Here’s another opportunity to expand the boundaries of the Institute’s globe-spanning campus community by hosting an international exchange student.  AFS Intercultural Programs is a world-wide nonprofit organization that has been leading high school foreign exchanges for over 60 years. In August students will be arriving in the Monterey area and AFS is reaching out to local organizations focused on international education in order to contact folks who might be interested hosting an international high school student.  Today, AFS exchanges more than 11,000 students each year in partnership with more than 50 AFS Partner Countries.  AFS is one of the largest volunteer-based organizations of its kind in the world with 100,000 volunteers worldwide and more than 10,000 in the U.S.  For more information about hosting an international exchange student through AFS, see their flier.

If you live in Monterey County, you can get into the aquarium free on the 20th of each month, through October.  Check out the details.

Intensive and Custom Language Programs — which includes Custom Language Services (CLS) and
the Summer Intensive Language Program (SILP) — has moved. You can now find them at at 419
Pacific Street, McGowen Building, Suite 103. Feel free to stop by on your way downtown!

If you would like any additional information on their programs, please visit online.

Please also note that MIIS is no longer offering the Winter Intensive Language Program (WILP).

One June 16, Jill Stoffers provided a great overview of the impact of Reorganization and Integration on Recruiting, Admissions and Student Financial Planning.  This led to an excellent discussion, including an idea offered by Bob Cole that MIIS faculty and staff could develop a process for identifying affinities between individual members of the MIIS community and prospective students in order to encourage matriculation.  Interested?  Stay tuned.

Download Jill’s slides.

Next up:  Accreditation (June 30, 12-1:30, Board Room) – Toni Thomas and Amy McGill

The Monterey Institute will host a summer campus visit day for prospective students on July 17th. To cap off this day, the Recruiting Department will be hosting a wine and cheese reception at Samson from 4-5pm, to provide visitors with an opportunity to mingle with our staff/faculty and to ask questions in a less formal setting. We would like to invite any staff and faculty available on visit day to feel free to attend the wine and cheese event and mingle with prospective students. This is a great opportunity to connect one-to-one with students, some of whom are deciding NOW whether to attend MIIS this fall. A strong class in September is important to all of us, so please support this effort!

As part of this reception, we also thought it would be nice to provide information tables/stations that can provide students a way to learn more about other opportunities on our campus that they might not otherwise know about. For example, the students might like to learn about DPMI, TLC/DMC, Team Monterey, GLOBE, CNS, CLS, the pizza process, student affairs, financial aid, and many others…

If your department or program would like a more structured venue for reaching out to these campus visitors and would like us to reserve a table for you, please be sure to contact Caroline Mansi in the Recruiting Department to coordinate.

If these additions to Visit Day are successful/well received, we might make this a regular part of our program.

Americorps has recently confirmed with the MIIS Recruiting Department that the Monterey Institute will now be featured on their web site and listed as one of a few colleges and universities across the US that match the Segal AmeriCorps Education Award for Americorps students. The Monterey Institute will be one of only four California colleges/universities featured on this listing. Alice Villemaire, Administrative Assistant in the Recruiting Department, spearheaded this effort; and we anticipate this new exposure on the Americorps will generate new interest in our programs among prospective students.

In the latest “Running One MIIS” session on Communications, there was a good discussion of the ongoing need for us to refine our internal communications. The burning question for me is HOW DO WE IMPROVE MIIS@WORK TO BETTER SERVE THOSE INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS NEEDS?

I invite you all to comment on this post with your ideas and suggestions!  Please specifically look at three areas:

The Blog Roll (list of links to other blogs in the upper left hand column).  Are there blogs you would like to add? Are there some on the list that we don’t need?

The Links List (lower left hand column): Are there links you would like to add? Are there some on the list that we don’t need?

The Pages: Currently, we have the main page, which serves as a news blog, and an “About” page.  Are there other pages we should create?

All other suggestions are, of course, welcome!

And please consider becoming a contributor yourself! Just drop a line to Amy McGill, and you, too, can post to MIIS@work. It’s easy, and we’ll teach you everything you need to know.

The Staff Advisory Team has planned an opportunity for staff to meet, get to know each other, celebrate a successful year, and share ideas for the future. (June 25, 4-6 pm, Sampson Center.) View invitation HERE.

The old booths in Simul Lab 1 are packed up and ready to move. After this picture was taken, the carpet was removed in preparation for installing electrical outlets in the floor.  Over the course of the summer, the old Simul 1 will become the new MML, while the old MML will house a revitalized Simul 1 Lab with new equipment and refurbished booths.  Thanks to Dean Bao, John Grunder, Jonathan Covell and their staffs for collaborating on this project.

White Whale, the website design firm, will be unveiling preliminary design concepts for the new MIIS website to our community on June 9th at 1 pm in B 104.  Everyone is welcome to attend this event and feedback on the new design is encouraged.