CAB Spotlights are feature articles designed to help you get to know the current Client Advisory Board members. The CAB serves as a liaison between CollegeSource and the community of people using CollegeSource software to maximize the higher education experience. Each spotlight will be presented in a “Q&A” interview style and provide insights into CAB member institutions, what they are passionate about, and their perspective on issues within the higher education community. Additionally, CAB members may share funny stories and anecdotes about themselves, tips and/or advice, and what they have learned from being on the CAB. We hope that these articles give you a new way to connect with the CAB and appreciate why each member was selected to represent our user community
In the Spotlight: Cheryl Muessig
Cheryl is the Degree Audit Coordinator in the San Diego State University’s Advising and Evaluations Office where she works on encoding, training, testing and development. She has been with SDSU for three years. SDSU is a Legacy SIS institution that utilizes TES, Transferology, and u.achieve. Prior to SDSU, Cheyrl worked as the DARS Coordinator at UC San Diego.
What is the best thing about your job? The most challenging thing? What strategies do you use to make yourself more productive/efficient, to give better service, or to keep your job fresh?
The product I work with is the best thing about my job; it is also the most challenging. There are so many features! I use the OWL and online documentation to improve my knowledge and look for better ways for the audit to do its job
Do you have any sayings–personal mottos your colleagues would know by heart because you frequently say it/apply it at work? What does saying it accomplish for you?
Let the computer do the work, so you can do your job. Many people are afraid of or adverse to change. I think this helps users recognize that automation isn’t taking away your job, its giving you the time to do it because the computer can handle the busy work, the calculations, and the redundant tasks that so often fill up our days.
Why CollegeSource? What do our products do for you this is critical to your and your students’ success? How are the products used well at your institution? And what are the opportunities you have yet to tackle with them?
Why CollegeSource – I work mostly with u.achieve. It is such a robust, dynamic product, there is simply no comparison. We use it predominantly for graduation processing but still have a manual process for multiple majors and minors. Moving them to an automated degree evaluation will have a huge positive impact on the students and the graduation techs.
What is something fun that the community might want to know about you?
I probably have about 100 puppets!
Do you participate in any associations, industry conferences or online groups? How does interacting with you peers from other institutions help you perform your job more effectively?
I’m pretty singular to working with u.achieve. I have attended conferences since 1995. There is such a wealth of information and insight available from other institutions. Someone is going to have an answer or idea that will make my audit even more fantastic.
What advice can you offer first-time attendees or users trying to decide about attending the annual CollegeSource conference? What tips an you give to help them be successful and get the most out of the experience? What should they know before they go?
There should be no question about attending the conference. Just talking at a lunch table can generate ideas to resolve an ornery encoding hurdle. And people will want to talk to you about CSI products!! Don’t be afraid to speak up or ask questions; even the most experienced still learn from others.
What have you learned about being on the CAB? Why might you encourage others to apply/join?
CollegeSource cares! The CAB is an awesome venue to discuss development, future paths for products, and where CollegeSource excels or can improve. If you want to feel a part of the process, this is the group for you
List any projects or objectives the CAB is working on now that you can share insight or progress made:
The CAB has been focusing on how to engage users in the conference, and generating ways for institutions to share information.
In the Spotlight: Cem Sunata
Cem is the University Registrar in the Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo’s Office of the Registrar. His role is to serve as the custodian of student records, curriculum, catalog, scheduling, SIS, degree audit, articulation agreements, enrollment services, graduation, and transfer articulation. He has been with Cal Poly SLO for seven years. Cal Poly SLO is a PeopleSoft institution that utilizes TES and u.direct. Prior to Cal Poly SLO, Cem worked at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Reflecting back over your years in higher education, what do you see as having changed in higher ed that may not be understood or apparent to someone from the outside or who has just joined the community?
Higher education is losing federal and state funding rapidly while the demands of functionality and customer service are increasing. In other words, we’re being asked to do more with the resources that we have. While I think that this is a “necessary and expected” evolution in higher education, being at the receiving end of it makes us, the higher education professionals, face a unique challenge that our predecessors didn’t necessarily have.
What do you see as a recent trend or on the horizon for higher ed? What problems do you think it needs to/will have to solve?
Technology isn’t necessarily a recent trend but it hasn’t gone out of fashion either. In fact, far from it. Although, these days, universities and colleges have started to realize that technology, in and of itself, isn’t the silver bullet. It requires knowledge, expertise, resources, and (ready for this?) process improvement in order for it to make a difference. After all, “garbage in garbage out” isn’t a recent discovery. Here is an example: in my opinion, the days of the liberally administered curriculum are gone. Today, faculty and staff on a university campus have to be much more intentional in designing and administering the curriculum. Inefficiencies in any given curriculum translate into frustration among students and parents and a more expensive and longer education. There are good software options out there to streamline the curriculum workflow process, which makes faculty very happy, but an inefficient curriculum process isn’t worth automating. Every single time we want to apply technology to a problem or process, we should ask ourselves “can this process be improved or be made more ‘lean’ before I automate it?”
