Augustana’s Career Opportunities Research and Exploration Center (CORE) is currently in the process of hiring a new assistant vice president. A search committee of several Augustana staff members from various departments on campus along with Provost Dianna Shandy have been involved in the hiring process. An email was also sent out to the Augustana community inviting students and staff to attend the candidates’ forums that have happened over the past several weeks.
Each candidate is responsible for bringing new ideas that correlate with the strategic plan to make CORE a better place for students. Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs, Dianna Shandy, has been heavily involved with the process.
“It’s the assistant vice president of CORE and community-engaged learning, so it’s the head of that whole unit,” Shandy said. “CORE ensures that each student has tools to access opportunities post-graduation.”
According to Shandy, the assignment is a replacement position for the former Director of CORE, Robert Haak. Haak retired in the fall of 2023.
The search committee consists of several staff members including Ashley Allen, Chris Beyer, Rachel Horner Brackett, John Delaney, Kelly Nowak and Sangeetha Rayapati.
“It’s a national search. So mid-fall, we launched the search, and it went out on LinkedIn and our HR website,” Shandy said. “We pushed it out through the Chronice of Higher Education. So all these kinds of venues where you might hope to attract and recruit candidates, and we’ve gotten candidates from across the United States who applied.”
CORE has encouraged students and staff to get involved with the hiring process as well. The Augustana community has received emails that included the three candidates’ resumes, as well as an invite to attend the forums either in-person or virtually. Recordings of the forums were also sent out after the meeting for any who were unable to attend, along with a feedback form to fill out.
Sophomore Sofia Magalhaes, a CORE student ambassador, was invited to sit down and talk with the candidates over lunch.
“We go to lunch, and we ask them different questions. It’s a much more informal interview than any of the others,” Magalhaes said. “Anyone who is involved in the search process then fills out a form about the person, what you thought, did they do well, what were their strengths, what were their weaknesses and if they would be a good fit for this position. Then that [form] is reviewed by Provost Diana as she is making her decision.”
There is currently no known date for when CORE will officially hire a new assistant vice president. Certain steps have to be followed with a national search. Currently, the candidates are in the finalist stage.
“The people were invited to campus and then had adequate time after each candidate for the campus to provide feedback and for the search committee to meet after they had that feedback,” Shandy said. “Then we’re checking references as a part of that process, and when we make an offer, they often have a certain amount of time to decide how to extract themselves from their other job [and] give notice. Sometimes there’s some delay in making an announcement.”
Peyton Heisch, sustainability interface manager at Augustana, graduated from Augustana last May and used CORE as a way to jump-start her career. She also sat in on all three forums that had happened over the past several weeks.
“[CORE] affects everything we do that’s based around academic and career-associated skills. I think as a student I didn’t realize CORE was just around 20 people; I thought it was this big thing,” Heisch said. “It’s a much smaller group of people, and they do a lot of things that help us, and if you utilize them, you’ll be better off after college.”
