In This Story
Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs Jill Nelson sees her role through the lens of mathematics and likens it to an optimization challenge. In the simplest terms, optimization is making a process or system as fully perfect, and effective as possible––she wants to optimize undergraduate programs and student experiences.
Nelson became associate dean at the College of Engineering and Computing (CEC) in the summer of 2024 after a career teaching and researching in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a three-year stint as a program director in the Division of Undergraduate Education at the National Science Foundation (NSF).
She describes her career path as fairly straightforward starting with her first appointment as an assistant professor at George Mason, rising to associate professor and then to associate dean. The NSF appointment prepared her for her dean’s role in ways she didn’t expect.
“The job exactly aligned with what I do now,” she said. As a program lead for NSF’s Improving Undergrad STEM Education (IUSE) Program, she and her team explored everything from how students learn math in a way that can be applied to engineering, to questions about how to increase the number of students from different backgrounds, and the look of the cohort process.
Her work with IUSE also focused on institutional and community transformation. “Organizational change was fascinating to me because we don’t learn this. None of us (in STEM) study this unless we move to it later. The Division of Undergraduate Education at NSF brought in colleagues in psychology and the social sciences who have different ways of thinking about student learning,” she said.
As she managed and followed ideas, proposals, and then projects at NSF, she discovered similarities to following students, courses, and accreditation at CEC. “You ask what’s the guidance you can give along the way what do you do to assess success, how do you make this process as painless as possible,” she said. “I’m sure that both students and NSF PIs wouldn’t say that it’s painless, but in both cases we try to have accountability. Obviously, students are different than projects, but they are going through a pathway, and we try to help them.”
At George Mason, she says policy lives in the catalog where she looks for answers to policy questions. That can be ambiguous, and when it is, she must work with legal and the provost’s office to clarify. These gray areas interest her. “It’s an optimization and I like to optimize. With policy appeals the like, they can’t lay out every use case, so we have to look at how we can improve and how to best think about what’s going to happen moving forward,” she said.
As she moves forward, Nelson will be working on the ABET accreditation self-study and site visit for CEC engineering programs and much more. “The self-study is an opportunity to see how different departments approach their structure and their assessment. Through detailed reading and editing, I might find that different approaches between departments could lead to improvement throughout the entire college, and that’s exciting.”