In response to new accreditation guidelines and student demands, how assistant professor Dawn Bourne (BSN ’04, MSN ’10, DNP ’16) and colleagues have winnowed the on-Grounds requirements for DNP students in Advanced Health Assessment by more than 50 percent while ensuring students still receive the intimate, hands-on opportunities and mentoring for which the School is known.

Partnerships with local schools and HBCUs. Regular opportunities for faculty members to work as clinicians providing care at community events. Modeling and mentoring students in those spaces, too. How faculty members such as Randy Jones (BSN ’00, MSN ’02, PhD ’05), goal champion and associate dean for partner development and engagement, are showing up in places and spaces where nursing students and faculty haven't previously or typically been. 

The nursing faculty shortage is troubling. How goal champion Jeanne Alhusen, associate dean for nursing research, with her team in the Office for Nursing Research, is creating novel structures, supports, on-ramps, and opportunities for undergraduates, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and emerging nurse scientists to more deeply engage with and commit to futures in nursing science. "There is no one path into nursing science," says Alhusen, but the "hope is that a spark followed by organized support and engagement keeps them on a research track."

The work of goal four, says goal champion Melissa Gomes, associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, provides the foundation upon which all other strategic progress is made. And now that the School's student body is "majority minority" for the first time in its history, there's never been a better time to build out programs, resources, structures, events, and curricular programming that intentionally infuses belonging into everything that's done.