What is a Community Strategic Plan?
The Physics Community Strategic Plan is a framework for continuous improvement in the department’s culture, with an emphasis on transparency and fairness. The plan is structured into themes with goals, 5-year vision statements, actions, timelines, and metrics for success. The themes and actions were developed based on town halls and surveys in AY2023-2024. The full plan was presented to the department for feedback in Spring 2025.
Why are we doing this?
Physics is a human activity --- by humans and for humans.
We do our best when have an environment where we can all thrive, where we all feel the psychological safety to try new things.
History: This is a plan for all of us.
2022-2023: Department chair’s charge to the Physics Community Committee to develop a Community Strategic Plan to improve department interactions. The committee designed a framework to push changes through from year to year (addressing a serious structural issue) and made recommendations for the 2023-2024 committee.
2023-2024: Department chair’s charge included town halls and surveys of the department, and implementation of the first step of the strategic plan. Identified major themes, collated a list of action items. Recommended specific items for the 2024-2025 committees and department leadership (e.g., state-of-the-department town halls, clarifying Bridge-to-PhD transition, documenting grading practices).
2024-2025: Organize the themes and action items into a strategic plan, which includes implementation and timelines. (You can view the full text of the Strategic Plan in this shared department OneDrive folder.)
2025-2026: Developing webpages for Strategic Plan.
Future Goals: Create mechanisms to share progress on Strategic Plan.
Themes
Click on each theme below to read through the strategic plan, and the goals and actions for each theme in detail.