Hello SAAL Blog readers! Here is the next installment of our conversation series getting to know the leaders that make up this wonderful group of Student Affairs Assessment Leaders and learning from their personal stories. I joined the SAAL blog team after starting a new role as the Director of Assessment, Data Analytics, and Research at the University of Delaware. Being new to the role, I reached out to others who have been doing this work for a while. Given SAALs mission and vision center, in part, on the creation of a thriving community, I thought I would share with you a bit of what I learn from these conversations as well as some information about the humans in these roles, the faces behind the listserv emails so to speak.
Each conversation has been an hour long, so I’m not going to share all of what we talked about. I’ll share a bit about who these individuals are, some of their thoughts and advice, and hopefully give you some new ideas to ponder in your own work, with my own take-aways following the recap of our conversation.
Emily Tipton (she, her, hers)
Assessment & Planning Analyst
Chesapeake College, Wye Mills, MD, two-year community college
In her current role: February 2022
Tell me about your journey into student affairs assessment. How did you get here?
My graduate degree is from Clemson in a program called counselor education and student affairs. We took an assessment course and then my graduate assistantship was in career services. And we had [a staff member and] half of her work was assessment. And I kind of took to it. I think I just appreciated how [assessment] brought theory to life and concepts that in class I struggled with. It gave me something more concrete to evaluate. I need things in a box and …found assessment and research courses to be the easiest. Ever since I've always kind of done assessment work in random student affairs offices. I did an internship with Campus Rec where I did assessment of club sports and intramural sports and evaluating the student experience in all these different capacities. I was a student athlete myself. I was fascinated with what athletics gives you from a student development standpoint. In my full-time career, I always just kind of took it on. It's kind of counter to what I see a lot of my colleagues wanting to do, but the student-facing stuff exhausted me and the assessment work I found to just be easier. It came naturally to me.
… Everywhere I've worked, I've been able to just kind of get really lucky [and] end up doing assessment work. And then I'm doing it well and they're like, "Wow, we've never had this before. Maybe you could do it full time." …I think just something about it clicks with me more than what other people I see really in student affairs excelling at.
By the time I left [my last institution], I was the assistant director for assessment and strategic planning for their career center. We were the only office on campus that had a full-time assessment person. There wasn't even a full-time assessment person for the division at that point. The way [the institution used to do] things, I think, really shifted my perspective of assessment at large. They did an assessment day where everyone on campus came together, used a rubric, and evaluated each other's assessment plans all across campus. So, I sat with like the dean of liberal arts, the head of the police, and the head of the library. And they mixed divisions. And it was really interesting to see, "Oh wow, it's much easier to assess student learning when you're the dean of liberal arts and you're just looking at course data." But then the police department is held to the same standard and they're trying to figure out what the heck assessment is… I'm thankful that I got [that experience], because now in my job now, we oversee assessment for the whole institution.
What do you think are the biggest differences between student affairs assessment at four-year versus two-year institutions?
There are fewer hoops to jump through but you have the same set of expectations with far less resourcing. You take for granted working in like a 20-person office. And now [at Chesapeake College], I've got to train our director of career services who does every single role of those 20 people. He still has to plan a career fair and meet with students and appointments and oversee the budget. And I have to convince him now that assessment needs to be part of his cyclical process and he needs to incorporate budget into his report and all these things that people [here] have never done before. And they just don't have a lot of time. And even in our [Assessment & Planning] office, there's two of us. Our office has changed substantially ... We don't have the same technology budget, so we're having to do things in really antiquated ways that take a lot longer but still our IR office has to submit the same state reports as [larger and more resourced area two-year institutions]. …I do think we're lucky that the assessment work for Student Affairs is housed in our office and we have the money to get [updated technology solutions] whereas our Student Affairs division does not get a lot of money. …[And] It's rural. ... We have this massive population of continuing ed courses, programs where students are not enrolled in the school. We don't capture information about them. And so, it's all this data that people are like, "You know, we just don't report on that, assessment-wise." But now they have an interest in it. …This new system allows us to have data visualization. So, I think they're seeing some of that on the academic side and they're like, "Whoa, we want that in skilled trades. How do we do that?" We have to be collecting data consistently. [But] there's instructors that are just so far removed from academia. …[We] have a lot of people whose mindset too is very anti-data, anti-tracking.
… I definitely took for granted that student data was so accessible at a large four-year institution and it's not here and we're still figuring it out. …I definitely took for granted, in my opinion, how much easier it was to do assessment work at a four-year institution where you have the resources. You typically are coming into an established data arena that allows you to do your job better in assessment…[We] still have to do the same work that those four-year colleges are doing, with less. The appeal is that it's a much smaller community feel. … Here, everybody knows everybody on a first name basis because it's smaller. There's a lot less siloing here, which is nice… The president's cabinet is just like three or four people that lead the college and they meet very frequently. …The org chart is so compact that things can get done a lot quicker and collaborating feels easier. There's only so many people that have to be involved.
[That also means] if any one of us leave, it's catastrophic. It's an entire office abandoned. It's crazy. I had to take over from a director who left a month after I started. I was going to be like an assessment analyst for him and then he left so, I had to do that [Director] role in the interim, like collect all academic assessment having only a student affairs background and using this new system I'd never used. He had like two days to train me. It's just basically like the whole office up and left. I had nobody to ask about things.
One of the things that it feels like it could be easier given how you're situated is making the case to link up the academic data to the student affairs data.
