The fall has been whizzing by, and here it is Halloween already. I shouldn’t be surprised, it’s been busier than ever. (I know. I say that every year.) We’ve completed two massive projects involving tracking student enrollment and outcomes over multiple cohorts and years, and another one that was small potatoes after those. The Associate Provost and I have spent a ton of time building on the considerable work of our Middle States Periodic Review Report (PRR) Steering Committee to create a first draft of the report. Our new IR staff members and I have worked together to get up to speed (including the Fall freeze and fall IPEDS reporting). We’ve fielded four five! surveys (so far), and are getting pretty darned good at Qualtrics. (Nothing like troubleshooting to help you learn something.) I’ve gone through the CITI training for IRB and feel incredibly ethical. And of course we’ve dealt with all the usual ad hoc requests and miscellany. But with some of this big stuff behind us, and what is turning out to be a terrific IR team, it’s like the sun coming out. For the first time in a year it seems we’re almost caught up. We freeze employee data tomorrow, so that may not last long.
