Portland State Magazine Fall 2015

6 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE FALL 2015 Career placement bragging rights MATT WALSH , pictured here, graduated in 2013 with a business degree, a Food Industry Leadership Certificate and an immediate job in Portland’s commercial baking industry. Now, just a year later, he is a grocery sales rep for Stumptown Coffee Roasters. Thomas Appenzeller earned a master’s in speech and hearing sciences this past June and was hired as a speech- language pathologist by Portland Public Schools before he even graduated. These are just two alumni from Portland State programs that boast 100 percent career placement for graduates: the Food Industry Leadership Certificate in the School of Business Administration and the Master’s of Speech and Hearing Sciences degree program. PA R K B L O C K S University plan nearly complete EFFORTS TO CRAFT a new strategic plan for Portland State have reached the home stretch, and a draft will soon be ready for public review. The plan, meant to guide the University over the next five years, is the culmination of a yearlong campus conversation about PSU’s mission, goals and priorities. It reflects thousands of comments and suggestions from all corners of PSU, including alumni. In late October, a draft of the plan will be available for public comment at pdx.edu/president . A revised version of the plan will be submitted to President Wim Wiewel, who expects to deliver the final document to the PSU Board of Trustees for approval in December. Portland crime maps REPORTED CRIME HAS FALLEN in Oregon over the past three decades, but 90 percent of its citizens still believe crime in the state has increased or remained the same. To raise awareness of actual crime rates in the state’s largest city, Portland State criminology and criminal justice students teamed up with the Portland Police Bureau to create a website that maps crime trends in Portland from 1995 through 2013. It geographically and temporally covers 13 offenses, from domestic assaults and gun crimes to bicycle thefts and burglaries. For example, while 63,609 residential burglaries were reported in Portland during that time frame, the incident rate decreased 53.3 percent over the years. The website, www.pdx.edu/crime-data , will be updated as new data becomes available.