Well, the questionnaire is out. I’ve had about 60 bounce back. Oof. I will see if I have secondary emails for those people. However, if you are reading this and you are an alum, please email me at rimese@uncsa.edu and I will happily send you a questionnaire for the UNCSA DnP Lighting Newsletter, issue #1 – hopefully coming out Aug 1st.
Monthly Archives: June 2020
Google Form Ready
It’s been a good weekend. I finished uploading the alum names and emails into my database, created a google form and sent it to a test group (class of 2020). Next, I will be sending the form to everyone I have an email address for and posting the link everywhere I can think of. Please fill it out if you graduated from UNCSA, DnP Lighting. Or even if you just want to be included….
Remember the goal here is to help as many people as possible connected. Talk with you soon!
Finding Family Project
Last night I finished getting all the email addresses and known alumni in one spreadsheet and uploaded into a Filemaker. There are 538 names. Soon (I’m hoping for tomorrow, but at least by Monday) I will send a questionnaire to them all asking a few things:
- Would you like an Annual Newsletter with department updates, alumni updates, introductions to new graduates and alumni contact info?
- Would you be willing to include your contact information in the aforementioned Newsletter?
- What are you working on? Before, during and after COVID-19?
I hope we have a lot of participation. As projects start happening again (whenever that may be) it will be useful to know who your fellow pickles are and if we can help each other!!
Progress for 2020-21 Season
Today we had a great talk about the 20-21 Season. It is going to be very interesting. Like so many things, it will be a different season than what we are used to, but it will be interesting and exciting to do productions with different challenges. What we have been thinking about is, how are productions being done around the world right now? How do we teach that and give our students that experience? Intriguing, yes?
Alumni Newsletter
Today I finished step 1!! I now have over 500 names of people that have been a part of the Lighting program over the last 50 years! I don’t have email addresses for everyone, but most! The next step is to build a database (Filemaker) and then create an email list for contacting everyone and asking what they would like to share with the group (if anything). I’ll post here on progress.
Stagetechnician.com
In addition to connecting grads and students, I am working on making more pages on this site. Password protected, but a page for each class and my advisees. Look for updates here on ways to make appointments and how to access your class page. Much of this will be duplicated for Canvas, but some things will be only here on Stagetechnician.com. Stay tuned!
Alumni Connections
I have been working for several months on an alumni database. Why? One of the most powerful tools you can have at your disposal is your contacts. If I can help you all (students, new graduates and alumni) connect with one another think how much more useful your address book will be! To that end, I am hoping to send out a quick survey about who is OK with publishing their contact info. After that, I’ll create a newsletter (big newsletter) to send to everyone on the list. I’m really excited about it!!!
New Equipment
One very exciting thing is that we have been able to buy a bunch of new equipment this summer. We should have enough instrumentation and dimmers to support the shows we do now and we even got some truss to expand the grid in our large lab all throughout the whole room. All this stuff, of course, will need to be “prepped.” I hope everyone is ready to roll when we start in the Fall…
Alumni Connections
Some of you may be aware that I have been working on contacting Alumni. Why? To bring us all together somehow, of course. It would be awesome to find everyone, but right now I have 500 names and I am trying to put email addresses to them. I am more-or-less, through the “a”s. Baby steps. I am hoping to publish a “newsletter” by July 15th and make first contact on June 29th. Those are the goals!
Rebuilding
So, there is a lot that has changed in this last year. Covid-19, BLM, faculty changes, staff changes….to name a few. There is a lot that will need to be “re-built.” I am going to start with re-doing my website and my Canvas pages for my classes. My hope is that there will be a lot more useful content for students and my friends to see what’s happening…
I am also working on contacting more alumni and connecting as many of them as possible. I think this is essential and helpful to our graduates and I hopefully everyone will agree with that!
Stagetechnician.com 