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Dean's Perspective: SNRE's Bright Future

By Dr. Jim Cato
Senior Associate Dean and Director of SNRE

This fall, SNRE was notified that it was scheduled for the seven-year Board of Governor's review of our Interdisciplinary Ecology graduate degree program. The intent for this self-assessment review is to evaluate the trends in the program, its productivity and its quality and to determine areas of improvement. We used this opportunity as a time for reflection and to receive input from our students, the affiliate faculty, our Advisory Board, our Faculty Academic Council and our External Advisory Council. They encouraged us to be proactive and continue to reach our goal of becoming a top-ranked interdisciplinary natural resource and environmental academic, research and outreach/Extension program in the United States.

Through self-evaluation, SWOT analysis, special studies and prepared historical data we compared our current progress against the action items listed in our strategic plan. Findings indicate that we have been highly successful in recruiting top-quality students and in growing our graduate degree programs and in implementing our organized research and outreach/Extension activities. But, we still need to create a sense of place among faculty and students to better facilitate our mission of interdisciplinary collaboration. The following is brief summary of achievements, challenges and recommendations that SNRE will be delivering to the Board of Governors as a guide for how SNRE is working to position itself as a nationally recognized, interdisciplinary program.

The strong growth of our M.S. and Ph.D. programs (from 21 graduate students to 145 in eight years) indicates not just a willingness, but a requirement on behalf of the students and faculty to approach critical issues from a new perspective. However, to do this, a stronger infrastructure is required. Combined, dedicated space and facilities for SNRE students and administration are needed to create a sense of place for students entering the program and assist in the operation and growth of SNRE programs. Additionally, a small number of core faculty to provide programmatic leadership in areas not currently covered within UF's traditional discipline-focused academic community would help improve the academic culture of SNRE. They would embody the interdisciplinary nature of the School in concrete and practical terms, would provide new approaches, catalyze interdepartmental research and teaching teams, generate fundable ideas, and secure extramural grant funds in partnership with others.

SNRE is working to improve its research and outreach identity throughout UF and the State of Florida. The success of our annual mini-grant program has solidified SNRE's image as a true facilitator of interdisciplinary research, having generated more than $11.8 million in extramural and leveraged funding through an investment of $456K over three years; a return ratio of 27:1. SNRE Extension programs NRLI, NATA, and PREC are recognized state-wide as critical training programs. The continued success of these programs will further enhance our identity, but more is needed.

SNRE needs to become a leader in a thematic area to fully achieve national prominence. Land use, a critical issue facing the State of Florida could serve as an appropriate theme, especially given the ongoing, cross-campus collaboration on topics in land use. About one-fourth of our graduate students do their research on some aspect of land use. There are many opportunities for SNRE's programs to become more involved in land use training and education and SNRE is poised to engage in these actions. In addition to the People and Land Use Strategies faculty workgroup, SNRE is proactively working on a number of land use related issues.

Recently, SNRE secured funding to assist rural Hamilton County in economic development, community involvement and planning for its future, all centered on land use trends in the county. The interdisciplinary team consists of faculty from the Departments of Urban and Regional Planning, Family, Youth and Community Sciences, Food and Resource Economics, the GeoPlan Center, and the Hamilton County Extension office. We also want to become more engaged in training on land use decision making and policy issues.

Proactive strategies will help SNRE as we work to train students in a new way of interdisciplinary thinking and to push the frontiers of science which helps them tackle real-world problems as they enter the workplace. These strategies will also help us to attain national recognition for our achievements, and to provide research and outreach/Extension solutions. The self-assessment review which contains a wealth of information about SNRE will be available on the SNRE website after June 1, 2008.