You want money? Let me help you get some money.

I'm talking, of course, about the faculty retraining and faculty development fund.

This is a separate pool of funding, of up to $30,000 per year, meant to supplement your contractual travel funding. Unlike contractual travel funding, however, the faculty development and retraining program is a competitive program—meaning that faculty have to apply for the funding and a committee of faculty and administrators reviews them and distributes funding based on the strength of the applications.

I provide some basic information below and will be hosting workshops on all three campuses in the next few weeks to share information about the program and advice for completing the application. As I mentioned in an email sent to members last Wednesday, the workshops will meet on the following Wednesdays from 11 a.m. to 12 noon:

• Ammerman: Wed., 2/12, Smithtown 211
• Grant: Wed., 2/19, Captree 104
• Eastern: Wed., 2/26, Orient 135

Retraining

The first priority for the college is retraining any faculty into disciplines or areas for which growth is expected or a critical need is identified. Thus, funding is granted for faculty approved for retraining first. This may include, for example, support for a current faculty member to earn a master's in a different discipline or area for which the college needs new faculty. A list of the specific departments/areas identified by the college is below:

• Information Technology
• Cybersecurity
• Engineering
• Computer Science
• Geology
• Geography
• Physics
• Chemistry
• HVAC
• Manufacturing

Development

If no faculty are approved for retraining, the entire $30,000 is then alloted for faculty development. Again, this is a competitive supplemental fund to your biannual contractaul travel monies.

Faculty may apply for financial assistance for professional development activities including workshops, short courses, academic presentations, field research, seminars or other similar activities.

To give a sense of the kinds of applications that have been approved recently, the following faculty gave us permission to share their successful projects (please know that there were many more successful projects; these were the faculty who returned their permission-to-publish forms by the time of this issue of The WORD was published):

• Sarah Boles, faculty coordinator for counseling (Ammerman), attended the June 2019 Postgraduate Certificate Program in Nutrition and Integrative Medicine for Mental Health Clinicians held at Adelphi University.
  
  
• David Clark, assistant professor of English (Ammerman), traveled to Washington, D.C., to work on completing the research for his essay, "The Effects of Punctuation on Praelection from 15th-17th Century Editions of Le Morte D'Arthur."
  
  
• Meredith Starr, assistant professor of visual arts (Eastern), attended and participated in the 2019 Foundations Art Theory and Education (FATE) Conference in April 2019 in Columbus, Ohio, as a FATE Regional Coordinator. Meredith was also selected as the 2019-2021 FATE Emerging Educator.
  
  
• Yu Zhang, assistant professor of chemistry (Eastern), attended and gave a poster presentation at the 8th International Conference Network for Inter-Asian Chemistry Educators (NICE) at the National Taiwan University of Education in Taipei, Taiwan, in Summer 2019.

Timeline

After you attend one of the workshops shown above, your application will be due by April 15 to Kathy Keane in the office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs. The committee, consisting of an equal number of FA members and administrators, typically meets in early to mid-May to review all applications.

Members are notified by May 30 if they are awarded financial support for summer 2020, fall 2020, spring 2021 or summer 2021.

See you at one of the campus workshops!