Congrats, Scholarships, and Updates
CONGRATULATIONS TO:
Russ Keeling is to be commended for his superior performance in teaching two sections of COM 115 last semester. Russ' overall mean scores on the Faculty Evaluation administered through the Honors College were 1.05 and 1.08, which are in the top quartile for the fifty-eight Honors College professors who taught for us last Fall semester. Such a score is especially remarkable since Honors College professors are as a rule a highly capable group – e.g., the composite mean for the entire group was 1.33 (with 1 as the best and 5 as the lowest score). We are honored to have Russ continue his excellent teaching career in our honors courses. Thanks Russ.
Ryan Childress has been chosen as the Student Governor of Missouri State’s Board of Governors. This is indeed an honor for Ryan and for the department of communication. Ryan is a Public Relations Major and has a double minor in Public Law and Technical Writing. If you see him or have him in class, please pass along your congratulations.
Meredith Cantrell, for those of you who remember her, she received her undergrad in 2003 and completed her MA in Health Communication at Purdue University in 2005. She recently accepted at position with the Kansas regional office of the National Cancer Institutes, Cancer Information Service. This is a huge accomplishment for her, and it speaks to her training in health com both here and at Purdue.
CALENDAR ITEMS
I just posted to the InCommon blog reminding our graduate and undergraduate students that scholarship applications are due in the office March 15. I advised them to speak with you if they have questions about a scholarship, so I wanted to give you the head’s up about that.
Relatedly, the Annual Honors Ceremony will be held this year Monday, April 14 at 2:30 in the PSU. We will announce scholarship recipients at this time as well as LPH having their induction ceremony. Please put this on your calendars!
COMING SOON
Faculty meeting, Wednesday, March 19 at 2:00.
February Faculty Meeting and other items of interest
So we had to cut short our faculty meeting today, I'm sure you were crushed.
Actually, we were only about 10 minutes from being done anyhow. For those of you following along in your hymnals, we got through the Agenda (2_20_08.doc) items 1, 2, and 3. We discussed the impact of the new Banner registration system impact on our course pre-requisites and numbers. We will follow up on those in the graduate faculty and with Randy will help us manage the undergrad courses. I plan to have specific items for vote/discussion for us to address at the March faculty meeting. I asked for everyone to share with me any student awards, presentations, etc, that were made last year with me via email. Please consider both graduate and undergraduate students in this request so I can include them both in my department annual report.
So, I want to follow up on the remaining items. I will also be posting minutes from the meeting later this week.
- FOR YOUR PLANNING Campus Interview, Feb 27-29.
• Research Presentation, Thursday at 3:15.
• There are MANY opportunities to interact beyond the presentation, so please seek those out!
• Stephanie Norander Itinerary.docItinerary is attached and the candidate file should be in the office soon
Ms. Stephanie Norander, ABD, Ohio University
Research in two related areas: organizing for social change across cultural, national and gendered boundaries, and organizational identitites. Dissertation title: Organizing for peace: Women’s cooperative networks in post-conflict regions. Teaching interest org com, conflict, intercultural, qualitative methods, and gender and communication.
- Departmental Scholarships are now available for students to apply. Applications are due March 15. Info was sent to all majors/minors in blog. Please encourage your students to apply! This applies to graduate and undergraduate students.
- I strongly encourage you to attend the Friday Provost Open Forum at 3:00 in PSU 400. This is "an open forum, to discuss issues of concern and ideas (big and small) about how we can all best lead and nurture our campus community." You can ask questions about anything, including issues such as Banner or even concerns with Merit.
- Then next Tuesday is Dean Adams', Arts and Letters College-wide meeting. Tuesday, Feb 26 at 4:00 in Hill 002. This is yet an opportunity to ask questions of the dean, and the Provost is making an appearance there as well. They are very interested in getting feedback on the various initiatives college and university wide. I'll be here, and hope to see you as well.
OTHER ITEMS OF NOTE:
Advisor Forums
Thursday, February 21, “Advising for Student Success: Ideas and Strategies.” Pat Juncos, Rebecca Woodard and Kathy Davis. The session will be in PSU 315 from 12 to 1 p.m.
Friday, February 29, Mike Frizell, George Connor and Jim Moyer will address “I’m having trouble in your class…How instructors can assist students who struggle.” This panel will be in PSU 313, the Traywick Parliamentary room.
Please, encourage your freshmen and senior students to complete the NSSE survey, if selected. NSSE stands for National Survey of Student Engagement. This self report survey collects levels of reported engagement by students at both the first and last years and these data are important in development student success initiatives as well as feeding back data to departments on how they are doing in engaging students academically. So, we want as many COM students as we can who have been selected to actually fill out the survey. A random sample of these students has been selected (2500 of each class) with up to 5 emails sent inviting them to complete the survey.
Interested in Service-Learning scholarship? There is a luncheon and speaker event hosted by the CASL office, Thursday, Feb 28 at 12:30 in the PSU 308. Please RSVP at 836-5774. For more information, contact their office.
Kelly
Playing Catch Up
Hey everyone,
These last couple of weeks have been busy with candidate interviews and deadlines for just about everything. This week's HeadsUp includes a number of catch up items, news you can use, and "to do" items for this week.
1. I'm going to be out of town this week. John Bourhis will be covering for me while I'm gone, but don't ask him for money--although he'll want to give it to you. 
Janis King will be reviewing all degree applications but not signing then. So, please instruct your students that any degree applications, waivers, substitutions, etc. will not be processed until next week. I would recommend students get their minor approved this week while waiting for my signature next week. Thanks to John and Janis for helping me out.
2. Reminder, you will need to set up an appointment with me starting the middle of next week for our annual meetings. Please complete the form I provided last week with the memo. I'll be sending you individual forms with your information via email today. You can complete it and send it to me electronically before our meeting or you can provide me with your form handwritten when we meet. Whatever method, please have that workload request form completed when we meet.
3. You should have received an email about the IDEA administrator's assessment survey last week (with reminders this week via email too). It's an electronic version administered through K-State's IDEA program. PLEASE complete the online survey by 2/15/2008. You should have received two, one for evaluating the department head and one for the dean. Please complete both!
4. I've updated the Craig Lobby Dept Bulletin Board with a tip of the month regarding career preparation opportunities. I would like you to nominate a student to highlight for this month. Please send me those nominations quickly so I can get a picture and put some information there. If you'd like to nominate a faculty member or staff, please do that as well.
5. I'm attaching the minutes from last week's faculty meeting Minutes for January 23.doc. Thanks to Deborah Craig for succinctly capturing the events and decisions of the meeting. 
6. At the faculty meeting, I put out a request for any additional conferences you'd like to attend this semester. Those requests were due Jan. 31. I will entertain any additional items until Feb 8. Use the travel request form from Karen.
7. We've made an offer to Heather Carmack, and she's unofficially accepted it (the contract is in process right now)! She's excited about joining us and even turned down other interviews in order to accept our offer! You might send her a quick email congratulating her. Her email is hc200403@ohio.edu
Information about the second faculty position to come later. The search committee is reviewing feedback. Please submit any feedback you can from Andrew's interview last week.
That's it for now. See you next week.