President George Hanbury has established a new college, the College of Undergraduate Studies to centralize services for all undergraduate students, effective July 1.
Offices under the new college include Academic Services, Student Communication and Support, Orientation, Career Development, Academic Advising and Undergraduate Student Success. Students of all undergraduate majors will stay within their academic college, but they will also be a part of the new college and be served by its offices.
“Students will continue to take classes in their respective colleges they’re a part of,” said Vice President of Student Affairs Brad Williams. “But the college of undergraduate studies will serve as a home base for students.”
Williams said that all colleges with undergraduate programs — such as the Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences, the H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship, and the Abraham S. Fischler School of Education — still exist but “more in a pure academic sense, whereas the College of Undergraduate Studies exists more in a service sense.”
Williams oversees the new college as its dean and Jennifer Quiñones Nottingham, formerly the assistant provost for Undergraduate Services and Operations, is the college’s associate dean. Shari Saperstein, director of the Office of Career Development, is the college’s executive director.
“Things that impact all undergraduate students — things like convocation, commencement, the student catalog, academic discipline, most of the policies associated with being an undergraduate — will all be administrated from a single entity,” said Williams.
The new college will not receive its own building space; it will be spread throughout offices all over main campus, though several offices are scheduled to relocate during this academic year.
The Office of Academic Advising and the Office of Career Development will move to the Horvitz Administration Building, from the Mailman-Hollywood Building and the Alvin Sherman Library, respectively.
The Athletic Department has moved to the Athletics and Business Services Building — now simply called the Athletics Building — near the Don Taft University Center. The Office of Academic Services, which is part of the new college, now occupies Athletics’ former space: the second floor of the The Athletics and Student Affairs (ASA) building.
Lisa Walther-Austin, director of the Office of Academic Services, said that the change will allow her office to “broaden the scope” of its services — including tutoring, testing, in-class workshops, study materials and writing resources — “to not just focus on courses of Farquhar, but of the overall population of the university.”
“If anything, what I would expect, is that our services will expand at some point,” she said.
Cortney Palmacci, assistant director for tutoring, said, “We want to make sure that we have time to expand into the business population and the nursing population, because we don’t really have those relationships. So building that is definitely an important part of the expansion process.”
Nottingham said that students should be on the lookout for additional news as administrators are “trying to just get away from the old pen and paper type of thinking, and step into the technology era.”
“We’re going to be offering Skype appointments for students,” she said. “We’ve also developed and are ready to roll out an advisement appointment system, so that students can go online and make their own appointments. We hope to do things more in an expedited fashion, so that students feel that they are not just an NSU ID number; there is a face behind their email and their phone call.”
Though the College of Undergraduate Students is new, Nottingham — who has been with NSU for 20 years — says its creation has been years in the making, discussed among deans, directors
and the president. She views the change as “a rebirth, a renewal, something to offer students and bring them a little bit closer together.”
Yet, that rebirth is a work in progress. “Myself, along with Dean Williams and the rest of the executive team, along with the Division of Student Affairs, are still in the planning and development stage of getting people together, pulling resources together,” said Nottingham. “I’ve met with my direct reports, to get a better idea of how they operate, what works best for them, what they want to see come out of this new concept of the college.” Williams emphasized that the primary mission of the new college is to support students.
“At any institution, particularly at a school that has grown like NSU, you always have the possibility that there might be cracks that students slip through,” he said. “What we’re attempting to do is eliminate those cracks. So that students come as freshmen, they graduate as seniors, and they just love being a Shark.”
Nottingham added, “Our goal is to bring directors, administrators and staff together to unload their resources and put them into one basket, per se, and start to have better communication with each other, instead of things being disjointed or decentralized.”
Williams said the college’s success, as well as the changes it brings, will be evaluated by retention and graduation rates, tracked over time.
“We’re looking at doing a whole assessment of the student’s first year experience, from the time they get that first admissions email or brochure, all the way up to when they are done with that first year,” he said. “What was that experience like? How can we make certain that it’s seamless for the students?”
Though Williams acknowledges it will take time to fully establish the new college as envisioned, he said, “I think there’s going to be synergies here that haven’t really existed before.”
Nottingham advised students to be patient and trusting.
“Just be open to the changes that are occurring. It’s something that has a plan, but they will take time to roll out,” she said. “So, at any point in time, a student feels that their needs are not being met, we just need to know about it so that we can address it.”
