“When we speak of 'the higher education community,' it's not just an expression... We really are a community of learners, and we take care of each other.” — John Peters
A.T. Still University is split up into a number of schools, including two osteopathic medical schools, a dental school, a school of allied health, and my school, which is the School of Health Management. Today I received an email from the interim dean of SHM, Kimberly O'Reilly. It wasn't send just to me personally, it was a note to all of us in the school. Interestingly, the email directed us to Dean O'Reilly's message as a video on the SHM web site, an interesting use of multimedia, and a very welcome development considering that I've remarked in the past on how ATSU doesn't take good enough advantage of online audio and video.
Even more interesting, she called on students and alumni to make our own videos and send them in, to help ATSU recruit students. She explained that she made a video for us in part so we could put a face to the name, and hoped some of us could respond in kind. That's an exciting challenge, and I'm looking forward to taking her up on it. I already have a videocamera (one of those cheap ones from Flip, but it ought to be good enough for this), and I figure this should be a good excuse to get familiar with some of the multimedia studio tools that come with Linux.
Another interesting fact about my dean is that she was one of the first graduates of the program that I'm in now. I realize that if a school has too many faculty members that are its own alumni that this considered a problem, because it means there's not enough diversity of training among the faculty. But that's not the case here, and it's good to know that the person who's running things there really knows what I'm going through.
Next up, I get interviewed by the Sacramento Bee newspaper about my recent critical comments about UC Berkeley's call for a federal bailout of top tier state universities.
Image courtesy of g_kat26