How did it get to be Thursday? It must be the Monday holiday that is throwing me off. I spent the weekend driving from Michigan to California for what I believe to be my last time doing that! It was far cooler in Michigan, quite nice actually, and I had a chance to see a graduate student who is moving on to her career and my former technician who is doing quite well in her new position. I have 1 graduate student to complete who should finish in December and he just had one of his 3 dissertation manuscripts accepted for publication. I am hoping a second is accepted before his defense as that usually makes for an easier defense exam. This reminds me that I need to check in on him and prod a bit for the draft of his next manuscript. Of course I still have one from my other graduate student and one from my technician to get off my desk but perhaps this weekend. You would think now that I have completed the review of dossiers for faculty seeking promotion at other universities and turned down requests to review a few others, I would see time in the near future to get to these manuscripts. But with a few other 'must dos' on the docket and a half dozed to dozen UC ANR competitive grant proposal reviews in my near future there isn't an obvious weekend to knock these out. I promised something to Jim Downing in the next couple of weeks as well - clearly didn't think that one through.
Tuesday MatthewShapero started as the Assistant Cooperative Extension Advisor, Area Livestock and Range Advisor in Ventura, with programmatic responsibilities in Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties. We are excited to have Matthew in that position. Please be sure to welcome him to UC ANR.
This week Program Council met and we had some really great conversations about communications as well as updates from the Communications Advisory Board and CSIT. We also had some updates about the UC ANR Archive project that is run out of UC Merced and the UCB Graduate Students in Extension pilot project. Program Council also discussed the next steps for completing reviews and making funding recommendations for the UC ANR Competitive Grant submissions, the upcoming position call process, and status of strategic plan goals, particularly Goal 5.
Today is VP Council and Executive Council. Between those two meetings the day is just about full. I had better get started on some things. I need to review proposed edits from the REC directors about a message regarding the research rates at the RECs and then think through yesterday's conversations about how to move forward with upcoming vacancies in leadership positions. Good thing I have some commute time to try to sort through these topics and more.