This week we launched full speed into community engagement with a three-day campus visit by SimpsonScarborough, our Institutional Positioning Project partners. Four experts flew in to host 16 in-person and virtual meetings – and took a student-led campus tour. A huge THANK YOU to everyone who elected to take part in these initial individual and group sessions, including staff, faculty, students, alumnae/i, trustees, high school college counselors, college leadership, and others. Some additional groups will be met with virtually after the Thanksgiving holiday.

This week was all about initial impressions — the team solicited ideas and feedback around the what, how, and why for Bryn Mawr as an institution and learned more about how the individuals and groups within our community think and feel about the college. I purposely did not participate in these discussions (except one) so I can’t report out more detail except to say that in a debrief meeting this morning, the SimpsonScarborough team was buzzing with excellent early ideas about how we can stand out from our peers. I can’t wait to see what they come up with after the completion of this research phase.

There will be no update next week as the team will be heads down synthesizing their observations and thinking about the next big initiative, which will be an online survey sent next month to a much larger part of our community. The meetings this week were extremely helpful in testing out some concepts that can be further explored via the survey instrument. Happy Thanksgiving to all and I’ll type to you in December.