Student SWOT Process

The student SWOT analysis of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research(PEER) Center was conducted during the center's NSF site review. This is an NSF requirement and is a convenient time to do it. The process we used was:

Consider all aspects of how we (the students) see the center performing in relation to the performance goals (strategic plan, etc) and present our evaluation of:

• how well the center is meeting these goals;
• how well the center is responding to our concerns, suggestions, and requests;
• any aspects of center performance which we believe greatly affect (positively or negatively) the success of the center and its progress to date; and
• how well the center is responding to these weaknesses/exploiting these strengths.

*Don't* feel like you have to get something in every category. If you really can't think of anything that is a threat, don't put anything down. Ditto with the other categories. The idea is to present an honest review of how you think the center is doing. As far as I know, the Center leadership wasn't surprised by anything we had to say because we try to keep in good contact with the center director and administration so they get continuous feedback rather than only hearing from us around review time. They've been very supportive of us, and we try to support them as well.

We had a written report because we prepared in advance for our second site review. We were new for our first site review and met, prepared our SWOT analysis, and presented it all in one day. Our "report" was thus fairly short the first year. Our second year, we met in advance and got a lot more deep thinking done. I strongly recommend meeting in advance.

Our written report was basically a combined annual report for our SLC activities and our SWOT analysis with explanations of those which we felt were unclear. The NSF review panel discussed the report with us, asked us a few questions that they felt were important (some related to our SWOT, some more general), and our chair at the time (Annie Kammerer) made a brief presentation outlining what we had to say & describing in more detail any comments were had made which we felt mightr be unclear or prone to misinterpretation.

Charley Hamilton
PEER Center SLC Chair
2000-2001 academic year

1. Are you aware of the goals of MarBEC?? (Yes/No)
2. What has been the best part of being involved with MarBEC for you?
3. What do you hope to get out of your experience in MarBEC?
4. Is there anything you would change about our ERC? (Please list)
5. How available are MarBEC faculty and how productive are your interactions with them?
6. How available are MarBEC administrators and how productive are your interactions with them?
7. Would you like to have student academic events (such as student-only brown-bags) and/or student social events? (Go ahead and list them if you have an idea!)
8. Do you have a good idea of how your project contributes to the strategic plan of MarBEC? (Yes/No)
9. Do you have the opportunity to do interdisciplinary work?
10. Do you feel our relation to UC-Berkeley is beneficial and well-utilized by the U. Hawaii contingents?
11. Any other comments, please add them!

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