NLU Alumni Magazine
STAYING NIMBLE AND HUMBLE Collaboration key to new college success By Nicholas A. Love
National Louis University has announced the launch of the College of Professional Studies and Advancement (CPSA). Born out of the College of Management and Business (CMB) and the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), CPSA will house three schools: the School of Health and Human Services, the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the School of Business and Management. CPSA is an affirmation of what was already true of CMB and CAS: NLU is an institution focused on professional outcomes. The restructuring creates more opportunity for synergy that provides more cross-training and diversified learning so that students are more attractive to prospective employers. This explicit professional orientation of CPSA requires that the college stays professionally relevant. This means determining what employers want from their employees by way of thoughtful research built on external feedback. This feedback needs to inform not only marketplace demand now, but marketplace demand for the next 20 years. “It would be kind of scary to be training [students] to be the next set of buggy drivers,” jokes Vlad Dolgopolov, Ph.D, Associate Dean of CPSA.
CPSA will incorporate two new marketplace-relevant programs. First is the entrepreneurship concentration, available to both undergraduates and graduate students. This concentration was birthed out of an advisory committee consisting of Not only does success mean internal growth, but it requires branching out through an integration of programs into successful, meaningful community partnerships as leaders and experts with both entrepreneurial experiences and teaching experiences. The product is a concentration that translates real-world experience into the classroom and equips students with entrepreneurial skillsets that will serve them in a variety of career opportunities. well as employer partnerships that bring the student from relevant experience into stable employment.
counseling will have the extra expertise to start their own counseling practice or other mental health related startup. That same student will also be equipped to act as an “intrepreneur,” an innovator embedded in an established private sector, public sector or nonprofit sector workplace. The second new concentration is nonprofit management, offered to graduate students as part of the MBA program. This concentration adds to the dedicated work of Professor Catherine Honig, who redesigned the MBA program around the theme of leadership. Nonprofit management equips graduates with a depth of knowledge in the nonprofit field, while allowing them to retain the attractive, multipurpose skill- sets developed in the MBA program. This keeps graduates flexible, which is an advantage over highly specialized degrees. All these new opportunities would not exist without a culture of collaboration among the CPSA faculty. Dolgopolov has over 10 years of experience working in higher education administration at other institutions, and he points out that NLU has “some of the most dedicated and most student-oriented faculty members” that he has seen. These dedicated faculty members
A student working towards a degree in psychology or
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