March 24, 2014

Dear colleagues, I am pleased to have an opportunity to share my reflections on Elia Greniers professional strengths and potential. I have supervised Elia for the past year and a half, during which time she has consistently taken on and executed work that greatly exceeds expectations for her current position. In doing so she has demonstrated several traits which speak to her professional potential and areas of particular strength. One area where Elia has taken a great deal of initiative in our office has been in leveraging an online survey management software tool, Qualtrics, in order to support various important data gathering efforts for Seattle University. Elia was initially asked to play a purely administrative role with Qualtrics, setting up new user accounts and assisting in the creation of survey instruments and the identification of and communication with target populations to be surveyed. She took on this responsibility with her typical eagerness to learn something new, and quickly mastered the basic operations of the software. When she was asked to support the development of a graduating seniors survey using the Qualtrics platform because of her familiarity with the platform, the sponsors of that survey soon found that she was a full partner in all aspects of the project, including refining the survey instrument, thinking about the most effective strategies for improving response rates through multiple communication strategies, and working with database professionals to manage the results data. The results were a spectacular success, with high response rates and high quality valuable data on the employment and graduate education destinations of the universities recent graduates. One important aspect of Elias contributions to this project was that she could keep the overall goals in mind and connect them to the detailed decisions being made about how to manage the survey. For example, Elia was able to ensure that the survey questions were well crafted, and that response results would be stored in an appropriate set of tables to support reporting and analysis. She was also able to oversee the development of a process for integrating responses for students who took the survey in multiple rounds of surveying [pre-graduation, 3 and 6 months after graduation], and for integrating data from students who took the survey with a unique respondent ID and those who took the survey via an anonymous link but provided identifying information such as an email address. To accomplish the data management parts of this project Elia showed common sense in understanding and communicating with other about data relationships, but she also leveraged her willingness and ability to learn basic SQL database querying to be able to speak to the database professionals in their own language, ensuring that they delivered what the survey sponsors needed. Elia has had similar experiences supporting survey projects for university advising, student government, and a university sponsored community service program, and in each case she has been able to communicate with survey sponsors to clearly identify their objectives and to recommend how best to implement survey administration, data management and analysis to meet their goals.

Another area where Elia has taken what was originally an administrative support function and moved it into a professional contribution has been in monitoring the annual academic program assessment reports. Her formal role is simply to receive, log and file annual assessment report documents sent to our office by assessment coordinators in each of the schools and colleges. This process, however, is relatively new to the university, and largely on her own initiative Elia has reviewed the documents being submitted and brought to my attention patterns where program faculty may not fully understand university requirements for assessment of student learning. She has also, usually but not exclusively at my request, worked in a very professional and proactive manner with particular assessment coordinators to make sure report filings are complete. Because she is interested in supporting the quality of assessment work taking place at the university, as opposed to simply monitoring the quantity of such work, Elia has been invited into conversations with the university assessment committee (UAC). Her work in mapping departmental assessment results as well as individual questions from university administered surveys to the universitys learning outcomes has helped the UAC to identify data to be reviewed as we perform university level assessment of student learning outcomes. Overall, Elia brings several strengths to professional work which will serve her and others well throughout her career. She is an eager and quick learner, able to identify what she needs to learn and the resources to achieve that learning while simultaneously getting on with the job at hand. She is unusually capable of seeing the connections between particular details and the big picture objectives in the work she is doing. She communicates effectively with her colleagues, bringing to their attention opportunities and/or concerns she has observed and recommending possible solutions. She is particularly adept at offering suggestions in a supportive and nonthreatening manner. Beyond her skills and talents, Elia brings a genuine enthusiasm to her work that is uplifting. She sees possibilities, isnt afraid to take on some hard work to realize those possibilities, and can help others see how they too can contribute to a job worth doing being done well. It has been a pleasure having Elia as a colleague. I am grateful to have had an opportunity to reflect on what she contributes professionally, and hope this reflection will help others understand her current strengths and potential for continued growth.

Sincerely,

Bob Duniway AVP for Planning Seattle University rduniway@seattleu.edu 206-296-2145