One of the many things our program does well is helping students connect classroom learning, including theories and scholarly research, with their professional practice as student affairs educators and institutional leaders. As a graduate of our master’s program and a current student in our doctoral program, I can attest to how much value our faculty place on connecting theory to practice as well as on using our practical expertise to inform our scholarship. My assistantship experience this year has really illustrated these connections for me.  I’ve been working with a university-wide committee working to secure reclassification for NC State as a Carnegie community engaged institution.

To share a little background: NC State was initially classified in 2006 as part of the first group of institutions across the U.S. to receive this prestigious designation. By “community engagement,” Carnegie means “the collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.” NC State literally wrote the book on institutional community engagement: our own Dr. Audrey Jaeger, along with Dr. Courtney Thornton, a graduate of our doctoral program, and several other faculty and administrators at NC State, published the defining scholarship on the topic after the initial wave of institutions were classified in 2006.

Much has changed since 2006, however; there are some ways in which NC State’s commitment to community engagement is less evident than it was eight years ago. And so despite our longstanding reputation as a national leader on institutional community engagement, our reclassification is not guaranteed. Yet there are many things we’re doing well, and the solid grounding in the scholarship of higher education I’ve gained through our master’s and doctoral classes—especially organization theory—has helped me recognize these strengths and advantages. For example, in constituting our reclassification committee, we made sure to include representation from a wide variety of units across the university. As a result, the committee has access to a much wider network of information and institutional resources to help us in completing our application, the wide participation helps minimize potential complaints about being “left out” of the process, and symbolically, we’re demonstrating that community engagement touches almost every part of NC State in some way. In fact, this is one of the things that differentiates us from other NC institutions who’ve been awarded the Carnegie classification—engagement is not a single office on campus, but rather has permeated the university. Yet this also complicates our committee’s efforts to collect data and relevant information, as the loose coupling (those who’ve taken org theory will recognize that term!) between different campus units means that much of the excellent engagement work that goes on here never receives the recognition it deserves.

Ultimately, understanding how higher education organizations function—which I gained through taking and co-teaching org theory—has given me insight into both the micro level of our reclassification committee’s functioning as well as the macro level of how engagement works throughout NC State. In turn, NC State’s experience with this reclassification process is providing us with rich material to follow up on the scholarship produced after our initial classification, to expand knowledge about what’s effective—and ineffective—in institutionalizing community engagement for the long term. Serving on the Carnegie reclassification committee has given me a lived experience with how practice informs scholarships informs practice as well as an opportunity to apply what I’ve learned in my classes in “real life.” I know many of my colleagues in our program have had similar experiences with their assistantships, and this is, in my mind, what makes our program one of the top higher education programs in the US.