Week 4

The Multicultural Student Services, the MSS, department is more of a multidisciplinary organization than an interdisciplinary one. I guess that the easiest way is to go over examples of both that the MSS. The ways that it is multidisciplinary, is that first, it has separate groups that fall under the department. There are the African and African American, Native American, Chicano/Chicana, Latin American, Asian American, Pacific Islander and LGBTQ organizations that all fall under the MSS department but do totally separate programs for the specific groups. On the other hand it is interdisciplinary in nature because it is a part of the complex infrastructure of ASU. First, the MSS falls under a hierarchy, President Crow, the Vice President of Student Affairs and the Dean of Students. The overarching programs that is done by the MSS transcend all the individual groups that are a part of the MSS and bring them together, so that when there is an organizational fair, organizations from each individual group are represented. So the coordinators of the MSS work in an interdisciplinary manner because they make sure that every group they account for is doing programs that are going to ensure that the intent of the president as far as retention, grades and campus involvement are upheld by the each denomination. The coordinators look at the groups under them as one group, because they all have the same goals to accomplish. If those goals are not met for a specific group then intervention is needed within that group. For example if the GPA for members of one group is lower than the projected goal, then for that group there will be some plan of action to rectify that situation specifically. Other than the overarching similar goals, though, each of the coalitions of organizations in each group is free to achieve the goals by hosting approved programming and projects which are all open to the ASU public and fall in line with the goals of the MSS. The different disciplines vary as the programs vary, the programs and organizations can fall into the disciplines of education, politics, sociology, psychology, family studies, gender studies, cultural studies, communication, marketing, social sciences, finance, business and anthropology.

Week 1 & 2

My name is Kevin Badger and I would like to thank you for reading my blog. My BIS concentration areas are Communication and African American Studies. These concentrations are a fair representation of my identity. My experience as being the president of my fraternity and being a student leader in the Army ROTC program has put many communication concepts that I have learned to the test. Being an African American in a historically black Greek lettered organization aligns with the African American studies concentration. The Multicultural Student Services department at Arizona State University is my applied study site. Academically I hope to learn more about institutions higher education as a business, as opposed to academic (for some reason that is hard to word correctly). I know that I will be working with student organizations, that part is not foreign to me. But I will be representing the MSS as a whole, instead of representing a student organization, which will be slightly different. I’m looking forward to working with majority university staff and faculty on projects as opposed to working with other student workers. So far I have been assigned as a team member on a undergraduate event on ASU Tempe campus. I have also been assigned to work on a presentation comparing and contrasting other universities programs focusing on minority leadership development. The second part of that project is to take the pros and cons from their programs and make suggestions for ASU’s own minority leadership development program. These relate to Communication because it will take many different communication skills to negotiate the undergraduate project, and public speaking for the presentation at the end of the semester. Also, it will put my research skills that are stressed in the cornerstone and capstone courses of Communication. Working on behalf of the minority organizations and researching minority leadership programs across the nation directly aligns with the African American studies. My study site focuses on Student Affairs issues here at ASU, which includes high school preparation for college for high school student and focuses on the university as a business. This internship is not exactly what I plan on doing in the future, I am an ROTC student and I will be a full time Army Officer when I graduate, so the knowledge and skills will be transferrable, but the job itself is not what I plan on continuing.