John Paul (JP) Regalado, NACADA President
I can’t believe it is 2015! I hope your year is starting off well. As I head into the second half of my presidency, I am still in a bit of awe as to where we are in higher education and our collective role in shaping its future!
On our campus, and I know on many others, we continue to talk about the completion agenda and our respective responsibilities in helping our students succeed. It is an awesome responsibility and, truth be told, sometimes an overwhelming one, but one that I think we should embrace. Every time we see a student discover their passion, make a difficult choice that we hope will lead to a positive outcome, finally get “it” and thrive, overcome a significant challenge, or best of all, graduate, it is a reminder of why we do what we do. Yes, it helps to work for supportive supervisors and administrators, and yes, it helps to work with dedicated colleagues who share in our collective goal of student success, but let’s be honest: the reason we do what we do is because of our students!
I want to share with you a little bit of what the NACADA Council and Board of Directors are working on. The Council continues to work with their divisions on their respective tasks and initiatives. Having served on the Council for three years, I can assure you that it is in these divisions that much of the NACADA “magic” happens. Our chairs submitted mid-year reports in late fall and all are working hard on achieving their respective outcomes. There continue to be opportunities for some great collaboration and idea sharing across the divisions that we believe will enhance NACADA as an organization and assist you in your daily work with your students and institutions of higher education. The Board of Directors has been tasked with working on strategic planning in the areas of Diversity/Inclusion, Research/Scholarly Inquiry, and Leadership and has been divided up into three subcommittees. Some questions I have asked us to ponder and answer are:
If you have any ideas/suggestions/comments, please let me know and I will be happy to share them with our NACADA Board of Directors.
In addition, a committee charged with looking into the possibility of creating a Center for Research with Kansas State University has met and is determining what that will take. Last, a committee has been created to revise and update our organizational by-laws. It is our goal to have significant progress on all these tasks by our mid-year meeting in April.
I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about all the “NACADA Near You” professional development opportunities that will be available to you over the next months. Last month, we had our Winter Institutes take place in Florida. Our recent webinars have covered a variety of excellent material and best practices in the areas of Academic and Career Advising, Advising in Two-Year Colleges, and Advising and the Completion Agenda. Look at the NACADA website for more information on our remaining webinars. Lastly, we have our regional conferences coming up in March, April, and May. Did you know that, in at least the last several years, we have had more NACADA members attend our combined region conferences than attend our annual conference in October? The point in all this is that NACADA is your organization and we want you to engage in NACADA in the way that is best for you and your institution. Having participated in all of these opportunities, I can truly say that I got something out of all of them that helped me in my work with students and in my work with my colleagues and administrators, while developing me professionally and personally.
I want to thank all of you for staying engaged in NACADA. Without your participation as a reader, writer, presenter, participant, and researcher, we wouldn’t be as strong as we are.
Last, I want to thank you for voting in our recent elections. I also want to thank our candidates for stepping up to the plate and running for a position. While running for a position is not the only way to get involved in NACADA, it isn’t easy to put yourself out there, and I appreciate your willingness to do so.
It continues to be my esteemed honor and pleasure to represent you and all the great work that you do for our students. Thank you for all that you do!
John Paul (JP) Regalado, President, 2014-2015 NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising Executive Director of Academic Advising Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi john.regalado@tamucc.edu
Cite this article using APA style as: Regalado, J.P. (2015, March). From the president: Staying engaged in NACADA. Academic Advising Today, 38(1). Retrieved from [insert url here]
