Enriched Student Experience
PNW’s curricular offerings and support services are designed to be responsive to student interests and needs, providing them with an excellent college experience that prepares graduates to succeed in meeting their life and career goals.
This is accomplished through coordinated student support and enhanced and innovative academic programming that provides reflective, integrative, and experiential learning opportunities.
Goal One: Increase Relevance and Responsiveness of Curriculum to Student Interests and Employer Needs.
- Strategy: Conduct regular market analyses for each existing academic program, and opportunity analyses to identify areas for new programs
- Strategy: Form Advisory Boards to advise and inform each College on current and future business/industry needs.
- Strategy: Integrate PNW faculty and staff into professional organizations and industry/business groups so as to participate in and learn from discussions about current trends.
Goal 2: Expand opportunities for experiential learning within all majors, increasing the quality and scale of internships, service learning, and student research activities.
- Strategy: Leverage existing support structures and systems to enable formal faculty participation and oversight in the creation, nature, and approval of curricular offerings and assessment of the PNW Experiential Learning Program.
- Strategy: Formalize assessment and evaluation of experiential learning activities, with all programs offering EL submitting assessment results.
- Strategy: Integrate increased opportunities for civic engagement and service learning projects into the classroom, increasing the number of community partners working with PNW students
- Strategy: Create “virtual internships,” project based learning, and micro-internships that allow students to work online with partners throughout the country, and the world.
- Strategy: Develop/Integrate a cocurricular transcript program for volunteerism, service, and engagement.
Goal 3: Reimagine PNW’s General Education curriculum to better assist students in developing broad, interdisciplinary outlooks, critical and creative thinking skills, and effective communication.
- Strategy: Expedite the adoption and implementation of the General Education Task Force’s recommendations, defining the PNW Gen Ed core/approach, curriculum, and assessment.
- Strategy: Formalize assessment and evaluation of general education activities, integrate assessment data into continuous improvement cycle with all programs offering General Education courses submitting assessment results.
Goal 4: Improve cohesion and quality of the student experience and support services from enrollment through graduation
- Strategy: Implement a consistent university-wide advising strategy that leverages technological tools, employs professional advisors, and includes continuous assessment and oversight from a relevant task force.
- Strategy: Enhance student career advising and career counseling to ensure career readiness and increase positive post-graduation career outcomes.
- Strategy: Increase graduate and pre-professional school admissions advising and programming
- Strategy: Increase student engagement in campus life and co-curricular learning through communication and outreach.
- Strategy: Expand peer tutoring and support programs for underrepresented groups to increase success in foundational and other challenging courses.
- Strategy: Create a robust athletics culture that engages students and student athletes in a way that connects them to the campus community.