- Author: Wendy Powers
Ready for more fun facts? Recall that the sense of taste and the sense of smell are tightly related. Skeptical? Try the following at home. Obtain a bag of Jelly Belly jelly beans, mixed flavors. Then, with a clothespin on your nose and your eyes closed, taste a jelly bean and try to determine the flavor. More than likely, you can determine that it is sweet but you can't identify the flavor. Now, remove the clothespin. The flavor is likely now readily identifiable. I hope it was a flavor you like!
A fact that's even more fun – we are increasing in numbers! Progress to increase the academic footprint is slow. The Program, Planning and Evaluation group are tracking numbers of academics each quarter so that we can all start to see that progress. From the chart one can see that the Advisor headcount increased by 1 while the CE Specialist headcount remained steady. Other categories, plus AES headcount (not shown) dipped slightly. There will be dips because of the waves of retirements (June and December) offset by trickling of hires throughout the year, but as we continue to plot our course, a trend in growth will become more apparent.
Headcount of CE academic titles, measured at the end of each quarter displayed.
Over the past month, Hawau Bojuwon started her career with UC ANR as an Assistant CE Advisor in Nutrition, Food and Consumer Sciences for Kern County, based in Bakersfield. That same day, Lynn Sosnoskie began as an Assistant Area Cooperative Extension Advisor in Agronomy and Weed Management, based in Merced, with programmatic responsibilities in Merced and Madera Counties. Please welcome them; we are glad they are all here!
This week is Program Council and a few more days of one-on-one meetings with County Directors. Program Council will be reviewing budget requests and talking about observations of the position call process, to date. I am meeting with the UCD Specialist Advisory Committee on Tuesday before Program Council. Thursday the Ethics, Compliance and Risk Committee meets in Oakland.
On Friday, Dr. Alejandro Del Pozo-Valdivia, starts as an Area IPM Advisor for Monterey, San Benito, and Santa Cruz Counties. Campuses have been busy extending offers to CE Specialists. So combined, we are moving in the right direction!
July and January aren't the best quarters to illustrate that we are growing because we observe retirements during those quarters to a much greater extent than April and October. Those retirements are reflected in the January numbers. So despite a number of retirements, we remained steady in Specialists, increased Advisors by 1 person (1.8 FTE, actually). Other Academics include seasonal or project-based personnel. The Academic Coordinator line is the result of retirements and not having completed recruitments to refill those positions by the end of January, but we should see those numbers back up next quarter. Growth is more apparent in the FTE data but I find those a little more challenging to explain because they are reported in tenths of persons.
Thanks for feedback!