San Bernardino Valley College’s faculty and staff have the blueprint for success, and are using it to ensure their students thrive.
SBVC’s Convocation Week was held August 9–12, and included adjunct orientation, faculty-focused workshops, and an all-campus meeting during Opening Day. One inspiring Zoom workshop, “Purpose + Belonging,” was delivered by Tim Klein, who shared important information on ways to support students as they navigate college and their careers, as well as tips on how to make employees feel happier, more hopeful, and more resilient.
This was the first in-person Opening Day since 2020, and gave faculty and staff the opportunity to hear from different programs and departments about their accomplishments in the last year. The theme was “The Blueprint for Success,” and attendees watched a short video with remarks from SBVC Interim President Dr. Scott Thayer and interviews with four SBVC alums: Mohamad Kudsi, Travis Love, Kimberly Morales, and Jaime Oropeza.
Thayer thanked SBVC’s faculty and staff for all of their hard work, saying their “efforts have formed the foundation for our blueprint for success in 2022–2023.”
Everyone at SBVC wants to see students flourish, he declared, and “the blueprint we create together as architects of our student’s success will surely help to guide them from enrollment to graduation and beyond to amazing careers in the globalized workforce.”
Love, who wants to become an educator, shared that going to SBVC was “an opportunity to not only prove to myself that I could do this academic thing and get to the next level, but also better myself.” Kudsi, a native of Syria, spoke about how the country’s civil war affected his childhood, but he never gave up his dream of becoming a doctor. Once he moved to the United States and began attending SBVC, his teachers helped him learn and improve his English “to prepare me for the bigger things I want to do in my life,” he said.
Oropeza, who recently graduated from UCLA, stated that SBVC “has given me everything. As melodramatic as that sounds, it gave me an opportunity, it gave me mentors, amazing professors, people that I’ll have in my life forever.” He believes that “had it not been for Valley, my life would be entirely different.”
