8-25-06

Welcome to the Tabor College Business Department Blog. On this site, we will try to keep you up to date on events, courses, faculty happenings and other items going on in the department this year.

Please let us know what is going on in your life. You can e-mail us at business@tabor.edu or to me personally at normh@tabor.edu

It is an exciting time as school just is ready to begin. All of us are excited to get going. I think we all miss summer a bit, but it will be nice to get into a regular routine.

We had our first department meeting of the semester today. We discussed several things. We talked about the blog site, what our goals for it were, and how we would like to use it. Here are some of the thoughts we came up with.

1. A site to keep you informed about what is going on in the department.
2. A place where we can let you know about what your fellow alumni are doing
3. A fun place for us to let you know what is going on in each of our lives both personally and professionally.
4. A potential clearing house for job openings you may have.
5. A place where we can inform prospective students and alumni about happenings at the Bean Counter (business department student operated coffee house) and things in business club.

The second thing we discussed is the development of a mentorship program. We are interested in matching interested students and interested alumni in a student mentor relationship. The commitment for the alumni is one for an academic year. What we would like you to do is contact your student at least once a month. The contact can be over the phone, face-to-face, or electronically (e-mail or using an instant messenger program such as MSN or Yahoo). We think this can be beneficial to both the student and to the mentor. If you are interested in information about the program, send an e mail to either of the two addresses noted above.

The last thing we discussed is our departmental assessment plan. We are moving to a plan which assess student learning through the use of portfolios. We have taken our steward model and identified specific objectives for each of the steward goal statements. We will be asking students to begin gathering data for their portfolios beginning this fall. We hope to fully implement the program / plan for students graduating next year. Identifying assessment goals and outcomes continues to be a challenging process. If you are interested in knowing our goals and outcomes, let us know and we can e-mail you a copy of our portfolio guidelines. We are always looking for input from alumni on how we could do business education better.

Additionally, if you have internship opportunities, we are always interested. You can contact Dr. Linda Cantwell at lindac@tabor.edu.

Again welcome to the site, we hope it will be helpful, informative and FUN (as recent alumni know we are into that as much as anything)

NH