The Board of Regents is pleased to present a KUDOS award to Casandra Siefkes; graduate secretary in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Pictured: Chancellor Perlman; Shannon Parry, Supervisor; Regent Phares; Casandra Siefkes, recipient; Interim President Jim Linder; Ann Siefkes, mother; Regent Knudson
Her nominators shared the following comments about her work. “Starting out as the graduate secretary, Casandra has moved beyond sending notifications to grad students, organizing application paperwork and exam schedules. She has become an equal partner to the graduate committee; tracking and developing the budget, organizing recruiting events, becoming an unofficial ‘advisor’ to students, and assuming complete responsibility for developing successful proposals to the Fulbright Foundation. These proposals has allowed the department to receive two funded foreign language teaching assistants; one in Arabic and another in Portuguese. Perhaps the most important task she was assigned was to take the lead in developing a proposal to the College and to Academic Affairs which would reinvent the department language lab as a global classroom and interactive learning environment for students.”
“She approaches her work with amazing intelligence: thinking along with me on projects and anticipating problems; innovative thinking where she figures out technical solutions that often resolve difficulties; and using common sense, thereby giving all employees in this large department the confidence that their project is in very capable hands. She has designed programs that make everyone's job easier from developing art for important recruiting tools to graduate student tracking, and so much more. Casandra makes UNL as a whole look better to the outside world!”
Today Casandra has brought the following guests: Dr. Evelyn Jacobson, Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures; Shannon Parry, Supervisor; and her parents, Jerry and Ann Siefkes.
Please join me in thanking Casandra for her dedication to the University of Nebraska Lincoln, to her department and college.