New Strategic Plan to lead Tech toward preemience

Just over a year ago, the Tech community undertook the task of developing a strategic vision for Tech that will shape our future for the next 25 years. Our challenge was to create a shared vision to ensure success in a rapidly changing environment, allowing us to make the best investments today to better prepare our students and the Institute a for the future.

The creation of the strategic plan has truly been a collaborative effort involving many of you. After holding 70 town hall meetings, openly soliciting ideas via the Web and engaging you through the “Days of Engagement” held last spring, as well as our faculty, staff, alumni and community, we have refined input and have created a guide that serves to chart our course as we create the Georgia Tech of 2035.

You may wonder why those of you currently attending Tech should care about a 25-year vision. As I shared with the campus community earlier this week, our new strategic plan includes five overarching goals, along with both short-term and long-term strategies. It is designed to be a living document, providing a big- picture road map for where we are going as an Institute, but flexible enough so that we can be responsive to change and open to opportunities before us.

These five goals are to: be among the most highly respected technology-focused learning institutions in the world; sustain and enhance excellence in scholarship and research; ensure that innovation, entrepreneurship and public service are fundamental characteristics of our graduates; expand our global footprint and influence to ensure that we are graduating good global citizens; and relentlessly pursue institutional effectiveness.

During the planning process, a list of ten Institute-wide ideas emerged, and those ideas were so compelling that we didn’t want to lose any time in exploring them. Bear in mind that these aren’t the only initiatives. We anticipate that there will be dozens, if not hundreds, more of them as we develop specific plans to implement our goals throughout the Institute.

Among those of particular interest to you are: preparing you for global leadership, creating an experimental college (the ”X” college), pursuing globally significant grand challenges using our campus and region as a test bed for research and application, creating a virtual Tech campus and providing an educational guarantee.

These are just a few examples of the strategies that we will explore. It may be that upon careful analysis we will not implement all of them, or we may even discover other opportunities to improve them.

Whatever ideas we decide to pursue, you can be assured that as we move forward, Tech will continue to build upon its strengths as a culture that nurtures innovation and shares a commitment to excellence that will both challenge you and enrich your education.

The strategic plan will serve as our guide toward future success and innovation. We can all look forward to our 150th birthday as a celebration of one of the most vital, well-respected and defining institutions for technology and commerce in the world.

This is our time and our vision, and I hope that you will join us in making it happen. I am convinced that working together, we can design the future. This is, after all, Georgia Tech.

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