[Plsfaculty] CALES Microbiology Town Hall Follow Up (last mass email before transitioning to listserv)

[Baltrus, David A - (baltrus)]

Hi all,

Thank you to everyone that was able to attend and participate in the town hall last Friday. Unfortunately I had some technical issues with recording, however, happy to discuss any and all relevant discussion points going forward. Most importantly, if you are interested in having a voice in the microbiology undergraduate major as it's reshaped in the future, please at least sign up for a listserv and leave any comments in the town hall survey found here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc6jgOpr87RgviH49YSthoW7e3aAMIqO4xZtDcfW_imy7DioA/viewform?usp=sf_link

To quickly summarize points of discussion (with the ackowledgement that this is not a comprehensive list):

-There are two major issues that we are tasked with dealing with in the near future. One is figuring out a smooth way to hit the right notes to bring everyone in the CALES microbiology community together and feeling like a program. The second is that there is worry amongst CALES administration about declining numbers of microbiology majors.

-The Micro Undergrad major is now a shared between ACBS, SPLS, and ENVS. There is an executive committee to interface between department heads and other faculty across the programs and a curriculum committee established with members from each of the programs.

-One goal of the shared program is to provide everyone who contributes to the program a voice in the direction of the program, with an important part of this being establishing better lines of two way communication at all programmatic levels.

-There will soon be a public shared website for CALES microbiology

-There was significant discussion about analyzing why past attempts at running the program in a shared way did not work as well as hoped for, and about querying current and graduate students about the program overall.

-The curriculum committee (and HODs and Executive Committee) are in the process of reshaping the microbiology curriculum to include five different emphases. Core courses will be same across emphases but electives will differ. This will hopefully provide students multiple paths towards graduate and could be a selling point in recruiting new students to the major.

-There was also discussion about the finding ways to bridge the undergraduate and graduate microbiology programs as well as bridging microbiology across Colleges on campus.

Thank you,
The CALES Microbiology Executive Commitee (Gayatri Vedantam, Paul Carini, Dave Baltrus)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.cals.arizona.edu/pipermail/plsfaculty/attachments/20241211/adcdd46c/attachment.htm>