-: My name is Caleb Southern,
and I'm Director of Retention here
at Southern Wesleyan University.
My job description comes down
to determining why students leave,
and figuring out what the institution can do
to keep them from leaving.
So I do a lot of work with data,
looking for trends about why students have left in the past.
Are there certain demographics or groups
of students that have left
in the past that we might need to service better?
I manage all the early alerts that we get
at the institution, try to connect students
with academic resources, social-emotional resources
on campus to help them feel
like they're connecting here on campus,
and as a part of the community here.
So, yeah.
So I work a lot with data.
I'm housed in the Student Life Department,
so anytime there's any type
of data request about the percentage of certain students
that left, or I could update all of our,
the retention model that we have to run numbers
and stuff every year.
And then also during the semesters,
I'm running the early alert system,
so making sure that students are being followed up with,
that they're getting connected
to the resources that they need,
that faculty are staying informed about,
the progress of their students that they left alerts for,
things like that.
I've got a board report that's due today.
I finished it, but my supervisor asked me to make some edits
to some of the data and graphs that I had.
So I'm making some of those adjustments,
and reworking some of the narrative I had
to explain some of the data.
That's another thing that I do is try
to provide the narrative to go with the numbers,
unless somebody just wants the numbers.
But I try to provide
that narrative context for some of that.
I also had a couple
of alerts come through this morning,
so I made sure that the person who submitted the alert knew
that it had been received, and then I contacted a few people
on campus who I thought might have connections
with the particular student,
and asked them do they have an update,
or if they could follow up with the student, so.
I put together what I call a retention task force
of a lot of residence life, student life,
athletics representatives, some other staff
across campus that are really heavily student-facing,
and we meet once a week to make sure
that every student that's
on our master alert list is being followed up with.
And so if there's any,
then try to make sure nobody falls through the cracks, so.