Thank you to the nearly 6,000 undergraduate and graduate students, staff, tenure and non-tenure-line faculty, alumni, employers, and community members who provided input for the Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) topic selection process.
The QEP Steering Committee has identified Foundations for Learning, Well-being, and Career as the topic area for our next QEP.
These foundations are the necessary elements for growing networks for well-being, a strong web of social connections within and beyond the classroom, to sustain our students and help them thrive at UT and beyond. Feedback from the campus community on the themes of career readiness, well-being and mental health, and access and belonging all highlighted a sense of anxiety and uncertainty related to the pressures and challenges that students face on their degree trajectories.
Two needs seem to underlie these themes: (1) a need for a more consistent understanding of the college experience and strategies for successfully anticipating and navigating common challenges and (2) a need for more robust networks to support life-long learning, belonging, well-being, and professional development.
To be sure, many students enter UT with the knowledge and skills to meet these challenges and the university has many effective people and programs already addressing these needs; however, responses to the Committee’s two-stage feedback process emphasized an opportunity for a more consistent, integrated, and far-reaching approach.
To that end, the new QEP will focus on fostering deeper commitments to learning and cultivating broad and robust connections among students, faculty, and staff. The new QEP will better empower students to weather adversity and succeed by building a foundation on which students can thrive at UT and beyond.
We are excited because this topic will involve all our faculty, staff, and students — and this is only the start.
In the spring, the QEP Steering Committee will identify specific activities that will become part of the new QEP. Developing this plan will involve researching evidence-based best practices, learning from other institutions, and identifying existing campus programs that can be expanded. We will continue to seek input and ideas from the broader campus community as we operationalize these Foundations for Learning, Well-being, and Career.
Visit the Institutional Effectiveness website for more information about the topic selection process.
Erin Hardin
Chair, QEP Steering Committee
Associate Department Head & Director of Undergraduate Studies, Professor, Department of Psychology