By Amy Martin, assistant dean, Student Success Strategy, Office of Undergraduate Education
Over the past year, we have continued to intentionally design the student success ecosystem of meetings and groups to build synergy, alignment, and to connect various efforts across the university. In January 2025, Mark Largent, vice provost and dean for undergraduate education, and Renata Opoczynski, assistant provost for student success, revived the student success project meetings with these goals:
- Understand sponsors’ expectations and ensure they align with committee expectations
- Remove barriers for project leads
- Support interconnections between projects, fuel collaboration, and facilitate learning from each other
- Promote a culture of growth mindset—learning by trying new strategies and addressing challenges
- Celebrate progress—moving rocks, boulders, and mountains
- Broadcast project work across multiple projects, stakeholders, the provost, and the president
Wasek Sazzad, student success initiatives project manager, and I worked with the group and drew on our project management knowledge to
- develop values for engaging in our monthly conversations,
- provide templates for leads to report their work each month,
- update the project charter template and stakeholder engagement strategy (in collaboration with colleagues from the University Project Management Community of Practice),
- work with Emily Jaszewski, administrative business professional in undergraduate education, to create budget templates informed by her work with CGA on grants, and
- provide tools for conducting literature reviews.
Wasek and I also worked with Mark, Renata, and Maria O’Connell, UIA fellow & undergraduate student success strategic initiatives manager, to develop a more formal onboarding and offboarding plan so we can determine which projects need to be members of the monthly project team meetings.
Over the past six months, the group has already experienced synergies, including sharing tools for developing, supporting, and meeting with advisory councils; referencing common challenges; discovering relationships between projects; and supporting each other as leaders.
We look forward to sharing progress on the projects with you at the Student Success Launch on Monday, Sept. 15. Many of the initiatives will also be seeking your input, perspective, and expertise at Launch as their work advances. In addition, we will update you regularly as part of the Student Success Newsletter and have plans to develop a website where we will provide information about each initiative/project, regular updates on progress, all the tools we use for project management, and a place to archive the work for future reference.
2024–2025 Projects and Leads Attending SSI Monthly Meetings
- MiLEAP Transfer – Portia Watkins
- Increasing Academic Mapping – Becky Keogh and Kari Stone-Sewalish
- Expanding Envision Green – Laura Wise
- Transfer Student Success Center Expansion – Charles Jackson
- Transfer Credit Operational Excellence – Lesa Louch
- Expanding Credit for Prior Learning – Justin St. Charles and Sara Barnwell
- Transfer Communications – Jessica Livingston
- First-Gen Center – Heather Shea and Christina Bridges
- MiLEAP Retention (centralized application) – Christina Bridges and Justin St. Charles
- Academic Standing – Maria O’Connell
- MiLEAP Learning Goals Initiative – Emily Conroy-Krutz, Stephen Thomas, Renee Miller Zientek, Helena Gardener (Project Leads), Wasek Sazzad (Project Manager)
- Lansing Spartan Scholars – Jared Stratz and Joy Hannibal
- Modern Campus Texting – Christina Bridges and Julia Barnes
- A Modern General Education Curriculum – Stacia Moroski-Rigney (Project Lead) and Elizabeth Elliott (Project Manager)
- Some College No Degree (SCND) / Reorientation, Reintegration (RoRi) – Justin St. Charles and Kay Stevens
