Face to Face

WorkWise Academy is a four-part professional development series designed specifically for part-time and federal work-study staff to bridge the gap between their current roles and future career goals. This cross-collaborative effort included Career and Transfer Center, Center for Workforce and Experiential Learning and Counseling representatives. During the Fall 2025 student affairs pilot cohort, the program focused on fostering an environment that supports individual growth and professional potential.

The Career Skills Challenge, hosted by the Career and Transfer Center during the 25-26 academic year, is a low-budget, high-impact workshop series designed to teach NACE competencies through gamification. The program engaged 56 students in scenarios ranging from survival councils to office simulations. The assessment shows a 100% peer-recommendation rate and high skill-connection scores, proving that innovative storytelling and campus partnerships can be equally vital to student engagement than high-cost programming.

Introductory biology courses serve as a foundation for upper-division coursework and are expected to develop not only content knowledge but also essential skills such as note-taking, organization, and conceptual understanding. A persistent challenge in BIO156 is that students struggle to identify key information, organize their notes, and connect concepts, often relying on memorization of isolated facts. This limitation affects their ability to apply knowledge and create effective study tools, such as exam cheat sheets.

Traditional grading practices often fail to measure learning in the way instructors intend, as they can be influenced by subjectivity and implicit bias. These systems frequently turn grades into a form of negotiation, creating an adversarial relationship between students and instructors rather than a collaborative one. As a result, traditional grading can heighten student stress and anxiety while discouraging creativity, critical thinking, and cooperative learning.

Prelicensure nursing students often have limited hands-on exposure to pediatric learning, which leads to gaps in confidence and clinical skill application. This initiative aims to increase students’ psychological safety while caring for pediatric patients by improving communication, assessment skills, atraumatic care, and medication safety. A needs assessment using faculty and student feedback identified deficits in growth and development, communication, atraumatic interventions, medication math, and overall student confidence.

Described is the use of a team-based healthcare case activity in BIO205 Microbiology to strengthen student diagnostic reasoning, communication, collaboration, and evidence-based decision-making. Working in randomly assigned groups, students were tasked with diagnosing a patient case while operating within a fixed budget and justifying each selected task or test to a simulated attending provider. The activity required students to interpret emerging evidence, revise their plans, and submit a final diagnosis supported by specific findings.

This activity describes the implementation of a themed, experiential review day designed to reinforce nursing students’ knowledge and clinical skills prior to progression into the subsequent block of the nursing curriculum. Developed in response to student feedback, the review day was conducted in a laboratory setting and utilized a Harry Potter–themed framework to promote engagement, collaboration, and active learning.

Additional contributors to this include ALL volunteers across campus as well as the Open House Planning Group:

Laura Porritt

Angela Ho

Gerniah Liburd

Miyah Gaston

Nahum Cabrera Olivas

Tracy Tanner

Alissa Manzoeillo