Join Community Action Board on Monday, Nov. 18, at 6 p.m. in upper Olmsted, CR 310–311, for a collaborative round table discussion on how to improve community engagement and how to be a good neighbor within the Drake Neighborhood. The session will also cover how to get involved with CAB during the school year.
— Laura Harris, AS’20
Portable electric space heaters can be a convenient source of supplemental heat in cold weather. Unfortunately, they can pose significant fire and electric shock hazards if not used properly. Space heaters without adequate safety features, space heaters placed near combustibles, or space heaters that are improperly plugged in can cause fire and electrical hazards.
Space heaters used at Drake should meet the following safety criteria:
Safety should always be a top consideration when using space heaters. Here are some tips for keeping safe and warm when it’s cold outside:
— Chris Nickell, Environmental Health & Safety
A review of Drake’s benefit plans and an overview of shared benefit costs will be provided by Drake Benefit Consultant Mark J. Becker & Associates on Wednesday, Nov. 13, at 1:30 p.m. in the Cowles Library, Room 201. Human Resources and Wellmark representatives will also be present to answer individual questions. Registration is not required.
— Marlene Heuertz, Human Resources
About two months ago, ITS made the switch from the DUStudent wireless network to eduroam. How’s eduroam working for you? Are you having any wireless network coverage issues? Connection problems in your room? Or your classroom? Let us know.
Report any issues connecting to eduroam by submitting a Wireless Network Issue report in our service portal. By letting us know where you’re having issues and what device you’re using, our ITS staff can work on adjusting access points and other tweaks to improve the network.
And don’t forget as you travel over winter break or J-Term that you may be able to take eduroam with you and connect wirelessly at your destination.
Learn more about the eduroam wireless network at www.drake.edu/its/eduroam.
— Carla Herling, ITS
Friendly reminder that this organizational view of institutional leadership is a great way to get to know the leadership structure here at Drake. Instead of a boring text, you will find photos of each leader. This can always be found on the Office of the President page and is maintained by the President’s Office. Bonus feature: if you click on a person’s image, you will be directed to their corresponding web page to learn more. It is a handy tool, especially if you are new to Drake!
— Nate Reagen, Chief of Staff, President’s Office
DU What Matters—that’s the theme of this year’s Campus Climate Survey. At Drake we seek to create an environment characterized by openness, fairness, and equity for all students, faculty, and staff.Please take the Campus Climate Survey to help us better understand the current climate at Drake University. The survey is open through Nov. 26 and should take about 20–30 minutes to complete. Your participation is an opportunity to DU What Matters.
This confidential survey is designed to gauge the current attitudes, beliefs, and experiences of students, faculty, and staff at Drake. We will use survey responses to identify opportunities for making improvements and taking tangible steps toward creating a more positive and inclusive campus climate. Please be assured that all of your answers will remain confidential, and the results will be reported in the aggregate.
Creating change
Five years ago, when we collected data through the last climate survey, a host of positive steps were taken to make our campus community more inclusive and equitable. Here is a list of the top ten initiatives to come out of the project:
Win a prize!
When you complete the survey, you will be directed to a different page to submit your name into a drawing for a variety of prizes. The two sites are completely separate, so please be assured that confidentiality of survey responses will be protected. Prizes include:
The Campus Climate Survey has been acknowledged as an exempt study by the Drake Institutional Review Board. Additional information about the project is available at drake.edu/duwhatmatters. Thank you in advance for your contribution to the future of Drake University.
— Erin Lain, Associate Provost for Campus Equity and Inclusion
Thanks to support from the Slay Fund for Social Justice (http://www.drake.edu/slay) and the Olson Endowment for Global Service-Learning, the office of Community Engaged Learning (OCEL) is hiring two faculty fellows to work with the Director of Community Engaged Learning on programming and initiatives that support faculty and staff in implementing community engagement and service-learning pedagogy. The faculty fellow positions are a two-year opportunity for Drake full-time faculty members (non-tenure-track, tenure-track, or tenured) to expand, deepen, and disseminate their mastery of community engaged learning to others. Fellows will begin their term in spring 2020 and receive a $3,000 stipend ($1,500 in June and $1,500 in December). In addition to the stipend, there is funding to support participation in scholarly activities such as conferences in support of strengthening or promoting community engagement at Drake.
For specific details about each position please visit: https://www.drake.edu/community/learningservice/facultyopportunities/awardsfellowships/.
Faculty interested in serving in either role should send a letter of interest and CV to renee.sedlacek@drake.edu by Dec. 2. The statement of interest should address why you want to serve as a faculty fellow and how this position contributes to your personal, professional, and scholarly development.
— Renee Sedlacek, Director of Community Engaged Learning
Please join the School of Journalism and Mass Communication on Thursday, Nov. 7, at 2:30 p.m. for a major gift announcement for the renovation of Meredith Hall. The event will be held in Meredith, Room 104. Following the announcement, there will be refreshments, networking and tours of Meredith Hall, a unique mid-century modern building designed by famed architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Drake is celebrating 100 years of journalism and mass communication education in 2019–2020.
— Kathleen Richardson, Dean, School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Facilities Planning and Management will host a retirement open house for Jolene Schmidt, director of capital projects, on Friday, Dec. 6, from 12:30–2:30 p.m. in the Paul Morrison Room. Jolene will be retiring after 38 years of serving faculty, staff, students and visitors. She held several roles in her career at Drake starting in the stock room and eventually being involved in over $201 million of capital improvements across the campus. All will greatly miss her vast historical knowledge of Drake’s campus growing and changing over the years.
Please join us in thanking Jolene for her dedicated service and commitment to Drake, congratulating her on this well-deserved retirement.
— Kevin Moran, Executive Director, Facilities Planning and Management
Michi Matsukura, assistant professor of psychology, has received the National Research Foundation: Major Research Instrumentation (NSF: MRI) award—the first MRI award that Drake University has received in its history. The award allows Michi and her College of Business and Public Administration (CBPA) faculty collaborators to conduct a series of studies, using the eye-tracking system with capabilities of gaze-contingency programming (the paradigm that allows a computer display to change as a function of where an observer is looking) and pupillometry (the technique that measures changes in the diameter of the pupil as a function of cognitive processing). The CPBA research team is composed of Andrew Bryant (Marketing), Brian Vander Naald (Economics), Heath Henderson (Economics), Lori Solsma (Accounting), Alanah Mitchell (Information Systems), and Terri Vaughan (Actuarial Sciences).
Michi says, “I am extremely grateful to NSF for recognizing (1) this unique collaboration between visual cognition research and decision sciences as well as (2) our efforts to include and support a diverse range of students and faculty in the projects. Besides my own line of visual information-processing work, the system allows us to conduct a series of experiments to identify possible cognitive mechanisms that guide individuals’ ultimate behaviors, in the respective fields of the CBPA research collaborators. I am really excited to have this opportunity.”
