Happy and Healthy New Year: Week of December 27th, 2019

Students, Faculty, Residents, Staff, Alumni, Board Members and Friends,

This will be my last “Weekly Update" of this decade, as we get ready to bring in 2020. Instead of looking into the rearview mirror back at all the great things that happened in 2019, I’d like to look forward and share some thoughts for the upcoming year.

As we close out this decade, I want to sincerely thank our world-class faculty for the work they do every day in making our institution shine brighter than our peers, to our students for selecting Salus and entrusting us with your professional futures, to our staff for ensuring we all can perform our jobs efficiently, in a a comfortable environment, to our Board of Trustees, for their time, wisdom, philanthropic generosity and vision in helping to move us forward and finally to our alumni and friends who have guided and enabled us in many ways by volunteering your time to serve on committees and Advisory Boards, your philanthropy, guidance and other support.

For my optometric colleagues, 2020 will be something special. How many times to we get to celebrate the year of the optometrist, in a sense? What an opportunity to market the wonderful attributes of the optometric profession during the year of 2020! Every one of us is an informed spokesman and we should take every opportunity to educate people about the fact that optometry is THE primary eye care profession in the United States, providing comprehensive eye care to virtually everyone in our population from birth through death. With an aging population that, unfortunately, has a high prevalence of diabetes and hypertension, access to comprehensive optometric care is essential.

On the other end of the spectrum, caring for children with vision disorders helps to prepare them for learning that will enable them to succeed throughout their lives. Of course, there are contact lenses, low vision, dry eye, ocular disease, neuro-optometry, and many other clinical areas optometrists are expert in which makes this profession so vibrant and adaptable to multiple lifestyles and practice models. 2020 – The Year of the Optometrist – let’s all help to energize that!

To that end, I’d also like to challenge our PCO alumni to direct any young person you know to take a look at optometry as a possible profession for them to consider. After all, who better knows more about the exciting attributes of this wonderful profession than you?

2020 will be an extremely exciting and interesting year. As our students and faculty prepare to come back to campus next week, I ask that them embrace all that’s happening around us and come back rested, energized and ready to take on whatever comes your way! To our Alumni, let’s make this a year where you really have a positive impact on the future of our profession by helping to strengthen our applicant pool.

Wishing everyone has a very Happy and Healthy New Year!

Mike

A Holiday Poem: Week of December 20th, 2019

Students, Faculty, Residents, Staff, Alumni, Board Members and Friends,

‘Twas the week before Christmas, when all through the campus,
Not a student was stirring, especially not in classes;The finals were done, grading prepared with care, 
In hopes that an “A" soon would be there;
The students have fled to their homes far away,While faculty and staff are left here to stay;With Provost in his office and I in my space,
We have attempted to prepare for a much reduced pace;
As you all spend time with family and friends,We wish you a Happy Holiday until this vacation ends.

On a less poetic note, I would like to thank Dr. Brooke Kruemmling for organizing this week’s University Development Day.  All of the speakers were fantastic and the topics extremely relevant and timely, resulting in a great exchange of ideas and information.  It was really nice to see such robust faculty attendance at the event.

As we end this year and look towards 2020 (the year of the Optometrist) I want to thank our extraordinarily talented faculty and staff for all you’ve done for our students, patients and clients throughout the year.  I really appreciate our faculty’s candid and well-thought out comments as we recently discussed ways to make Salus even better.  It’s been a great year filled with many individual and team successes.  Next year promises to be both interesting and exciting, presenting all of us with new opportunities and challenges that will help to bring us to the next stage of excellence as a premier educational institution.  

I’d like to remind our faculty and staff to please join us for the Holiday Party in the Hafter Student Community Center today (Friday) at 1pm. I look forward to seeing everyone there and wish everyone a safe and happy holiday!

Be safe, have fun and come back with your intellectual batteries charged, ready to hit the deck running!

