As President, I spend a lot of time building – building relations, building programs, building community and building buildings. I guess that my architecture and engineering background prepared me well for that, and it is certainly one of the things that I enjoy most about being President.

On Monday, I spent quite bit of my day building relationships and sharing information with students, prospective students, faculty and prospective faculty. I also met with VP for University Advancement, Brooks Hull, about building a capital campaign that will drive further advancement of our institution. I am excited about this ambitious initiative that will elevate the impacts of Tech and further our efforts to create unparalleled experiences in a 21st Century campus environment. You will hear more about this very soon.

Tuesday, Kathy and I enjoyed taking a new student, Kylie Kalinowski, to meet the coaches, student athletes and fans of the Lady Techsters basketball program at their Welcome Back Dinner at Argent Pavilion.

On Wednesday, I drove to Baton Rouge to build relationships with some of my colleagues of the University of Louisiana System.  University of New Orleans President, John Nicklow, hosted a reception for the ULS Board, Presidents, staff and friends at the new  Water Campus.  Three of our ULS institutions (Tech, UNO and SELA) are working together to build out an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system for our institutions, and we took this opportunity to get together to get updates on project progress. While it is not as visible as our campus building projects, this ERP system is a crucial development that is going to most positively impact our ability to manage and use data and information for improvement of operations and better serve our students, employees and stakeholders. 

I returned to Ruston on Thursday in time to pick up Kathy and head to Monroe where we boarded a plane with the Bulldogs to travel to Florida for a Conference USA football game with the Florida Atlantic Owls. We enjoyed building relationships with the team, fans and alumni during that trip. The late Friday night trip home was certainly most pleasant as we all celebrated the huge Bulldog victory over the Owls.

Hope you enjoy a few of my favorite pics for the week: