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Clearly, this team illustrates something about being competitive. These are talented,
natural athletes, yet we don’t have great size. I don’t believe we have
any Parade All-America recruits. Many of our players, like the student body in
general, come from the immediate area. They are both skilled and smart. In the classroom, they have ranked No. 1 or near the top among all NCAA Division I programs in cumulative GPA. In the gym, they have great teachers in Kevin Borseth, Kris Johnson, Chari Nordgaard and Liz Grzesk. It is my impression they are exceedingly well-prepared. I have noticed something else about our team. They really are a team. Why? Because they always learn from each other. See something go wrong on the court and what does Coach Borseth do? He wheels around and starts talking to the younger players, making sure they understand the sequence of events leading up to the miscue. And there is a lesson we can all draw from that. How do we create a real team, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts? It would seem to violate laws of physics. It happens, though, because as human beings we learn from each other, thereby multiplying our effectiveness as a group. Skilled. Smart. Well-prepared. Team-oriented. You don’t have to read ahead to know where I’m going with this. Obviously, I also believe these attributes are common to high-achieving individuals across campus, and they enable UW-Green Bay students and alumni to compete with the best. And, this derives from the fact that we are an institution that places learning at its core. In some respects the Top 25 comparison can seem a bit ambitious. We might face No. 1 Duke in a basketball tournament but we don’t otherwise have a great deal of overlap with a world-renowned private institution with a $2.3 billion annual budget and acclaimed medical and business schools. Our mission, size and scope are quite different. In today’s economy, however, our University, its alumni and our region do in fact need to compete at a high level. The setting might be local but it is also, increasingly, farther afield. That’s why we take pride in achievements large and small that mark UW-Green Bay as a competitive academic institution. Briefly, just a few: • Admission to the most selective graduate schools, law schools and medical programs across America... Our graduates have particularly excelled on the M-CAT exam, giving us a strong reputation in pre-med. TOP OF NEXT COLUMN |
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• Accounting,
Business and Economics... At recent alumni receptions at Wipfli and Schenck I
continued to hear raves about our accounting graduates, who are as highly recruited
as any in the state and have a collective, first-time pass rate on the CPA exam
well above average... In Business, our graduating seniors scored in the top 15th
percentile on a nationwide “exit exam” a few years ago... Our SIFE (Students
in Free Enterprise) economics club has taken top honors in Midwest competition. • Performing Arts... There are numerous instances of visual art and music students or groups winning recognition, but I’ll note here the theatre program’s recent success at the ACTF regionals and standout performances by actress Sunam Ellis and production specialist Beth Noonkester. • The Dietetics emphasis within our Human Biology program... Last year, a UW-Green Bay instructor (Karen Lacey) and student (Jodi Klabunde) swept the awards at the Wisconsin Dietetics Association Conference. • The fact we are always near the top among UW System schools in terms of the quality of our incoming freshman class... This year the average high school GPA for these students was 3.37, better than one in five were Top 10 percent in their class, and we also attracted 57 new students of color... These were all records. And that’s just a quick snapshot, a random scan of only a few of our “competitive” achievements. I apologize for being brief. There’s not space here, for example, to note all the standout students — with our emphasis on hands-on problem solving by undergraduates — who have presented or helped present research results at major academic conferences. Or the alumni who report back from graduate schools or corporate settings that they feel every bit as well-prepared, and usually more well-prepared, than their “big school” counterparts. So, in conclusion, let me urge you all to root for the Phoenix women’s basketball team. Their success is a great conversation starter, an entree for more general discussion about competition, the pursuit of excellence, and the value of being well-prepared. In many ways, that’s the UW-Green Bay story. In next month’s “Chancellor’s FYI” I intend to share with you the latest news on the state budget and the immediate challenges ahead for UW-Green Bay and Northeastern Wisconsin. In the meantime, don’t forget to celebrate all that we do well. Enjoy February. Go Phoenix! I’ll keep you posted, Sincerely, |
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