I hate to jinx things, but we have had some beautiful summer weather here in the Palouse and it is only May. Shorts, sunglasses, dogs panting on walks, all of us hiding out in the shade. The warmth feels good.
As we near the end of the fiscal year, we reflect on accomplishments and begin goal setting. We are finishing up the first year of our 6-year strategic plan. For pillar 1, Teaching and Learning, we completed our first phase of the Student Success Center (the Vet Med Den) and are moving to phase 2, expanding our staffing and programming for financial planning and career development, as well as considering peer-to-peer and alumni-to-student mentorship programs. We are also formulating ideas around teaching excellence, including more structured onboarding for new teachers. Our Teaching Academy already offers a Designing, Aligning, and Refining Teaching workshop focused on fundamental teaching principles and strategies — a boot camp of sorts. Teaching is an art, and teaching methods need to evolve as students change. This focus on teaching excellence in our strategic plan is well-aligned with a burst of new faculty hires.
Last year, for pillar 2, Research Enterprise, we initiated the “Pump Priming” internal grant program to advance faculty research ideas and enable successful large, external funding opportunities. This initiative was supported by our strategic research fund. After releasing the funding opportunity, faculty proposals went through merit reviews, and three proposals were selected and funded at $125,000-$150,000 each. Interestingly, the proposals all focused on zoonotic diseases — diseases that can infect both people and animals: the plague (flea transmitted Yersinia pestis), the monkeypox virus, and Anaplasma infection, a tick-borne disease. I am proud of what we have done to strategically invest in research at the college, and investing in our faculty is more important than ever as research and education institutions experience deep budget cuts. Moving forward, we will focus on bridge funding as well as clearly communicating college and university-wide criteria for research excellence. The college remains committed to supporting science, medicine, and health. Period.
I am also very excited as we begin to flesh out our ideas around pillar 4, partnerships, outreach, and community engagement. As a college, we need to be a central resource or hub of community engagement and information for all things animals, pets, and the human-animal bond. We already participate around the state in animal welfare events (spay and neuter clinics, vaccination days), we care for agricultural animals through Veterinary Extension, we care for the pets of low-income and unhoused people in urban settings, and we educate veterinarians and our community in a wide range of educational events. This is who we are. We need to embrace, optimize, and formalize this critical piece of our mission. Year two of our strategic plan promises to be lovely.
If you’d like to know more, you can always read the latest stories from our college on our news page. For even more content, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Be safe, healthy, happy, and stay hopeful.
Take care & Go Cougs, Dori Borjesson