Grad‑App‑Alooza (Transfer and Job Fair) is an annual event organized by Estrella Mountain Community College’s (EMCC) Career and Transfer Center (CTC), in coordination with Workforce and Experiential Learning (CWEL). The event is designed to support students as they transition to the next phase of their academic or professional journey by connecting them with representatives from over 50 universities, employers, and campus departments.
This assessment evaluates changes implemented for the Spring 2026 Arizona Data Center Alliance event at EMCC. Based on feedback from the previous year, the event format was redesigned to reduce the number of panel discussions and expand networking opportunities between students and industry professionals. The updated structure featured two focused panels representing IT and technician career pathways and significantly increased networking time with industry partners.
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
The following also helped with planning and organizing this event:
Laura Porritt
Tracy Tanner
Alissa Manzoeillo
Gerniah Liburd
And the many........many.....many volunteers who participated. Thank you!
This assessment assesses the CLO of "Students will pick the most appropriate tool/technique to solving a problem" as well as the ILO of written communication.
Student applicants to the DRS office are not prepared for their eligibility meeting. Students do not actively participate and struggle to provide thoughtful/applicable answers to questions. Some also express a sense of nervousness as if they are on a job interview, which complicates their ability to fully participate in the process.
Angela McClure and I worked on this as part of our calc I/phy I learning community. She and I plan to re-evaluate this in the Spring and I will also try this in the other learning community. I will be reaching out to some of my calculus colleagues to see if they are interested in trying this with some of our exams that are more "skill" based an not conceptual. Angela mentioned possibly looking into doing something like this with vectors in PHY121. Is this worth the time and effort with doing this? Are students willing to take advantage of this opportunity?
Not all faculty have the time or nor want to teach in the calculus/physics learning community. So, how do we help faculty who teach stand alone calculus courses? Also, stand alone calculus courses do not have another instructor present to help emphasize concepts. So, Becky is teaching a stand alone calculus course in Fall 18 to see if she can cut down on some competencies, incorporate labs, and she will compare her course to other instructors who teach non-learning community calculus courses. Did Becky's class perform the same, worse or better on the common final?
Since Fall 2014 , the calculus instructors have been working on creating common questions to have on the final exam for calculus I. Faculty (both full and part time) meet to discuss pedagogy, common questions and creation of a pre-post test. The common questions are the first half of our final exam with the 2nd half written by each individual faculty member. Each semester, the questions are looked over and kept or modified. The purpose of the common questions is to make sure all calculus faculty are covering "core" topics in MAT22X.