GRAD REBEL MENTOR Feburary 2020

A Message from Dean Kate Korgan Dear colleagues, As everyone who has been engaged in strategic planning knows, it can be an adventure. Planning gives us permission to dream about where we’re collectively headed and what we’d like to achieve together. This academic year the Graduate College team has been deeply engaged with constituent groups around campus to craft a new five-year strategic plan. In the fall, we began the process internally, with each of our teams throwing limitations out the window and brainstorming pie-in-the-sky goals, balanced with tactical strategies to make those goals a reality. Our thinking is that if each Graduate College unit achieves what they set out to do in their operational plans, we’ll achieve our objectives; and if we achieve our objectives, we’ll meet our goals. In planning, a good process with lots of input is one key to success. In January, we shared our draft plan with the Graduate College Executive Committee and the Dean’s Leadership Council and received positive and helpful feedback. We then held a campus strategic planning workshop, during which we again received incredibly insightful additions to the draft plan. In February, we held three open sessions to elicit graduate student input and feedback and heard what some very wise and engaged students envision for graduate education at UNLV. Next up, the Graduate Council reviewed and provided guidance on the plan. We’ll continue to incorporate all the feedback that we get along the way, and we’ll be circling back to all of these constituent groups with a closer-to-final draft of the Graduate College strategic plan this spring. You can see a condensed version of it here. It contains goals and objectives, but does not yet include all the strategies, action items, metrics and timelines from each unit’s operational plan. Those are in the works, I assure you! I invite you to review the draft plan and share your thoughts. Feel free to send feedback and suggestions to graduate.dean@unlv.edu -- we welcome your input! I’ll send a more complete version for your review in April. Collaboration is at the core of what we do day in and day out, so it should come as no surprise that it has served as a cornerstone throughout our strategic planning progress. If you have partaken in the process, thank you. We could not have done it without you. If you haven’t yet participated but would like to, please do so. We welcome all feedback and suggestions. All the best, Kate Kathryn Hausbeck Korgan, Ph.D. Dean, Graduate College