Driving Transformative Experiences

We aim to propel the journeys and passions of individuals in our community and ignite a strong sense of belonging, community and purpose for our students, staff and faculty. 

Summer Experiential Learning Opportunity Fellowships

• In today’s world, students need an array of experiences both inside and outside the classroom to compete for graduate school admission or top industry jobs, and access to these experiences, which often take place over summer months, should not be limited to those with higher family incomes. Expanding access to experiences outside of the traditional classroom environment for students to participate in research, internships and study abroad trips is a key goal, as the college works to reduce disparities for students from families with low to middle incomes to participate in experiential learning opportunities.

Welcoming Campaigns like You Belong Here

• CNS wants to embed in its spaces, touch points and events explicit signals of welcome and belonging for our students, staff and faculty. We are continually examining ways to bolster community-based values and experiences for everyone in Texas Science.

Taking a Promotion Milestone From Associate to Partner

• The “From Associate to Partner” retreat for newly promoted associate professors in the College of Natural Sciences engages newly tenured faculty in an exploration of their hopes and goals for their life's work. The retreat is a two-day event filled with opportunities for mid-career faculty to interact and learn from senior-level faculty about new possibilities in service, research collaborations, teaching, administration, entrepreneurship and more.

CNS Mental Health Task Force and Resources

• CNS is directing more focus to the essential role of wellbeing and health across our community, including a new College of Natural Sciences Student Mental Health Task Force — made up of faculty, staff and students — working to identify priorities for those in CNS with concerns and experiences related to mental health and create affiliated resources for students, faculty and staff.

Advancing Mentorship College-Wide

• With careful consideration from a soon-to-be-established working group, a large-scale, multi-phased initiative will work to create resources for improving mentorship across students, faculty, staff and alumni. Such resources will include clarified job expectations, training workshops centered upon best practices, strategic intake and matching opportunities, timely conversation templates and timeline nudges, a new awards series, evaluation and feedback loops, toolkits for troubleshooting and more.

We aim to deliver excellence in all we do through outstanding personnel, operations and technology.

College Climate Assessments

• New and ongoing efforts to listen and learn from our community members help inform and focus the work of the college. Improved coordination across faculty, student and staff climate surveys will allow us to better understand the climate of our college and the various units and organizations within it.  Periodic updates on the findings of these surveys will help inform the work of various committees as well as affirm the voices of our college community, and college actions will be driven by lessons learned through the assessment process.

Research/Practice Partnerships in Science Communication

• New and expanding partnerships with the Moody College of Communication create expert-informed opportunities to train our scientists to be better communicators. With graduate student opportunities underway, the college is exploring new ways to systematically train our faculty. This research/practice partnership aims to explore public trust in science and science literacy as well as motivation and barriers to effective science communication.

Improved Data Leadership, Data Availability and Data-Informed Decision Making

• Informed by the Action Plan of Summer 2020, CNS has been worked to establish a college-wide Data Task Force to develop CNS data policies and ensure access to data to improve CNS outcomes. This group is closely monitoring the affiliated Data to Insights Initiative (D2I) that is planning for modern, cloud-scale technologies, analytics and broad engagement of all campus-wide data systems. The CNS Data Task Force also worked to establish a data ticketing system. This system provides a streamlined process for requesting data and/or requesting support for data queries.

College Budget Planning Capacity-Building

• Working with key staff and leadership across the college, CNS will be designing new methods and training opportunities for strategic budgeting and optimal use of resources in alignment with strategic priorities.

Increasing Attention to Educational Technology

• Leveraging the disruptive technologies that have recently emerged as common teaching tools, the college will work to prioritize needs and opportunities, then create resources for learning, building and troubleshooting the use of technology in the classroom.

Conducting Comprehensive Exit Interviews

• Systematic, standardized and centrally administered exit interviews will provide a more confidential and comprehensive understanding of why individuals choose to leave the college and university. This initiative aims to not only improve upon the employee experience in their final days on campus, but more holistically inform the college as to areas of strength and areas of needed improvement.

Updates Prior to 2024

• Experiential learning and data office reorganization: The Office of Undergraduate Education organized an Office of Experiential Learning with a director whose work pertains to overseeing the college’s student community and engagement efforts in several domains, including the Freshman Research Initiative, Inventors Program and various experiential learning offerings (internships, study abroad, faculty lab research, etc.) Meanwhile, the college data team was moved to the Office of Strategy, Planning and Equity Initiatives to help broaden and streamline access to information, helping individuals and groups improve outcomes across multiple domains and aligning with the campus-wide Data to Insights initiative. In partnership with enrollment analytics, these teams and others in the college worked to assess outcomes of student success programs beyond retention and graduation rates; to better understand the impact of existing math, calculus and chemistry readiness initiatives; and to identify any gaps in supports or services for students entering the health professions, using data to inform decision-making.

• Expanded health and wellness resources: A new CNS Student Wellness Center opened in PAI where students can access services from non-academic coordinators, counselors in academic residence (CARE) and other wellness and support services related to a culture of care in CNS. The Counselors in Academic Residence Program (CARE) that initially provided one professional counselor devoted to Natural Sciences has been increased to three full-time counselors, including to serve the needs of graduate students.
• Comprehensive survey assessments and exit interviews: Systematic, standardized and centrally administered exit interviews for staff and faculty, along with a coordinated climate survey of all students, faculty and staff, each have provided information to help support continuous improvement efforts in the college over the last year. The data helped inform decisions on a range of topics, such as areas for professional development attention, awareness of broader trends that drive faculty or staff separations and what leads students to opt to leave the college.
• Improving mentoring of scientists and mathematicians in-training. Graduate students and postdoctoral scientists helped to inform a new set of toolkits and supports, as well as an awards program for faculty, related to mentoring in the college. A mentoring task force made recommendations about how better to ensure effective mentoring for graduate students, postdocs and others across the college. With support from the dean’s office, a group of faculty teamed up with the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research (CIMER) to bring quality mentoring training experiences back to multiple departments within the college and knowledge of best practices in mentoring college-wide. An estimated 400 students benefited from a new partnership with STEM Muse, a mentorship program whose best practice toolkit was originally developed by neuroscience students at UT Austin. 
• Undergraduate summer experiences were funded with $200,000 annually in new philanthropic support, sufficient to provide hundreds of students, most of them in the Freshman Research Initiative, with support to conduct research through the summer whether in Austin, overseas or at another institution in the United States.
• Academic technology: With help from a new faculty fellow, faculty benefited from academic technology trainings and resources. The college collaborated with the Office of Academic Technology, UT ITS and the Academic Technology Council to conduct a comprehensive, nine-month evaluation of learning technologies (the Learning Technology Adoption Process) which led to the strategic selection of Ed Discussion as a resource for faculty.^~
• Science communication training: The college collaborated with a science-communication training organization, leveraging relationships with faculty in the Moody College, to offer multiple in-depth, day-long workshops to nearly 60 faculty, graduate students and postdoctoral scientists to help them development skills in discussing research topics.