I am still serving as chair of our department and primarily teaching our senior PR courses. This winter, however, I am getting a chance to teach the Principles of PR course. It’s been a while (five years) and I always love being there at the beginning when students start to decide whether PR is for them. It is reinvigorating to be teaching the class, although I look forward to the love campaigns course in the spring.

Probably the biggest change for me is that I decided to go back to school (again) last spring. In March 2018, I began an online doctorate in education (Ed.D.) program through Arizona State University. I’m really excited about the program because it is hands-on and practical, with each of us working to try to improve something within our own organization. I got my inspiration from some of our fantastic senior news-editorial students: Logan Portteus, Hailey Palmer and James Egaran. For their Advanced Reporting course they wrote a fantastic series of articles about academic dishonesty issues at Western. Based on their initial findings, my goal is to develop online educational materials to help reduce the number of academic dishonesty violations in our department. Too many result from a lack of information and I’d like to figure out (with the help of my fellow faculty and students) how we might fill in that knowledge gap. One year down, two more to go.

On the personal side, the house is still a project (of course) and I’m trying to fit in travels around my work at Western and my studies at ASU. Next up – Austin in March and then Scotland/London in August (with, I hope, a Chicago visit in between).