Greetings everyone!

I am writing this update in the wake of Fr. John Jenkins’ announcement about the (hopefully) temporary shift to online learning. I want to thank all of our faculty and staff for their commitment to teaching and academic support excellence. Over the last several months, you have embraced new modalities and technologies, adapted to an ever-changing landscape, and invested countless hours preparing for a wide set of contingencies. Because of your efforts, I am confident that though our students’ learning experience may be different this fall, it will still be distinctly Notre Dame and everything that embodies.

As we transition to teaching online, I would ask you to favor live to asynchronous instruction, though I recognize there is no one-size-fits-all approach. I would also ask that you continue to leverage the amazing expertise and resources we are blessed to have at Mendoza and Notre Dame: the Mendoza IT team; our director of online initiatives, Bob Lewandowski; ND Learning; the Resilient Teaching website, and many more. I am grateful also for each department’s online teaching experts who we all lean on.

Our advising team in the Office of Undergraduate Studies continues to provide superb guidance to our students. Over the last year, I have really come to appreciate all they do for our students and faculty.

Our undergraduate program is implementing some significant enhancements during this coming academic year. Students will now declare their business major in spring of their first year. This shift will allow students to accelerate their major curriculum, better prepare them for internships and align our process with the other colleges on campus. During this transition year, current sophomores will declare their majors this September. We continue to support extended discernment, emphasizing to the students that they may later change majors.

We are also introducing the new Fundamentals of Coding class into our required business curriculum. This course will prepare students in all majors to better understand the opportunities and limitations of data analytics, professionally translate between project teams and engineers/coders, and kick start their coding skills. It will also enable Mendoza instructors to rely on this course to provide the baseline coding skills so that upper-level classes could focus on applying the skills to the business discipline. I’d like to give a shout out to Fred Nwanganga, Xiaojing Duan ​and Sriram Somanchi for leading the development of this course.

We are elevating our undergraduate curriculum by creating Scholars and Honors programs that we hope to pilot this spring. These layered programs will challenge our brightest students and prepare them for placement into top-tier graduate programs and analytically intensive jobs in industry.

Lastly, this fall, we are continuing a comprehensive review of our undergraduate curriculum that we paused with the advent of the pandemic.

Best wishes and GO IRISH!

Jim Leady
Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education
Associate Teaching Professor