Admissions, Alumni, and More

I apologize for taking the past week off from blogging. I have been preoccupied with a personal family illness. For the past week, my mother has been in the hospital in South Carolina. Her condition started out as bronchitis, which became pneumonia, and exacerbated her asthma and heart conditions. Since last Thursday, she has been in ICU and on a ventilator. I certainly don't want to use this forum to exploit my mother's condition in any way. However, I have gleaned a few lessons from this experience, which I would like to pass along to future health care professionals.

If you live in the Phoenix area, you may have seen MWU in the newspapers over the past few days. Last Fall, MWU announced the establishment of a new College of Dental Medicine at our Glendale Campus. This new academic program is part of a $150 million expansion plan in Arizona to increase the number of health care providers needed by the state and region. The plan includes the development of a low-cost dental clinic for patients, which would also be utilized as a training site for our students.

With six colleges at two campuses, and now 20 degree programs, Midwestern University provides a fertile environment for scientific and medical research. Every time we conduct marketing audits of our current students, they tell us that the best thing about MWU is our faculty. They are excellent teachers, who are committed to training their future professional colleagues, and they are also accomplished researchers. The winter edition of the Midwestern University Magazine focuses on 2 alumni, 10 faculty, and 1 student researcher.

Every time we survey our accepted and new students, we hear again and again that our campus locations are important factors in the decision to apply to MWU. The two cities that are home to our academic community are both outstanding. While their weather profiles are vastly different, Chicago and Phoenix share an abundance of great restaurants. This entry may be considered "The World's Best Cheeseburger and Most Delicious Chocolate Cake."

This week at our Downers Grove Campus, a third-party consultant is conducting focus groups of our interviewees, current students, faculty, and administrators about our public web site (www.midwestern.edu). We are asking people to evaluate our current site and offer their suggestions for improvements. The current site is probably about four or five years "old," so it is definitely time to reconsider its design, navigation, and features. Over the past two years, we have made some improvements, such as creating an improved virtual tour; simplifying the home page (with direct "clicks" to our degree programs at both campuses); adding InteractNow tools for accepted students; and, of course, piloting this blog.