Oh, yeah, I did that in 5 minutes and people didn't even question it. …We got some feedback back from Middle States that was "Oh, you're not centrally evaluating your student services and you're not evaluating for effectiveness," which we all knew was going to be the case... [So,] I asked [our student services units and VP], "Would tying to our gen ed competencies [be feasible]..." And so, now I'm just adding to their [assessment] reports that they input every year, map this [outcome / objective] to gen ed competencies. And there's a lot of cross campus committees that have faculty, academic support, tutoring, and then like, advising and student retention. There's like 10 committees on campus where a rep from each of those is working together to enhance instructional design, to enhance our developmental courses. Developmental math has their own group and I mean, again, they can get things done a lot quicker. And there's always a rep from each entire division and it's so easy to put together. But the tie in [is that] faculty here are really bought in to student services, which is a little bit different than other places I've worked.
What’s a big issue/change you are watching in the field right now?
I mean, I'm so new to this myself that I would not advise anyone else. But that [Structured Conversation] on AI in Assessment. I was trying to think about how you could use it in a way that wouldn't be, I don't know, take away the critical thinking component of it but writing student learning outcomes or helping people to think of different ways to construct assessment tools or learning tools for people who have never done this work before. I don't know. I'd be more interested to hear how other schools use it first before I ever venture down that road.
Data visualization too. …Everyone is putting a lot of trust in me to build out this entire system and trust that what I have in my mind is going to end up giving them visualizations that we've never been able to have before. So, that's terrifying but it is in my head that it will work. But we'll be able to see in one area, strategic plan initiatives and progress along those with assessment data and success and outcomes. Under a division page, we'll have all of that together. So, having technology resources that comes with or having staffing who are familiar with data visualization is becoming more critical.
What advice do you have for someone new to this field?
I really, really have advocated for a lot of people [to take] the SAAL course ...especially if they're coming in with different backgrounds where they didn't have any assessment work [experience]. And then also … meet with whoever is leading your assessment office at your college. We had a new director of assessment who came into [my previous institution]. And he was amazing; he sat down… gave really consultative advice. I think sometimes people are scared or think they don't have the time. But truly it was like an hour-long meeting with a free consultant to look at your assessment work and review it…
One of the most impactful meetings of my entire career was just meeting with somebody in the college's assessment office who could connect it and show me, "This is how it's done in academics. it takes extra work to do it in a student services arena. there's a little bit more legwork because it's more transactional." a lot of people [in student affairs offices] I meet with now have that same gap that I had when I first inherited [assessment work]. you think you're doing assessment by collecting certain metrics but you're really not. And how do you bridge that? [That meeting] was like a light bulb moment.
If anyone wanted to be you one day, would you give them different advice or additional advice?
Be careful. [Assessment work] seems like the type of work that people are happy to pass off. …It [seems like] easy to ask "Hey, can I help with that?" [And they might say] "Great, you can do that forever now because I don't like it."
You have to start by just asking whoever's doing assessment in your office, ask to shadow them or talk through whatever your office's [assessment] plan is. That seems like the typical pipeline for assessment work. Assessment is the one place where I've seen people from academics, from IR, from student services that end up doing the work. So, I would pull as many people from many different divisions as possible and learn from. And if there's an established academic assessment process at your college, learn what that is. That's easier said than done. It's [been] easy at a [smaller] community college. I was able to learn [the academic assessment process] pretty quickly and then could mirror what student services assessment will do off of that so that the data visualizations can all be in one place.
Just be inquisitive, which I think a lot of assessment people are. So, be inquisitive, take on a little bit of unpaid work. nothing new.
I feel like the benefit is that it always makes you more appealing to someone recruiting for any open job in student affairs if you've done assessment work. I tell a lot of my colleagues, "Look at [national associations] -- They have outcomes. I'm sure they have example outcomes. I'm sure they have rubrics and tools that you can use” but especially in a community college, you have to think about how those things should be adapted to our environment.
What do you do in your spare time?
I have a toddler. …I really make it a priority to spend time with friends and family. …I'm big on creative stuff. I do a lot of like Pinterest projects and making my own Christmas ornaments. I made our Halloween costumes. I always have to be doing something hands on in my spare time.
I've gotten really good at compartmentalizing work and personal life. I do not take my work home. I don't stress about my work when I get home. …I try not to let work make me sweat. But assessment can be more stressful than I found career services... There were no big long-term projects. It was like, plan an event, meet with students. Every day I was able to check off my list of things to do for the day. And this is a lot more... It's a lot more long-term future thinking, thinking about things in a cyclical and calendar way that can be fulfilling. If you like the immediate satisfaction of working with students, which I totally get why you would, assessment can be less rewarding in that way.
I initially connected with Emily when I moved and was job searching – she was on the search committee for a role to which I had applied. I reached out to her for this series as I wanted to make sure to highlight the voice of someone from a community college, but I didn’t know going in how insightful Emily would be about the challenges and opportunities of this work in a different context! Her past experience working in student affairs assessment at a four-year institution I think makes her a wonderful person to highlight what those differences are. I’m struck by both how similar and divergent the work is in our various contexts – some of the challenges are the same but a different flavor and some are totally unique. In many ways for me, reflecting on this conversation points to the ways in which we are all engaged in similar work even though institutional context and organizational challenges and resources may differ.
This series is meant to highlight and lift-up those who are working in assessment full-time on a campus with at least some of their time dedicated to student affairs or co-curricular assessment. Know someone you’d like to learn from featured in the series? Leave their name in a comment and I’ll do my best to connect with them!
This blog post was written by Sophie Tullier, Director of Assessment, Data Analytics, and Research, Division of Student Life, University of Delaware.