How we got here
In Fall 2023, the Strategic Planning Executive Committee (SPEC) was formed with members from each department and school, and KPMG was hired to lead us through the planning process. KPMG outlined a workplan designed to address our needs and help us understand our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
The plan comprised five phases:
- project initiation,
- research and discovery,
- consultations,
- current state analysis, and
- strategic plan development.
The consultations were the most crucial and extensive phase and involved substantial stakeholder interactions.
Between October 2023 and June 2024, we collected 1,877 individual responses through 98 in-person and online community engagement events, including workshops, retreats, small group discussions, and online surveys. Stakeholders included undergraduate and graduate students, staff, faculty, alumni, university-level administrators, and community partners. These sessions and the feedback provided gave us direction and were crucial to the development of our final plan.
The final feedback session was an open house where we shared the nearly final versions of everything you’ve seen in this plan. Survey data from the open house scored highly with an average of 4.4 out of 5 across the board. This feedback told us that the Science community overwhelmingly agreed that this was the plan they asked for.