Friday Focus: Welcome, near and far

Sept. 1, 2023

— By Julie Queen, vice chancellor for administrative services

Welcome! Not only to the first week of classes, but to UAF locations across the state. I’m writing from Juneau, Alaska, after attending this week’s Board of Regents meetings at the University of Alaska Southeast. It is nice to acknowledge the feeling of welcome extends to all UA campuses, not just UAF. 

We had a lovely visit and tours at UA Southeast and the UAF Lena Point Facility. Lena Point supports a vibrant team of UAF College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences and Alaska SeaGrant faculty, staff and students doing some amazing things in fisheries, mariculture and marine biology, and marine policy with collaborative connections with our friends in Southeast. A big thanks to UAS for being such fantastic hosts, especially to Chancellor Aparna Palmer and her team, including my colleague and friend, Michael Ciri, vice chancellor for administrative services, who is retiring after nearly 40 years of service. I’ll miss your teamwork and support (and baked goods!), and wish you a healthy and happy retirement. 

To kick off the new academic year, I’d like to share how our Administrative Services, Student Affairs, and UA System Office teams moved mountains to make students in need of a residence on campus in Fairbanks feel welcome this year. A few things created a perfect storm: our Administrative Services team was relocated to Lathrop Hall (a residence hall) after UAF sold the Administrative Services Center on College Road as part of our footprint reduction and revenue generation efforts, UAF received state capital funding to renovate Moore and Bartlett Halls requiring UAF to relocate students to all other residential options on campus before those towers are fully modernized and open for students again in fall 2024, and our enrollment is up, way up! Residence Life had a wait list of over 100 students coming from primarily out of state locations - that meant, we needed to find them a place to live on campus or they might not attend UAF this fall.

The student housing need prompted Vice Chancellor Guthrie to make a request to me and our Administrative Services team to see if we could vacate Lathrop Hall about six weeks before the start of the semester. At first, I hesitated, not wanting to disrupt this critical team at the end of the fiscal year (their busiest time of year). When I asked Amanda Wall, associate vice chancellor of financial and business services, and Jason Theis, director of finance and accounting, whether this could be done - they didn’t hesitate at all. “This is why we are here, we can do it!” It was time to get to work. They understood instantly the impact of this decision and directly how it would solve an uncertainty for 128 students who could be booked into Lathrop Hall, ensuring their status as an enrolled student at UAF. Awesome.

This took some serious coordination - and fast. I’m so thankful for our very qualified and optimistic Project Manager, Deb Hicks, our amazing Space Planner, Brittany Van Eck, our nimble Residence Life Director, Teddi Walker, our Facilities Maintenance and Operations leaders, Nathan Platt, Darrin “Bear” Edson and crews for all of the move support and muscle, and to our colleagues in the System Office who cleared out nearly an entire floor of the Butrovich Building to make room for everyone on short notice. Kellie Fritze, Amanda Wall, Lee Ann Amerson, Chantelle McGinness, Glenda Findlay, Gwen Holdmann, Mark Billingsley, Ali Knabe, Rebecca Catlin, Luke Fulp, Michelle Rizk, Ben Shier, and all of the teams that made this happen - thank you. You made a difference to over 100 students who now call UAF home. Please look for updates this fall about a UAF Open House in Butrovich, to let people know where to find us! 

Continuing with welcome news - I am pleased to announce Carla Browning, UAF’s onboarding and engagement manager, is about to offer our first New Employee Welcome event on Sept. 7. This is an effort in response to feedback from Governance and employee surveys (especially coming out of the pandemic and after years of fiscal constraint) to (re)create an orientation and onboarding program for new employees or those who have changed positions, improving our support for new hires in a way that increases engagement and productivity earlier in a UAF career. Building cohorts and networks within UAF to strengthen our employee connections, capabilities, training and development is something we are committed to. Carla will continue to explore the employee journey and identify ways to enhance the experiences for staff and faculty from the time of hire throughout employment with the university. You can find out more about UAF’s Employee Experience on our website and I wish Carla the best of luck kicking off this new program!

Friday Focus is written by a different member of UAF’s leadership team every week.