The department is enjoying a surge in transfer students to the GIS Major, in part from the Engineering Disciplines as the College of Engineering manages their enrollments aggressively.

The good news is that we have lots of students wanting to take core classes -- but this is also posing some challenges to ensure we do not leave students on the wait list. This is actively being managed by colleagues in GIS.  Ningchuan Xiao, Harvey Miller as well as the always alert Brooke Raake are to be commended for their flexibility and creative ideas.

As some of you may know, undergraduates fill an exit survey as they prepare to graduate and head off into the real world. They report on such issues as their satisfaction with various aspects of their degree and major, student loans/debt, and prospects for jobs. This is very realistic and tangible stuff. While we might wish for a higher response rate, the data we get is terrific and gives high marks to our advising operation: so thanks again to Brooke Raake. We take this feedback seriously and are using it to improve where we can. Here are some highlights, as extracted by Brooke:

• Overall, 41% of students had a job when they graduated, 50% were currently searching or waiting on offers, and 9% said they would begin searching after they graduate.
• 84.2% of those who had jobs were staying in Ohio. 15.8% had job offers from out of state.
• 100% of Atmospheric Sciences, 60% of Air Transportation, 45.5% of GIS, and 0% of Geography majors had an internship while they were a student.
• Atmospheric Sciences received a perfect score (5.0) on "to what extent did you gain in-depth knowledge, skills, perspectives, and ways of thinking related to your specialized fields of study"
• Education abroad was rated as "highly impactful" for Geography (4.5) and GIS majors (4.3)
• The GIS major rated lowest (3.6) of all the majors on "availability of courses for your major"
• "Academic Advising offered by the department" received the highest overall rating (4.8) when compared to the other factors that were considered, including "class size of your major courses", "availability of courses in your major", and "accessibility of faculty outside the classroom"

I really believe that data such as this can help us to keep our eye on the well-being of our students.  We can clearly aim for more valuable internships! I know that there is more activity here than has been reported so we should aim to get more participation in the survey.