkert said. Multiple departments across Student Affairs, as well as partners such as the Office of Fellowships and the Buffett Institute, helped create and implement the framework. As the Leadership Framework expands and develops across campus, Benkert said she hopes that it impacts the stu-
10
cation, and mutually reinforcing activities among all participants.” In order to achieve the ‘centralized infrastructure,’ collective impact mandates the presence of a “backbone support,” which in this case is the LDCE team.
dent culture surrounding leadership. “Students have told us that now leadership on campus is thought of as a position: ‘I am a leader because I am the president of this organization.’ We want to shift the culture so students understand leadership as a process, that it’s a positive change process,” she said. “Anyone who is a member of an organization can engage in leadership to shape the direction of that organization and the work that organization is doing.”
The framework is being used as a guiding document for program planning and design by departments across Student Affairs and academic and research partners. Full implementation is still a work in progress as LDCE continues to develop tools and resources to support student leadership development.
The “how” behind the leadership framework, as Benkert put it, is a theory called collective impact. Collective impact is inspired by a model developed at Stanford University, which it defines as “the commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem… Unlike most collaborations, collective impact initiatives involve a centralized infrastructure, a dedicated staff, and a structured process that leads to a common agenda, shared measurement, continuous communi-
The Leadership Collective Impact Group, a community of practice dedicated to implementing the framework, meets monthly to work toward actualizing the framework within our community. If you’d like to stay up to date on the framework’s development and implementation, join the listserv: LCI@listerv.it.northwestern.edu.
11
WELCOME CLASS OF 2021 AND TRANSFERS!
12
Incoming students start getting to know Northwestern on more than an academic level through Wildcat Welcome. A series of True Northwestern Dialogues (TNDs) create space for dialogue around important topics to help new students learn about themselves, our community, and how to seek help if they need it during their time on campus. The sequence builds off of the online programs students completed over the summer, AlcoholEdu for College and Haven, which explores healthy relationships and sexuality. The TNDs specifically focus on generating dialogues around alcohol and drugs, mental health and wellness, consent and sexual relationships, and diversity and inclusion. The TND learning doesn’t stop after Wildcat Welcome; students will attend two sessions per quarter throughout the rest of the school year to continue to foster dialogues and support student success during their first year and beyond.
Welcome to our incoming Class of 2021 and transfers! The newest Wildcats moved in on Monday, September 11! After carrying on the March Through The Arch tradition and a brief Kiss ‘n Bye with their families on September 12, new students spend eight days together, bonding through fun and educational activities on campus, learning about our Wildcat community, and growing their Purple Pride. Wildcat Welcome helps new students and transfers build relationships with each other, as well as their faculty and Peer Advisers who guide students through their hectic week of learning about themselves and Northwestern. The first few days of Wildcat Welcome focus on preparing students for the academic challenges they will face at Northwestern. Students become familiar with their individual schools through a variety of school-specific information sessions, academic orientations, and advising opportunities. Along with the guidance of their academic and Peer Advisers, these activities are geared toward helping students prepare to register for their fall courses later in the week.
The busy week of Wildcat Welcome draws to a close with the President’s Convocation on September 18, the day before classes begin. President Schapiro speaks to new students, faculty, and staff in a celebration of the beginning of new students’ academic start at Northwestern
13
STUDENT AFFAIRS
14