Final Grade Reporting, and Greek information

It has been insanely quiet on my part of campus. Lots of staff have already left town. Of note, final grades were due yesterday. Your Deacs will be able to access them in WIN.

Especially for our P’21 new families, please know that your student’s grades might well be lower than they (or you) are accustomed to. This is normal. Our first-year students had to adjust to a TON of things the first semester: living in a new place, having a roommate, the rigor of college level academics, etc. etc. etc. Typically the first semester grades are the lowest ones – and now that your students have seen a full semester of classes (and know what finals are like), the next semester they will have a better idea of what they need to do.

I can promise you that most of our students feel enormous pressure (real or imagined) about their grades, and many of them are worried about your reaction. My best advice here is that you will give your students an incredible gift if you don’t dwell on the grade. Instead, ask them if they tried their hardest and did their best (by that I mean did not procrastinate, got extra help during office hours, got a free tutor in the Learning Assistance Center, etc.) If they did their best, great! Congratulate them for a job well done. If they did not take advantage of the other resources, gently encourage them to think about adding some of those in next semester. But please, reassure them that you love them and are proud of them. They need to hear that.

Changing topics….several P’21 Deac Moms have been in touch with me asking about the link for the webinar about sorority recruitment. The link is online here. You’ll go to a page and see a button for “Playback” – hit that.  A few notes on the sorority webinar:

It is a WebEx recording, and if you are not familiar with WebEx, there are normally a few minutes at the front of the recording where there is no sound, occasionally punctuated by beeps that indicate other people are joining the call.

Hang tight through that few minutes of upfront dead time and then the event will begin.

For my computer, it opened the recording up in a new window – if you can hear but not see, check if you need to click on the newly opened window.

One of the things the webinar mentions is that the Panhellenic (sorority) recruitment booklet is online here. Your young ladies going through recruitment received a hard copy at the PNM (Potential New Member) event in November. Finally, there will be IFC (fraternity) and NPHC (historically black fraternities and sororities) webinars in January; you can find more info here.