Administration

Graduate class plans for DSA future

Vice President for Student Affairs Richard Walker said the restructuring will focus on student success and UH’s Tier One status.  |  File Photo/The Daily Cougar

Vice President for Student Affairs Richard Walker said the restructuring will focus on student success and UH’s Tier One status. | File Photo/The Daily Cougar

The Division of Student Affairs will be enlisting a Bauer graduate management class to create a strategic plan for the division under the guidance of Vice President for Student Affairs Richard Walker.

The class will be broken up into teams of five to six students, which will help develop a strategy for the division. The DSA will simultaneously be conducting a planning process of its own.

“The purpose of the plan is to provide strategic direction for the division … relative to the vision for the University of Houston regarding student success and Tier One status,” Walker said.

Focusing on the next five years, the planning process will make use of students from the strategic management graduate course and division staff.  The students, taught by Professor Barbara Carlin, will analyze the Division of Student Affairs as part of a graded class project.

Carlin has worked on other similar projects, one for a separate college of the University, and another project for an outside entity in the Medical Center.

The DSA will consider the projects developed by the student-led teams, which may lead to the restructuring of the planning done within the division.

“The exercise … provides the point of view of those on the outside looking in,” Carlin said. “And (it) may present some novel or innovative ways of thinking about their organizations.”

The project will give the students real-world experience as opposed to case data, which can be obscure and incomplete, while the division will benefit from the unique viewpoints of the students, Carlin said.

At the end of the semester, teams from the class will present their ideas to the senior staff of the division, and winners will be selected. The student’s proposals will be thoroughly reviewed and congruent ideas will be incorporated into a working plan by the staff.

[email protected]

Leave a Comment