Skip to main content

Dear UTEP Community:

Today, I am excited to introduce UTEP Engage – a new University initiative that will better connect our students to more opportunities in industry, business, nonprofits and government.

Under development over the past year as part of UTEP’s Quality Enhancement Plan for re-accreditation, UTEP Engage will formally start July 1 and we will transition positions, hire people, install needed software and start this effort over the next 90 days. 

UTEP has always been about providing excellent education that opens doors for our students. With UTEP Engage, our goal is for our students to have access to the best career-launching opportunities in the nation.  

UTEP Engage is about more than launching our students. It’s also about continuing to improve our Miner culture of care and making it even stronger in our community by building even more volunteerism by students in the community .

Finally, we create a lot of useful knowledge in our research, and we have a lot of expertise.  Community-engaged research and community-engaged classes will continue to be a priority for UTEP.

So, how will UTEP Engage work? 

  • Engagement Officers: We will stand up a team of Engagement Officers, each managing a portfolio of employers in business, government, and community organizations with a focus on our region. Engagement Officers will help employers establish and recruit interns and graduates from UTEP, and get employers visiting our campus. They will also facilitate even more local volunteerism and community engagement by our more than 360 student organizations.
  • Continuous Engagement for Talent Placement: UTEP will shift from relying primarily on two large career fairs each year to a model of continuous engagement with employers, allowing organizations to connect with UTEP talent throughout the year. We don’t have enough room on campus for a single-day career fair to engage all the companies who want to recruit here. We need a better way. We want more companies on campus and jobs and internships posted on Handshake than ever before.
  • Partner Relationship Management Software: We have selected a version of Salesforce to replace the hodge-podge of Excel spreadsheets so that we can engage employers consistently over time and share information easily about employers across different offices on campus.
  • Expand Community-Engaged Learning Opportunities: We’ll build upon UTEP’s existing foundation of community-engaged learning, helping students connect their academic experience to real-world challenges while serving our region. A position will be added to UTEP’s Institute for Scholarship, Pedagogy, Innovation and Research Excellence (InSPIRE) to continue to help faculty to incorporate engaged learning in their syllabi.
  • Career Advising: Three new positions will report in the Advising Center to increase career advice for students. These positions will work with colleges, professional organizations, and employers to significantly increase opportunities for students to learn about careers available to them with their chosen majors.
  • A New Office to Take Point: This work will be coordinated by a new Office of Business, Community, and Government Engagement. Most of the efforts and resources of the University Career Center, Government Relations and Center for Community Engagement will be located in this office. Effective today, Marisol Chavez will lead this effort as the Assistant Vice President of UTEP Engage. 

Some of our colleges — like Education, Nursing, and Pharmacy — have engaged learning, clinicals and student teaching woven into the curriculum. Students can’t graduate without those experiences. This initiative will focus primarily where it is not required in the curriculum — Engineering, Science, Health Sciences, Business and Liberal Arts. But all colleges will be involved with an advisory board to UTEP Engage that includes all elements of the university. 

In January, the University appointed our first ever Assistant Vice President for Regional Innovation & Partnerships to foster research with local and state governments. Whether on water, criminal justice, health, transportation, or history, this new employee has already started to identify external funding opportunities and high priority regional needs aligned with our expertise so that faculty have support to conduct more community-engaged research.

If you have questions about how this reorganization may impact you, I encourage you to read the FAQs here. 

We believe bringing together the functions of community engagement, government relations, and career development and focusing on helping employers to establish internships and come recruit here will unlock tremendous opportunity. I hope you see the potential and will join in making UTEP Engage a success for our students and our community. 

Go Miners! 

Heather Wilson