What is the best thing about your job? The most challenging thing? What strategies do you use to make yourself more productive/efficient, to give better service, or to keep your job fresh?
The best thing about my job is working with a far more variety of higher education professionals on and off campus than I was when I first started my career. The most challenging thing about my job is working with a far more variety of higher education professionals on and off campus than I was when I first started my career. My strategy for productivity is to make sure that my staff are productive and have the tools, the information, the resources, and the right leadership to be able to do the best job they can. I also try to meet often with my constituencies and make sure that the work that we do at the Office of the Registrar really do make a practical difference in their lives.
Do you have any sayings–personal mottos your colleagues would know by heart because you frequently say it/apply it at work? What does saying it accomplish for you?
I do and I stole it from Patrick Lencioni: “The single greatest advantage any company (or institution) can achieve is organizational health.” I believe that if you surround yourself with the right people, and give them the opportunities and the right leadership to succeed, everyone will win at the end.
Why CollegeSource? What do our products do for you this is critical to your and your students’ success? How are the products used well at your institution? And what are the opportunities you have yet to tackle with them?
I think CollegeSource as a company has two qualities in their products in abundance that I admire the most: common sense and simplicity. When I was first introduced to u.direct during a Oracle Alliance conference a few years back, it was love at first sight because it possessed these two qualities. Today, u.direct is a mandatory tool for students at Cal Poly because we use it to drive our class scheduling. Our opportunity is to increase the efficiency of the demand information we receive from u.direct and make it more of a factor in faculty’s decision making in creating the future class schedules by further identifying the holes and inefficiencies in the curriculum, and course and seat offering patterns.
What is something fun that the community might want to know about you?
So, the other day I was walking around in Target with my 11 year old son, who recently became an avid Star Wars fan, and we stopped in front of a Lego box of a 12.5 inch tall General Grievous character from the second trilogy. Now, mind you, I’m not into toys anymore nor zealously wait in line for the opening day of any superhero or Star Wars flick. But something happened that day between my son and I where we both were struck by the sheer coolness factor of this toy, a feeling I enjoyed experiencing with him so much that I shelled out $34.99 on the spot and bought the toy after we both stared at it in awe for a good 10 minutes. We rushed home, built it together, and set it on his study desk to sit there for the remainder of his days in all his glory. I don’t know why I chose to tell you guys this story about me, but it seemed more relevant to me than telling you that I climbed K2 without a sherpa…
Do you participate in any associations, industry conferences or online groups? How does interacting with you peers from other institutions help you perform your job more effectively?
I’m in the program committee for AACRAO and participate in AACRAO meetings consistently. I guess it goes without saying that I attend CollegeSource conferences regularly as well. I also attend PeopleSoft Alliance, AACRAO SEM, and EDUCAUSE on occasion. Interacting with peers from other institutions is an invaluable part of my professional life; learning from each other and our experiences in higher education is not only a sanity check and a morale booster but also allows American higher education to excel faster compared to a world where each institution worked in a vacuum.
What advice can you offer first-time attendees or users trying to decide about attending the annual CollegeSource conference? What tips an you give to help them be successful and get the most out of the experience? What should they know before they go?
Networking tends to be one of the strongest aspects of CollegeSource conferences. It’s a much more intimate setting in a much more specialized context. It’s full of subject matter experts of their respective campuses, which is a setting that is almost impossible to find in any other conference. Meetings are smaller, so it’s much easier to identify your “clone” from another campus. My best advice would be to walk up to as many “clones” of yourself as you can and introduce yourself. You will see that the rest, as they say, will be history.
What have you learned about being on the CAB? Why might you encourage others to apply/join?
If for nothing else, joining CollegeSource’s CAB will restore your faith in “third party software” companies. It’s an invaluable experience in observing the inner workings of arguably the top degree audit software in the world as well as their other very highly rated software (u.direct, anyone?) and how they make it all hum, what some of the day to day as well as global factors are that affect the decision making in product development, release cycles, improvements, etc. It’s also strangely makes you much more aware of the competing software companies out there, and how their products compare. Being a CAB member also allows you to reach out to the broader user group and see what they like, don’t like, or are struggling with. Half of a software company’s battle is to identify how to improve their software and what the roadmap to the future of the software looks like. A CAB member has an important role to play in that.
List any projects or objectives the CAB is working on now that you can share insight or progress made:
One of the worthy objectives that I can share is our effort to bring the campus users of u.direct together in an online forum. In other words, to create not only a repository of information about u.direct implementation, functionality, etc. but also to bring users’ experiences, questions, concerns, and success stories together in one place.
0 Comments