Posts
Tonight, I provide just a brief update, after a long and
action-packed week for the Indiana Space Grant Consortium. Over the weekend, we learned that there
will be an opportunity to write another proposal to NASA this fall, for
augmentation funds to expand and enrich the program activities of the
Consortia. Thus, Monday
afternoon’s activities emphasized a meeting to address some of the priorities
to consider for this augmentation proposal. It’s clear that while we are doing very well in a number of
areas, there is a continuing push to increase the diversity of participation in
STEM projects. Over the next few
weeks, this proposal will be the focus of a number of our strategic planning
activities, and a highlight of our Affiliate teleconferences later this
month.
Starting on Tuesday morning, Dr. Dawn Whitaker and Angie
Verissimo represented INSGC at the Great Midwestern Regional Space Grant
Meeting. (I had to stay home and
take care of some additional priority tasks, including other campus proposal
development and getting my students ready for their exam and organizing their
semester projects. It’s times like
this that the value of effective and skilled staff really comes through: Dawn
took an active role to ensure that next year’s Regional Meeting in Milwaukee
would be in good hands (i.e., ours), and Angie also contributed as one of the
student poster judges. Arriving
home late Wednesday afternoon, they both turned around to start in Thursday
morning with an important visitor: Diane DeTroye, the NASA Headquarters program
manager for the National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program, who was
here to greet and learn on her way from the Regional Meeting to another Space
Grant activity in Lexington, Kentucky.
(Yes, it seems that our program manager is putting in some long hours,
too.) I can only express my
heartiest gratitude to Dawn, Angie, and INSGC intern Isa Fritz for helping to
demonstrate our improvements and quality in our program management, electronic
and social media presence, and campus and statewide reach. (There are lots of others to thank as
well, including Ann Broughton’s lunchtime discussion of Space Day’s student
participation; Martin Fisher’s great data from the Outreach to Space event at
Science Central; Bruce Hrivnak’s Valparaiso event calendar, including
congratulations to Todd Hillwig for his new NSF grant; and Dean Leah Jamieson,
who made space in her busy calendar and described why we believe so strongly in
EPICS as a transformative model in service learning.) It can only be a good thing to have your NASA program
manager to leave with a smile on her face, and positive words in her
comments.
Friday saw no letup in our activity. I’m continuing to work on the Purdue
campus proposal, but I did manage to join Dawn and Angie for a training session
for Pathevo, a STEM career and college major counseling software package. Our
training session was set up so that we at INSGC could deploy the software over
the coming year. We hope to focus
especially on underrepresented and underserved students, and try to overcome
barriers that prevent students from even moving into STEM majors at our great
affiliates in the first place. The
training session was followed by a business office meeting—once a month, the
three of us sit down with multiple business and sponsored programs managers to
coordinate, improve, and sustain INSGC operations and fiscal / accounting
flow. As soon as we were done,
Dawn got ready to deliver some INSGC banners for transport and display at the
Celebrate Science Indiana event being held on Ocotber 8 at the State
Fairgrounds in Indianapolis. I
went back to other proposal meetings (having read and commented on the students’
first team assignment—when did that get slipped in?) for the remainder of the
afternoon and into the evening.
Next week, we’ll be back at it again—more proposal activity,
more NASA reporting, and more consortium planning and management tasks. Just another week at the office.
