Inspiring Campus During the Summer with a SPARK

NC State SPARK stands for Summer Programs - Aspire, Renew , Kindle. SPARK is an asynchronous professional development series consisting of four media packages delivered to registrants once a week during the month of July. The program emphasizes accessibility of content as it is freely available for anyone or institution to not only replicate the structure, but also reuse the content from each of the three years of the program’s existence. This program won the POD Network Innovation Award for 2022 which highlighted its ability to be easily replicated and its focus on equity, diversity and inclusion. Each media package is composed of a podcast, an article in the form of a blog post, and downloadable resources. Conversations are also encouraged using hashtags on Social Media, including Linked In and Twitter. The series is offered for faculty, staff, and graduate students. While the series has a different emphasis each year, the overarching theme is to inspire the participants as they prepare for the Fall semester. In its first two years the program had an average of 242 participants per year. This year, our Spark program is called the “Summer of What if”, and is based on the bestseller, “My What If Year”, by Alisha Fernandez Miranda. We had over 550 participants from all around the world. The “Summer of What If” emphasizes embracing the mindset of the intern and focuses on shadowing experts in four areas of academia, Research, Leadership, Teaching and Service. The program uses student-produced music and artwork and we hope to continue the program every summer and encourage you to download and interact with or repurpose the content available by scanning the QR code on this poster.