WSU is inviting freshmen and senior students to evaluate the quality of their experience as well as the educational and campus community environments. What is going well at the institution and what areas can be improved?

The link to a 20-minute survey will be sent to the students’ preferred email addresses by the National Survey of Student Engagement starting today with a cover letter from Provost Daniel Bernardo. Reminder emails about the survey will be sent to students who have not yet responded on March 11, 25 and 31, and April 8. Please encourage students to participate.

More than $1.4 million is available for non-academic student activities, programs and projects on WSU Vancouver’s campus through Services and Activities Fees. S&A Fees are part of students’ tuition. Have a sweet idea for a performance, speaker, service, facility upgrade or something even more creative? APPLY! Budget request forms are due at 5 p.m. March 14. Forms and more information are available online.

Financial Aid and Scholarships is tightening the timeline to read and score scholarship essays with the goal of having scholarship notices in the mail on April 28. This way, students will have them in hand by the May 1 admissions acceptance deadline.

Due to the aggressive timeline, a few changes must be made to the process. Instead of a full week of reading/scoring applications the process will be condensed to two days. In order to achieve that, Financial Aid and Scholarships needs to increase from 40 to 50 volunteers. Roughly 800 scholarship essays are expected.

All volunteers will be trained. There will be four sessions to choose from, a morning and an afternoon session on both April 8 and 9. It’s a three-hour commitment—one hour of training and two hours of reading scholarship essays. All volunteers are expected to attend at least one three-hour session and are welcome to attend more than one if schedules allow. Lunch will be provided during the lunch hour and snacks will be served during other times.

If you are interested in being a scholarship essay reader, please email April Tovar by noon on March 15.

WSU’s brand elements have been refreshed and are now available via University Communications’ brand.wsu.edu website. With refinements for both greater readability and greater flexibility, the refreshed elements include logos, a new color palette, as well as standards to guide users in the implementation and consistent application of WSU’s brand. The brand site includes information for both written and visual communications.

Questions about the use of the brand elements should be emailed to brand@lists.wsu.edu. Or, feel free to contact the WSU Vancouver Office of Marketing and Communications for help at 6-9599.

For the first time this spring, WSU Vancouver’s commencement ceremony will be on the same day as the ceremonies at WSU Pullman—May 10. In the past, our ceremony was a week after Pullman’s ceremonies. That afforded us the opportunity to borrow some ceremonial props—most importantly the mace.

A mace is a custom-made piece of art often crafted from historic campus relics. Typically each component of the mace’s design is symbolic. Campus colors are typically represented and often times the mace is decorated with gems and precious metals.

“The mace is a reverential piece of school memorabilia,” said April Harris, author of “Academic Ceremonies A Handbook of Traditions and Protocol.” “It symbolizes the authority of the president to govern the university. If you don’t have one, make one.”

WSU Vancouver has contracted with local artists to construct a mace. The Mace Committee is soliciting ideas for language to be inscribed on it. Suggest a meaningful phrase or quote 42-72 characters in length to Nancy Youlden, chair of the Mace Committee, by end of day Wednesday, March 5. A selection will be made by the committee.

The 2014 Career and Internship Fair was the largest yet. More than 90 employers exhibited for upwards of 500 registered students. Of the 46 employers that responded to a post-fair survey, 40 said they plan to hire 85 WSU Vancouver students for jobs or internships in 2014.

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WSU Vancouver has installed charging stations for up to two 110V-compatible electric vehicles at a time.

Please observe the following Parking Services policies when using charging stations:

• Spaces are reserved for electric vehicles while charging only
• All users must display a WSU Vancouver Parking permit (daily, semester or annual)
• Any color of permit or proof of parking payment is acceptable while charging

11:10 a.m. – 12 p.m. March 26
Undergraduate Building, Room 202

Given the varied backgrounds and experiences students bring to the classroom, this Critical Literacies Achievement Success Program workshop offers strategies for clarifying the expectations and conventions for writing assignments within the major. In addition, we will discuss assessment strategies. Bring a writing assignment to revise during the session. Faculty and staff are invited to attend. For more information, contact Wendy Olson.

Engineering students use these turbines to learn about renewable energy. Students are currently working to redesign the blades.

See in the news to learn more.