News Release
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Wilmington University Partnership Center Makes Outreach More Effective
Partnership is a plus for academic departments, businesses and nonprofits alike.
The Wilmington University Partnership Center oversees the school’s wide range of external alliances with local corporations and non-profits to maximize their value to students while strengthening the university’s relations with the community.
Effective education doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Many of Wilmington University’s academic departments independently build and sustain real-world connections that provide internship, co-op and employment opportunities through which students can put their learning to work. But the collaborative coordination of the University Partnership Center (UPC) can extend the benefits of this outreach to the organizations they’re reaching out to.
The UPC facilitates and tracks each department’s partnerships, collects and organizes shareable data on the contacts and enrollment trends that result from them, and offers support and management services to ensure that the departments and their students make the most of these external relationships.
By streamlining the process, the UPC helps to promote the university’s academic offerings, increase its enrollment, and widen the pool of partners with whom students might find opportunities, which it does more effectively and uniformly than each department could working individually.
It also improves the university’s ability to develop and customize educational courses for specific organizations, respond to requests for credential and certificate programs, recruit industry leaders to advisory board positions, and identify potential adjunct faculty within partnering organizations.
Monthly meetings between the heads of the university’s colleges, along with representatives of its career services, work-integrated learning, external affairs, recruiting and other departments “will bring everyone together for a conversation that, until now, everyone’s been having on their own,” said UPC Senior Director Stefanie Whitby, Ed.D.
“Wilmington University is built for these types of relationships,” she said. “The UPC creates a single point of contact for achieving them. It lets faculty members and organization leaders know who to reach out to, where to go after they’ve made the contact, what’s the next step in developing a partnership, to build stronger partnerships.
“We’re a massive resource. We want to educate the community as to all the resources we have here,” Whitby added.
For more information, contact UPC Coordinator Ann Williams at (302) 327-4596 or ann.s.williams@wilmu.edu.
About Wilmington University
Wilmington University is a private, nonprofit institution committed to providing flexible, career-oriented, traditional and online associate, undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degree programs. Ranked as the second fastest growing nonprofit doctoral institution in America 2004 – 2014 by The Almanac of The Chronicle of Higher Education, affordable tuition, academic excellence and individualized attention are hallmarks of the University that enable greater student success in their chosen careers. For more information, contact Wilmington University at 302-356-INFO (4636), via email at infocenter@wilmu.edu, or visit our website: www.wilmu.edu.
