Happy Holidays, CALS colleagues!
This past Friday and Saturday, we celebrated our graduating students at the CALS Convocation on Friday morning, the university graduate student commencement on Friday evening, and the university undergraduate commencement on Saturday afternoon. What a truly wonderful line-up of recognitions and celebrations to help launch our newest alums! It is a great pleasure to watch our students file across the platform and receive congratulations and diplomas, to contemplate what they have accomplished here, and even more so all that they will each accomplish over the many next phases of their careers. It's humbling to imagine that each of us in the college have had some impact on the lives our students will live.
This year at CALS Convocation, we added a "hand-shake line” of department chairs (those not on the platform), faculty and staff to congratulate our graduating students after they descended the platform. I hope more and more of you will come out to join that fun at future convocations. It would be great to have a tremendously long line of hand-shakers to further celebrate our students! Please keep this in mind for May 2023, December 2023, and so on. Special thanks to all who planned our CALS Convocation and the many Iowa State faculty marshals drawn from the CALS faculty ranks!
Lots of good things happening in the college even as we get ready for winter break! Besides graduation, we have the start of winter term (thanks to all choosing to teach - we’ll reconvene in the spring for a debrief of how the term went); submission of applications for the Miller Faculty Fellowship, the Rossmann Manatt Faculty Development Award; the start of the search committee work for our next Associate Dean for Facilities and Operations, and more. We are nearing the launch with the ISU Research Park of the Alliant Digital Agriculture Laboratory that will be a new home for Matt Darr’s digital and precision agriculture work. Next up will be renewed planning for the putative Agriculture Innovation Center that we hope to develop, as well, at or adjacent to the Research Park and our college farms.
It's been a very busy fall semester, and I want to thank you all for all the efforts near-and-far, far-and-wide, local-and-global! There were a bunch of departmental and programmatic Board of Regents reviews this past semester – all extraordinarily well done and concluding that we indeed have world-class programs. We launched a good number of faculty position searches and have more in the works. We’ve made good progress on the budget. We have great news on turning the cycle of student recruiting back up. We've received record external grants and contracts to fund our research programs, and there is tremendous energy around extension and outreach to take us into the future.
With that, I bring this final version of the CALS Monday Message to a close for 2022, and look forward to working with you and having another great year in 2023! Your work matters so much and makes such a difference. At CALS Convocation, I encouraged our graduates to be proud of what they have done here, and let me encourage you to also be proud of your work here. I am privileged and honored to work with you.
All the very best all through the New next Year, and Happy Holidays of every kind to all of you and yours! - Dan
Scenes from CALS
Enjoy these images from the CALS Convocation - see more on the CALS Facebook page. A shout out to Cheyanna Sheaffer, senior in horticulture, (pictured with Carolyn Lawrence-Dill, Alison Parker and myself), for providing the floral arrangements that were on the stage at the CALS Convocation. Following graduation, Sheaffer will start her own floral business.
