Retention Commitee

As a university, Dominican attempts to keep all of it's students enrolled from semester to semester, year to year. We are so committed to this, there is even a Retention Committee, headed by Associate Dean of Students Norah Collins, to keep our retention rates high.

Right now, colleges across the country are suffering from low retention rates. Reasons students leave vary from personal to financial reasons and everything in between. There are also sub committees that focus on particular students who have statistically been more likely to drop out or transfer. Some of these committees include students of color and freshman.

Yes, I know about the GSSW

Dominican extends beyond the Rosary College of Arts and Sciences to the graduate programs. One of these programs is the Graduate School of Social Work. I know this because I feel like I get at least an email a week from them.

No, I haven't changed my major. The GSSW just feels the need to tell me about their open houses or q&a sessions all the time. I know that they send these emails to everyone, seeing the "TO" line is just the entire Dominican community, but it's still annoying. I get tons of emails everyday from classes or clubs or my mom. I think th GSSW should just send the emails to people who are interested, ie not me.

TV & Radio at Dominican?

Going by what my colleagues mentioned in posts that can be found here and here, I think adding a separate TV & Radio program at Dominican would be an invaluable asset to the way the University approaches academics.

Having a radio station or a TV station or both at Dominican would truly boost us to the level of a phenominal university. Having TV & Radio here would bring in so many communications students and people from the community interested in media. It could also be a resource through which students studying any discipline could get involved, generate discussion over important issues and make their voices heard. Adding these to the academic program at Dominican would take time, but the time spent developing such a reality would be worth it.

Perhaps leftover fundraising money could be put to good use on this interesting academic program?

White Boards

It seems in most of my classes my instructors are frustrated when they go up to the white boards in Parmer classrooms to write an example or term for the class to see. It turns out that most of the markers supplied at these boards for the instructors' writing pleasure don't work. Most of the time when this happens, instructors will get upset for a moment, make a comment on the lack of usable marker, then improvise a solution that may take a few minutes to hash out, i.e. lowering the view screen and firing up the projector and typing out whatever they needed to say on computer instead of writing it down on the board.

Often it's not just one marker that doesn't work, but all of the markers that may be in the little tray at the bottom of the boards. Are these markers just left in the respective classrooms for all to use and when they run out...too bad? Or are the instructors expected to bring their own marker simply so they can efficiently and effectively teach their classes? Someone should at least be in charge of supplying working markers so that instructors can make the most of the resources available to them.

DU Email Hypocrisy

One thing that had always been stressed here at Dominican is to check your DU email. Check it, check it, check it. Anything from class work to important campus news could be sent to that email address so CHECK IT!

Why then, may I ask, do half the faculty and staff NOT use their Dominican email address? This may just be a silly pet peeve of mine, but I hate it when professors refuse to use their DU address and insist that you send messages to their Yahoo account instead. I understand that when you may have 12 different addresses it can be hard to check them all, but IT offers ways to forward all email to a different account.

I just feel that because students can always find anyone at DU email (through the universal address book on Outlook) and it's the way all us students are required to communicate, faculty and staff should be required to use their DU email.


Photo taken from myDU.

Polish Proficiency Test?

According to myDU, a Polish proficiency test will be administered Wednesday next week. I know that Dominican offers classes in Italian, German, Spanish and French, but I had no idea there was anything for Polish offered here.

I'm just curious: Why would there be a proficiency test on campus for a language the University doesn't offer? I thought the point of proficiency tests was to test out of having to take a foreign language or prove you could speak it fluently for major requirement purposes? Maybe the University is planning on offering the class in future semesters and they want to gauge the level of interest?

Does anyone else know anything about this?

College Does Not Have to Equal Boring

I have two classes on Tuesday, both of which today had guest speakers. The first was my seminar class where a professor from the biology department who spoke about Natural Selection. The other class was American Empire where a foreign corespondent came to speak about working in the field. Both classes were interesting and gave a new insight on course that were becoming, well, predictable.

The use of outside speakers and other learning aids are underutilized to say the least. I feel that while, yes, this is college, classes don't have to be boring. Lectures day in and day out get repetitive and less effective as the semester goes on. Courses with engaging professors and varied class time are always the ones I look forward to and always the ones I get the most out of. More professors should look into alternative teaching methods to keep college as educational, and entertaining, as possible.