For Students, Faculty, and Staff: MyU One Stop

Jennifer Franko receives President’s Award for Outstanding Service

PsTL's Jennifer Franko in white, along with 2015 PsTL MA Graduates, l to r, Saida Hassan, Wuyi Zhang, Shane Lueck, Amy Barton and Timothy Warren
PsTL’s Jennifer Franko in white, along with 2015 PsTL MA Graduates, l to r, Saida Hassan, Wuyi Zhang, Shane Lueck, Amy Barton and Timothy Warren

Honoring a career devoted to improving the student experience. Congratulations to Jennifer Franko, executive assistant in the Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning, for receiving the prestigious 2015 President’s Award for Outstanding Service. Franko’s commitment to the University of Minnesota began as a part-time student assistant in General College and spans three decades of highly acclaimed and valuable contributions to faculty, advisors, programs, departments and most of all, students. “I’m honored to receive this award as an affirmation of thirty years of work. I also think it recognizes the importance of students because throughout my career I’ve been very student centered and evidence based,” says Franko.

In a letter of support for Franko’s nomination, Jeanne Higbee, professor emeritus and former PsTL director of graduate studies, and Bob Poch, senior fellow and PsTL director of graduate studies, provide evidence of her devotion to serving students.

Jennifer regularly meets with graduate students to listen to and solve the broad number of challenges that they encounter while pursuing their degrees. We have seen her tenaciously seek solutions to student financial barriers, physical access to classes, visa issues for international students, and complications due to institutional policy ambiguities during the transitions in graduate education. She has literally made the difference in students persisting in our graduate programs and attaining their degrees.

Franko acknowledges the influence of former supervisors, Terrence Collins and Daniel Detzner, in helping develop her student centered approach early in her career, but Franko’s drive to improve the student experience is also borne from her personal journey from a dairy farm in a small community to big city life at the University of Minnesota. “I came from a town of 187 people and walked into a psychology class with 800 people. I had never seen 800 people in one place before. In the big lectures it was hard to feel like I belonged and I wanted to leave,” Franko remembers.

Originally intending to teach grade school after college, Franko’s student worker position exposed her to the University’s administrative machine and provided her with a role well suited to her passion for problem solving and innate organizational skills. “I saw how classes were scheduled. I saw the other side, and I started realizing there were ways that could be better.” Even early in her career, Franko’s exceptional aptitude for enrollment management and course scheduling skillfully addressed the needs of multiple stakeholders including faculty, program administrators and students. In a letter of support, professor Cathy Wambach writes, “In the late 1980s the idea that student retention was everyone’s business started to gain traction in higher education. One key to improving student persistence is the class schedule. Jennifer was one of the GC staff members most responsible for making a student centered class schedule a reality.”

As scheduling technology changed, Franko expanded her capabilities to incorporate new tools and learn new software programs. But her true mastery of this vital academic function derives from a powerful alignment with her hard-wired competencies and inquisitive mind. Franko identifies the drivers of her well-regarded abilities. “It’s my data head and my love of putting puzzles together. When I first started, I was thinking broadly: We have faculty members, the University’s clout and we have students, the University’s commodity. So how do we keep both happy and able to do the things they do in the most effective and efficient way?” Franko explains, “I would take all these pieces of paper from every single faculty member home and put them on my dining room table until I had them put together in a way that would allow students to take multiple classes while meeting the faculty members’ needs.”

Franko’s analytic nature and attention to detail have proven extremely valuable in providing decision-support for policy and programmatic changes. In their nomination letter, professor and chair of PsTL Amy Lee, director of CEHD’s first year experience Kris Cory and Ellen Sunshine from CEHD student services define Franko’s impact:

Jennifer’s participation in institutional research also grew out of her commitment to student success. In the late 1990s, (our college) developed an institutional research model where a faculty member, graduate students and Jennifer were responsible for this function. From 2003 to 2007, this team conducted 18 institutional research projects investigating factors related to students’ success. Her most important contribution was as lead author of a multi-method study of our GC Commanding English Program. Through surveys, standardized testing, interviews with students and staff, and transcript analysis she supported an informed reconsideration of a long-standing program.

Data collection and analysis is an energizing endeavor for Franko, realizing the work either supports the thesis or research question, or negates it. She also knows the effort is a powerful way to dispel misperceptions, recounting with satisfaction an example: “I had a program director come to me and say, ‘We don’t want our students taking (a certain) class because they fail and have to go take another class somewhere else. ‘So I gathered the data of his students who had taken the class since its existence and realized it had happened to one student over a four-year period. So it was an anecdote, a myth. When I showed him the data, he said, ‘We want to put all of our students in that class because they do really well in it,'” Franko recalls with a chuckle.

Throughout documentation in support of her nomination, faculty, staff and students praise Franko’s exemplary work, her dedicated service to students and her tireless work ethic. She is grateful to receive the award, but graciously shares the honor with her colleagues. “I feel really privileged to work with the people I’ve worked with. Those are the people who made the award happen,” says Franko.

When asked what advice she would give the farm girl she once was from today’s vantage point, Franko advises, “Raise your hand and ask that question. Never fear doing that. And, most importantly never lose where you came from and who you are.”

Throughout her career, Franko has created environments that invite questions and support student individuality and success. Her outstanding service to the University of Minnesota has provided tens of thousands of University of Minnesota students the kind of positive and inclusive experience Franko believed was possible from the start.

Franko was recognized by President Kaler and the Board of Regents at a Board meeting held Friday, May 8, and will be honored along with fellow recipients during a reception at Eastcliff in early June.

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