During my time at Belmont I enjoyed getting to learn about strategic planning and assessment and decided to complete my final internship during the Spring 2015 semester with the Division of Student Affairs. Although this internship was not particularly working in sport, higher education has been of interest to me during my time at Belmont. Working under the Assistant Dean of Students has allowed me to gain insight into a world that I would not have otherwise seen. As an intern for the division, I assisted in the creation of the strategic planning initiatives for the division as Belmont heads toward its Vision 2020, along with the creation of the assessment plan and procedures for the upcoming years and the marketing and communication efforts for the division.
With the strategic planning piece of the internship, I was able to review each of the eight department's goals and strategic plans for the next five years as well as upcoming objectives in the next year. This involved sitting down with different department directors to discuss their goals and how we could better align them to meet one of the five themes of the division: health, faith, leadership, service and diversity. A large part of my responsibility was mapping the goals and objectives back to the themes to see where we have gaps, along with mapping them back to the university-wide Vision 2020 initiatives. Learning how to map goals and objectives to other initiatives has increased my ability to bring strategic planning full circle.
With a lack of assessment plan over the last few years, I have worked to create a plan that works for each department individually. We discussed the creation of a plan for each department, or whether an assessment plan should be division wide. There is a culture in the division that does not understand the importance of assessing each program and collecting that data, but it is important to shape the way the division talks about the work that they do and whether or not they will be viewed as successful. Along with creating an assessment plan, I worked to create a document in which program planners could document information about their program, their learning objectives for students with the program, whether or not they were successful and finally, how they map back to the divisional goals and efforts. I believe that by implementing these plans and processes the effectiveness of the division will be much stronger.
As part of my work with assessments, I have been involved with the divisional assessment committee which reviews work done by peer institutions and compares the work to the assessments that are being created among co-workers. The team also exists to review the assessments and ensure that we are asking the right questions to students and accomplishing what needs to be accomplished. Along with being involved with this committee, I have also served on the Vision 2020 planning committee which has taken the resources from each department and aligned them with the seven strategies outlined in the Vision 2020 plan.
Although the marketing side of the internship has not been quite as fast paced, we have discussed the creation of a new divisional website which can house all of the information that students, parents, faculty and staff members need to find. There is no clear site which houses each of the eight departments because the work that they each do is so broad. The creation of the website will create a stronger brand and image for the work that the division accomplishes as a whole.