Mike

A Return to Campus: Week of December 13th, 2019

Students, Faculty, Residents, Staff, Alumni, Board Members and Friends,

It’s great to be back on campus after spending the better part of ten days in China and Singapore with Dr. Vitek meeting with our alumni and new potential students.  While these trips provide a great deal of opportunity for us to tell folks about all the great things you’re doing here at Salus, it’s always great to be back home. 

Many thanks to our International Students for cooking up a wonderful holiday lunch on Wednesday.  There were foods from Saudi Arabia, China and yes, even the US!  

To kick off the holiday season, our faculty and staff will be decorating their office doors so they could compete in the annual door decorating contest across our Elkins Park and East Oak Lane campuses.  Judging will be done next week, so keep an eye out on our Salus social media platforms to see which doors won! 

I’d like to remind our faculty and staff to attend our annual Holiday Party on Friday, 20 December at 1:00pm in the Hafter Student Center. As usual, the event will include food, games, prizes, dancing, and Length of Service Award presentations.

I want to wish our students the best of luck as you finish up your finals!  I hope you all were able to take a break on Wednesday and enjoy some Pet Therapy time in the Learning Resource Center (LRC).  If you weren’t able to make it, keep an eye out around the next finals season as our staff at the LRC make sure to coordinate these sessions as an opportunity for you all to de-stress!

And how about those bagels? – Hopefully they gave you a much needed boost to get you through the day!

Next week, we will be hosting our bi-annual University Development Day and Faculty Social.  As some of you might know, our “UD Day” sessions serve as an opportunity for our faculty members across the University to become students for a day of workshops ranging in topics from team building to personal and professional growth. I look forward to learning from everyone’s sessions.   

The annual Army-Navy game will be played on Saturday at the Linc. So, if you’re going into the city, be aware there likely will be lots of traffic.

So as you get ready to head out for your well-deserved breaks, please stay safe and try to do something fun.  Wishing you all a very safe and happy holiday.

GO NAVY - BEAT ARMY!!!!

Mike   

Greetings from Harbin, China: Week of December 6th, 2019

Students, Faculty, Residents, Staff, Alumni, Board Members and Friends,

Greetings from a very frigid Harbin, China where the current temperature is 5 below zero!  Dr. Melissa Vitek and two of our consultants, Mr. Ken Wong and Jeff Ji, and I have been visiting several different institutions in Harbin which is in northern China, near the Russian border and Jinan, which is south of Beijing, to foster partnerships that will help Chinese optometric programs to develop the necessary clinical expertise to serve their millions of eye care patients across their country.  This visit was very unique is that, with the help of Mr. Wong and Ji, we had the opportunity to meet with high level Chinese public health experts and policy makers who may be able to help to facilitate these new partnerships.  We’re extremely excited about this and very much look forward to continuing the discussions we’ve started this week. 

On Sunday, 8 December, we’ll be in Singapore where we’ll enjoy warmer weather and will meet with the leadership of the Singapore Optometric Association and host an Alumni and Friends reception at the Regent Hotel, for our over 120 Asian alumni living in China, Southeast Asia and Singapore, from 7PM – 9PM.  During the reception we will be honoring the memory of Salus alumni Roland Izaac (MSc, ’04) and the impact he had on the practice of optometry in Singapore.  Of note, we’ve also named an eyelane in the Clinical Skills lab as a testament to his contributions to Singapore optometry. 

Closer to home, a new art exhibition has been installed at the D’Arrigo Family Gallery in the Hafter Center! The exhibit features artists who currently reside in Puerto Rico and those displaced to the mainland due to the catastrophe of Hurricane Maria. Learn more at http://salus.edu/NorWindNorWater and be sure to go check out the exhibit. It will be on display until Jan. 19, 2020.

I want to thank everyone who supported our Giving Tuesday initiative on behalf of all of us at Salus University and the thousands of children served by the Looking Out For Kids (LOFK) program.   While we didn’t meet our $80,000 goal, the money we did raise will help forward our LOFK mission and the Big Red Bus!

So, off to warmer weather for me and my team here – hopefully it’s going to be a nice weekend there!  Be safe, have fun and look out for one another!

Mike