Well, today our first-year students arrived on campus to check into their residence halls. APSU faculty, staff, and students were on hand to help. You wouldn’t believe how fast a car, or truck, or van can be unloaded when five or ten helpers show up to carry things. Note to self: please encourage someone to invent a lighter dorm-room refrigerator, especially when it’s going to the third floor of Sevier or Blount Hall!
Today, Apple approved for distribution through its App Store Austin Peay’s own app, PeayMobile. This app was created by Austin Peay students with the encouragement of Provost Tristan Denley. It features links to this blog, a campus map, a general news feed relating to APSU, sports information, the academic calendar, an event calendar, a faculty/staff directory, and a course catologue. Dr. Denley expects that we will be able to produce a similar application for other platforms in addition to the Iphone.
Lanie Jones, from AT&T, was recently on campus to present a $10,000 check from the AT&T Foundation to APSU’s nursing program to provide academic support for nursing students. Entrance into our nursing program is extremely competitive, and, as might be expected, completing the program is a significant challenge. The new grant from AT&T will allow the university to provide additional support to students who might otherwise fail to complete the nursing program. Now that the state of Tennessee has declared college completion, not just enrollment, a matter of the utmost urgency, AT&T’s generous grant arrives at precisely the right time.
The new chemical engineering technology program at Austin Peay was made possible by capital funding from the state of Tennessee to build a new $6.4 million laboratory facility and by a gift of $2 million of equipment from Dow Chemical and Hemlock Semiconducter. Now APSU and Hopkinsville Community College have received a federal grant which will provide scholarships for students who choose to pursue the chemical engineering technology program by spending their first year at HCC and then transfering to APSU to complete their degree.
I tried to fold this check up and put it into my wallet, but the check wouldn’t seem to fit. The support it represents, though, will be a great resource for students in our CET program.
As Austin Peay’s enrollment has soared over the past several years, its capacity to house students on campus has tigthened. We already have a waiting list for students to get in the dorm this coming fall, and I expect our ultimate housing occupancy to be close to 100%. The good news is that we will have a new residence hall by next fall and will begin design this fall of an additional new facility. The new hall which will open next fall will not actually expand our housig capacity, since it will replace our three oldest dorms, which must be taken out of service. But the one we expect to have up and running by fall 2013 will give us significantly more capacity.
People who hear me talk about Austin Peay’s incredible enrollment growth over the past several years might think I equate bigger with better. I don’t, though.
Bigger sometimes follows better. It has, at least, in the case of APSU. As college-bound students have discovered the strength of our faculty and the commitment of our staff to student service, it’s not surprising that they would increasingly choose Austin Peay. Bigger follows better.
At this particular moment, moreover, rising enrollments have allowed us to cushion the blow of sharp declines in our state funding and to keep sailing forward while others are just trying to stay afloat. Tuition from new students has offset the lost state funds and given us the resources to keep pressing ahead, though not without challenges.
We are working overtime to add the faculty necessary to serve the new students coming our way, and our staff are learning to use a powerful new campus software system to serve more students without additional personnel. We are struggling to find space to grow–especially space for new faculty. But I wouldn’t trade anything for these challenges, especially when I see the hard or even devastating choices being faced by universities with declining enrollments.
Austin Peay’s retirees association celebrated the start of its second year with a reception at Emerald Hill. The association, led by its president, Dr. Al Beakus, has launched efforts to connect our retired faculty and staff with one another and with the university. I think the creation of this association has been a fine accomplishment. As the university seeks to widen the circle of its alumni and friends, we do not want to neglect to maintain a strong relationship with our retirees. They are, and always will be, invaluable members of the Austin Peay family.
My watch broke while I was on vacation. When I arrived home, though, I discovered that Austin Peay now has its own sundial, and so I may be a little tardy in replacing the watch. The sundial towers over our new chemical engineering technology building at the corner of College and Eighth Streets. Watch for it the next time you drive by campus.
We will celebrate the grand opening of this facility and its naming at a special event in mid-September.
The month of June saw Austin Peay host its third Governor’s School for Computational Physics, which attracted 38 of Tennessee’s brightest high school sophmores and juniors to our campus. This year, each student received a mini-notebook computer, which allowed the participants in the program to have homework in addition to the work they performed during class periods. Dean Jaime Taylor, physics department chair Alex King, and other physics faculty were on hand to guide the students through a challenging curriculum.
My wife, Lee, and I had the students over to our home during the session for an evening of musical performances. The students in the Governor’s School are incredibly talented, and their talents are not limited to physics–many of them were accomplished musicians in their own right. We had a fine time listening to violin, trumpet, guitar, and vocal solos. I even cranked out a tune with my Martin guitar.
We continue to be amazed at the calibre of students who choose to attend the Governor’s School. This year, two of the students had previously earned perfect scores not only on the SAT exam, but the ACT exam as well. Less than three hundred students out of about 1.5 million who take the exam get a perfect SAT score each year, and less than two hundred students get a perfect score on the ACT each year. We don’t know for sure how many students get a perfect score on both exams, but suspect it is in the vicinity of 100 students across the whole country. You can imagine the university’s delight to have two of those students–along with 36 exceptionally talented peers–on our campus this summer.
Carrie Burggraf, one of the finest scholar-athletes Austin Peay has ever produced, won her most recent award this past week, as the 2010 recipient of the Steve Hamilton Sportsmanship Award, recognized at the annual honors luncheon of the Ohio Valley Conference. Carrie has the distinction of having won this award twice now, both last year and this year. Her mother was in attendance and, as you can imagine, quite proud of Carrie’s accomplishments. In the fall, Carrie will be heading to Pittsburg for graduate school, where she will take advantage of one of the NCAA’s prestigious graduate fellowship awards. I have a feeling Carrie hasn’t finished making Austin Peay proud!