Dear Student Affairs colleagues,
Last month, we provided an update on the First Year Flourish program, which is one of our year 3-5 initiatives for the Student Affairs Strategic Plan. In today’s message, we are highlighting two more initiatives, this time from the Transforming the Student Experience priority area.
As part of this work, our initiative teams have been assessing how we can better utilize Student Affairs space and services to make things easier and more accessible for our students.
We recently created an inventory of Student Affairs business hours and modalities across our student service offices (i.e., including weekend/evening hours, hybrid delivery, chatbots, etc.). With this information, we plan to learn from our different operations and determine how we can better meet the diverse needs of our students. This may look different depending on the services provided by each unit. The ultimate goal is to have a comprehensive list of all the student service units and their customer service logistics and provide broader recommendations related to service hours and avenues.
Another initiative team has been evaluating ways to make the Sproul Hall lobby more student-friendly as it houses many Student Affairs services, such as Cal Student Central, Financial Aid & Scholarships, the Office of the Registrar, Dean of Students, and many more. The new space will be more welcoming and manageable for students to navigate, including more space for students to lounge and a better centralized front desk. Here is a proposed illustration for the project we hope to complete within the next year:
A big thank you to the initiative leaders Sunny Lee (Dean of Students) and Luis Rodriguez (Financial Aid & Scholarships), as well as the rest of the initiative owners and working group members for their hard work to improve our student services: Jorge Martinez (Cal 1 Card), Sue Harbour (Berkeley Career Engagement), Stephen Furman (BusOps/People and Administrative Services), Nicole LaGrandeur (Financial Aid & Scholarships), Genaro Olivares (Cal Student Central), Melissa Landeros (Organization Advising & Student Involvement Services [OASIS]), Zac Hull, (Student Ombuds), Devin Wicks (Rec Well), Andy Hang (Student Union), Meryl Motika (VCSA Immediate Office), Jaime Santoyo (Student Union), Joyce Cheng (RSSP Design & Projects), Marissa Berwick (Dean of Students), Adam Hillier (Enrollment Management), Sarah Reed (Registrar), Carli Baker (SERC), and Dean Poblete (SA Comms).
Sincerely,
Layla Naranjo (She/Her/Ella)
Executive Director, People and Administrative Services
Division of Student Affairs
Jo Mackness (she/her/hers)
Assistant Vice Chancellor & Chief Operating Officer
Division of Student Affairs
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