From Melody's Desk: May 27

Good afternoon! Another Final Exercises has come and gone as we now move into Summer Session and prepare for the fall semester. A huge thanks to all who had a part in the ceremony last weekend and especially to Jeanne Sampson-Giles who ensured that no student was prevented from walking due to an unpaid student bill! To get a feel for the festivities, here is a video produced by University Communications to commemorate the 2014 Final Exercises: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc9fCbWHD8A&feature=youtu.be.

Congratulations to all of you who graduated this spring as well. It is such an accomplishment to balance work, school, and personal life:

• Johann Reinicke, SFS, with a master’s degree from the McIntire School
• Nita Graves, SFS, with a bachelor’s degree from SCPS
• Jeanie Sampson-Giles, SFS, with an associate’s degree from Piedmont Virginia Community College
• Michael Ludwick, OSP, with a graduate certificate from SCPS 

Beginning in June, Pat Hogan and I will host five upcoming Coffee and Donuts Chats in Carruthers Hall Conference Room E. We want the opportunity to meet each of you and to hear directly from you about the greatest opportunities and challenges in the central finance areas, questions about University initiatives, and anything else on your mind. Be on the lookout for the Microsoft Outlook invitation to one of the upcoming sessions. Our recent service award honorees and our newest employees will be invited to the first session; everyone will be invited to a coffee before the end of the calendar year. We look forward to talking with you!

I also wanted to pass along an opportunity sponsored by Organization Excellence. The Finance team was well-represented in submitting ideas for the Pay It Forward initiative, so I hope that some of you will be interested in extending that conversation with the Quality CORE Network. The first meeting is tomorrow, but you can join the conversation even if you are not able to attend tomorrow’s meeting by sending an email to orgex@virginia.edu.

Finally, thank you for your support of this blog – there were over 350 views of the blog in the first five days. I hope that you continue to find stories that bring you back and that you also share with us items of interest that you would like to see featured. I will not send out each of my updates via email, so I hope that you will bookmark the new blog at http://uvaavpf.blogspot.com/. There will be new content released on a weekly basis and you can sign up to receive posts regularly by email. For questions or submissions, contact your area representative (identified on the lower left of the blog’s main page) or to avpfinance@virgina.edu.

 Have a great week!

Melody