Riess receives Provost Advising Award at Virginia Tech

Jan T. Riess, of Blacksburg, departmental program advisor and career advisor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech, received the 2005 Provost’s Award for Excellence in Advising

The Provost's Award for Excellence in Advising is given annually to recognize an individual who serves undergraduate advisees in exemplary ways. The award includes a cash prize, a plaque, and membership in the university's Academy of Advising Excellence. Faculty, staff, administrators, or students may nominate individuals (but not themselves) for the award.

Riess provides academic advising for 600 to 1,000 mechanical-engineering undergraduates, provides career advising and interacts with potential employers to facilitate interviews, designs and provides special advising programs for transfer students, and meets with prospective students and their parents. She sets up and maintains a homepage on the web to provide departmental academic-advising information and career-opportunities information, sends career-opportunity information to enrolled students through a listserv, provides academic and career advising by e-mail, and serves as departmental career adviser, promoting career-services co-op and employment opportunities.

Riess received the first Exemplary Employee Award from the College of Engineering, the first Ingersoll-Rand Staff Award for outstanding Contributions to the Mechanical Engineering Department, and the Ingersoll-Rand Best M.E. Staff member award. She is a member of the University Self Study, the National Academic Advising Association, the College of Engineering Graduation Reception Committee, the Student Systems Taskforce, the Business Process Re-engineering Committee, and the advisory board of the Wesley Foundation. She earned a B.S. in home economics for general education from Iowa State University, did an independent study project and report on Student Satisfaction with the Cooperative Education Program at Virginia Tech, and earned an M.A. in Education, student personnel, from Virginia Tech.

The College of Engineering at Virginia Tech is internationally recognized for its excellence in 14 engineering disciplines and computer science. The college's 5,600 undergraduates benefit from an innovative curriculum that provides a "hands-on, minds-on" approach to engineering education, complementing classroom instruction with two unique design-and-build facilities and a strong Cooperative Education Program. With more than 50 research centers and numerous laboratories, the college offers its 2,000 graduate students opportunities in advanced fields of study such as biomedical engineering, state-of-the-art microelectronics, and nanotechnology.

Founded in 1872 as a land-grant college, Virginia Tech has grown to become among the largest universities in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Today, Virginia Tech's eight colleges are dedicated to putting knowledge to work through teaching, research, and outreach activities and to fulfilling its vision to be among the top research universities in the nation. At its 2,600-acre main campus located in Blacksburg and other campus centers in Northern Virginia, Southwest Virginia, Hampton Roads, Richmond, and Roanoke, Virginia Tech enrolls more than 28,000 full- and part-time undergraduate and graduate students from all 50 states and more than 100 countries in 180 academic degree programs.