Visits to our California Senators and Congressmen are over but I have follow up items with several of the staffers that I need to tackle yet this week. Thanks to Jhalendra, Marcel, Dan and Kamal for their participation last week. I look forward to working with the team that will make visits to our state representatives in 3 weeks.
It has been approximately 10 months since I was last on the UC Merced campus. I am astonished at how fast the campus has grown, and the building continues. Student numbers must be exploding, too, because for the first time I saw students everywhere on skateboards and scooters. The energy level seems high on that campus. The purpose for my visit was to meet with two of our CE Specialists and their department chairs.
Following those visits, I drove to Visalia to meet with the new CEO for the Citrus Research Board and Beth Grafton-Cardwell. It is always nice to see Beth and Marcie, the new executive director for the Citrus Research Board was a delightful. On top of that, it was a beautiful day for a drive.
Today the strategic plan goal owners met to talk about updates to the plan. It is hard to believe we are coming up on four years since we started the current version and that it is time to renew/refresh the plan already! Fortunately, many of the tasks are completed. Many of the tasks are on-going and will forward to the next version. I have some homework to do before next month. It's a good thing my spring break has already passed.
I still have a fair bit of travel scheduled for the rest of the month, though one meeting has already been moved to Zoom and others may follow. I am not sad about this, but I do wonder how effective the meetings will be using Zoom when the planning was based on an assumption that participants would all be present, in person. At least I am not trying to determine how best to teach the remaining portion of a semester to a class of 300 students using Zoom.
The near future may present an opportunity to reveal the usefulness, or otherwise, of some of these meetings. In the meantime, I need to check in for a flight. The long legs are my chance to focus on merit and promotion documents. Despite starting off strong, I am woefully behind schedule on packages.