Dear Ybor City Campus:

Welcome to the 2008-2009 Academic Year!!! I hope you are well rested and ready for an exciting year. The Ybor City Campus has experienced and will continue to experience many changes over the coming months. We will be starting construction on a new Student Services Building east of the Performing Arts Building. We will be working on accomplishing many of the goals that campus faculty, staff, and students said were priorities during our Campus Visioning Sessions. However, the most important change will be the substantial increase in the number of students on campus. I expect for us to far exceed 6% enrollment growth in most of our programs. Since every student deserves a high-quality learning experience, we will continue to focus on strategies that promote student learning, student retention, and student empowerment.

This year, we will continue to strive for a campus that is a place for all of us to learn how to be better people, better citizens, better leaders, better employees, better supervisors, and better learners. Every person on campus has an impact on student learning – from the first person a prospective student talks to on campus, to the bookstore employee who shelves the textbooks, to the faculty member in the classroom, and even the president who sets the tone for the campus.

Let’s make our campus a place where students are prepared to learn on the first day of class and where the faculty members are prepared to teach them on the first day of class. If the first class ends even a minute short, both the faculty and students feel a deep sense of loss. Students don’t always know that missing class is a big deal because we have told them that by our actions, such as letting class out early or just passing out a syllabus on the first day of class. Most students want to be successful, and they expect us to design our systems, our courses, and our campus in such a way that they can be successful both here and when they leave us. Again, our expectations must be high, but we must also be ready to help our students meet those expectations.

Never settle for less than excellence. I look forward to a great year in which a focus on student learning, student empowerment, teaching excellence, campus and college pride, and camaraderie is what will take the Ybor City Campus to the next level.

Welcome Back!

Dr. Shawn H. Robinson

Ybor City Campus President