Page 4 - Laker Connection 2014

President’sMessage
As a term, empowerment has been used frequently,
and in a wide range of contexts. I for one am attracted to the way in
Dr. Thomas J. “Tim” Hynes, Jr.
which the concept is described by the Connecticut-based People Empowering People Program. They define empowerment as “...a social process that helps people gain control over their own lives. It is a process that fosters power in people for use in their own lives, their communities and in their society, by acting on issues they define as important.”
I am attracted to the concept, because I believe it captures many Clayton State University values and actions. Learning creates the conditions for exercising greater influence over one’s own life. Students and graduates who apply that learning certainly bring direct benefits to themselves. But they do more. As a part of our institutional mission, the institution is committed to the cultivation of “...engaged, experienced-based learning, enriched by active community service....” And our students are empowered during their degree programs and other campus experiences to succeed in their careers. But they are also empowered through the same tools derived from their learning to contribute and, in fact, lead.
Our accounting students can gain in their understanding of Federal and State tax codes. That knowl- edge empowers them to advance in careers over time. But their learning also empowers those same students to contribute to citizens in our region through the VITA program described here and led by Professor Judith Ogden.
As you will read here, other business students use their learning to empower themselves to not only make a living, but also a life. In the end, leaving us with a quest to learn is the most important way we empower our students.
That quest manifests itself in academic programs across the campus. In some instances, it involves student involvement in research activities, reinforcing the need to continuously learn. In other in- stances, it will be the development of technical knowledge, which will provide access to a constantly changing learning environment of the 21st Century. Occasionally, the quests demonstrate how many of our new graduates help to empower others, through graduation contributions to the University Dream Makers Scholarship Initiative aimed to assist students for whom some scholarship support is the essential piece in the map to university completion.
Clayton State University has long been committed to empowering our students, even if we may not have said so explicitly. More than simply a cliché, we see this as a necessity of the 21st Century. Many of you may have watched a YouTube series first labeled Shift Happens and currently labeled Did Your Know 2014. That video reports the following: the top ten in-demand jobs in 2013 did not exist in 2004—[think search engine optimizer]. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies that haven’t been invented in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet. This issue of The Laker Connection can give you a glimpse of ways in which learning empowers our students to succeed in that future.
Dr. Thomas Hynes President
2 THE LAKER CONNECTION