Photo courtesy of Katie Corbin (Western Kentucky University)
Congratulations to Kaitlin Palmer (Eastern Kentucky University) for receiving the 2016 Graduate Student Award at the 2016 KAHO Annual Conference. The Graduate Student Award is awarded annually to one recipient for their outstanding service to their institution.
From the nomination:
The nominee is graduating in December 2016, and our entire department refuses to acknowledge it. Why? In her time as a Graduate Assistant, she has made herself invaluable with her strong work ethic, positive attitude, sense of humor, and genuine care and concern for the students she works with.
As a Graduate Assistant, Kaitlin was expected to simply work with our retention initiatives. While this is a big task in and of itself, she has excelled at this and so much more. In the 2015-2016 academic year, students who lived on campus were retained 9% more than students who lived off campus, and we also saw a 6% increase in our on-campus retention rate from the prior year. While this is not necessarily a direct result of her work, I think the new energy she brought helped the efforts of our professional and paraprofessional staff members. As an alum of our institution, she truly understands the student experience and she went above and beyond in her outreach and interactions with students who were struggling. She was consistently looking at the data from our early intervention survey trying to find additional students to reach out to or workshops she could provide to help our students succeed.
Kentucky Association of Housing Officers 