What are you responsible for as Vice Provost for Extension?

“Extension is the outreach arm of land-grant systems, so it’s all the numerous programs that the land-grant university represents. It’s taking all the programs of a land-grant university to the citizens of Iowa. We do a lot of work in the areas of agriculture and natural resources, economic development, communities, families, 4-H, youth, entrepreneurship, helping businesses get started.”

Why should students know about what you do?

“We hope to work with the various colleges on campus to develop opportunities where students while they’re going to school here can experience what some of these careers are like in areas of service learning and what they call experiential education, where you are actually working for a company or for an agency in an area that you enjoy. “

Do you make decisions that directly affect students?

“Not in the respect that a dean of a college or the provost would, but in an indirect way. I think more directly with non-traditional students. As part of extension there’s two main branches. There’s the areas that we were just discussing which you can call informal education when you go into a County Extension Educator’s Office or go to a workshop that we put on. Where you can learn something in those areas, that’s what we call informal education, but we also are responsible for continuing education.”

What is a typical day for you?

“The thing about extension that is really wonderful: It’s so diverse. Extension covers everything that the land-grant [university] offers, so one day I may be meeting with business people and our county faculty about economic development; I may be meeting with deans on campus to see how we can develop more continuing education programs to offer more courses that we do have on campus to place-based students.”