Our faculty invest themselves in Allegheny's mission to an extraordinary degree. Generations of students have their own stories to relate: the professor who asked them home for dinner and made them feel part of an extended family; the scholar who invited them to collaborate on an original research project and gave them the opportunity to be published in a national journal; the mentor who dropped everything to give them a ride to the airport so they wouldn't miss a job interview.
By investing in the following areas, we can in turn support the invaluable investments that our faculty make every day in our mission and our students.
Curricular innovation. While our educational mission remains unchanged, many of our teaching methods and educational opportunities change with the times. Faculty are continually exploring ways to redesign courses and academic programs to better meet the needs of students. As faculty integrate into the classroom more hands-on, experiential approaches to learning, students become fully engaged in the educational process.
Allegheny faculty are known for the enthusiasm and creativity they bring to curricular innovation, the lifeblood of academic programs.
"Dr. Rankin [Susan Rankin, associate professor of biology] always made us feel included in her work. When she made a discovery, she'd share it with us right away, so we felt like we were involved in a great collaborative effort." - Roy Phitayakorn '98
Professional development. Because knowledge - what we know and how we know it - expands and changes at a rapid pace, we must give our faculty ongoing opportunities to remain active in their fields and to further develop their teaching techniques. By increasing funding for professional development - conferences, symposia, collaborative research, and student-faculty study tours - we help our faculty continue to do the kind of work that makes their colleagues across the country and around the world sit up and take notice.
Allegheny is fast developing a reputation as a national leader in undergraduate research, due in large part to faculty - and, increasingly, student - participation in professional conferences. Professional development also takes place on campus, where initiatives such as Teaching Circles create a richer context for a community of teacher-scholars as faculty share their ideas about teaching.
