Greg and Kat's blog

There are a lot of days where nothing seems to get done. There are days when the whole world lines up against you. Then there are days like today when everything just happens.

For background: I have recently learned what our admission cutoffs are for fall applications. You’d think I would know what they are, since it’s the undergrad director’s job to set them, but that’s another story. The cutoffs were a little nutty (maybe more on that in a later post), and I had a bit of a controlled temper tantrum about it.

Highlights from the day:

• Started with my first Faculty Enrolment Management meeting. (For those that don’t know, “Enrollment Management” is recruiting, admission, and retention of students.) Found out that our new admit targets are actually pretty reasonable for the fall: definitely not enough to justify panicking and setting low cutoffs.

  Somehow in there, my Associate Dean decided to continue my tantrum up the chain in a productive way. I thought I was just ensuring that the same thing didn’t happen again next year, but we might get a change for this year.

• Had a long discussion with Paula from Engineering about Enrolment Management stuff. ENSC is our closest ally in a lot of this, since our student pool is pretty similar.

• Had lunch with Margo and Art at the Indian place on campus.

• Got some data from Nathan on performance of students admitted last fall. Remembered how to do a linear regression and found out that the numbers exactly match my instincts on student retention. That means I have data to support where I want to set the cutoffs. Sent the information to everybody that would listen. Getting this information together and presented less than 48 hours after the start of my spaz is astonishing by University standards: huzzah Nathan!

• Got information for our new Software Systems program to the web guy. The program doesn’t have final approval yet, but it’s critical that we start promoting.

• School meeting. Got our proposal for concentrations in the major passed in time for the 2008/09 calendar. Sent the proposal up to the next level.

• Inconsequential meeting with people from the downtown campus about offerings there. We’re okay; they’re okay.

• Helped Daniela with her math homework.

• Errands: Costco, and Home Depot. Now I have a doorbell again.

• One last look at the job description for Amanda’s position.

Not a bad 12 hour day.