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Fernandez eyes overall improvement
Northern Marianas College president Dr. Carmen Fernandez has appointed Manny Castro as enrollment director, while announcing many facility improvements at the college during a board meeting last Oct. 28.
Fernandez told the NMC Board of Regents that the decision was made with the intent to reactivate the recruitment team.
“We intend to get our recruitment team to get activated again, and we plan to make a big push to increase enrollment for the school semester,” said Fernandez. “I think everyone will pitch in to help with that effort. We need to do everything that we can in our part, not only to increase enrollment but to address retention. For this, we really want to be graduating many more people this spring. Those are our immediate goals for enrollment.”
Along with the emphasis on enrollment, Fernandez discussed improvements to NMC’s facilities. Fernandez wants space in the NMC campus for student-faculty interactions in a confidential setting.
“I also directed for the School of Education to build offices. There are eight faculties and they are all sharing four offices. That’s an urgency brought to my attention. The faculty must have a private space to meet with their students, so that project is ongoing now and should be complete very soon,” she said.
Other facility changes include the moving of the testing center to a larger building to enable NMC to accommodate even more students.
“Other major activities are the moving of the testing center from Building I to N-5. A team got together and talked about the space needs and the fact that we needed a bigger place for testing. The team agreed that this was a good move,” said Fernandez.
The NMC testing center serves as the NMC Saipan campus venue for tests such as ACT, GRE General and subject tests, LSAT, MPRE, Praxis I & II, SAT I & II, SSAT, TOEFL, and PAN (TSA)
The NMC cafeteria, which was damaged by Typhoon Soudelor, was recently renovated and is now in the process of being redesigned.
“Our café, we call it ‘Point Break’ here, is under renovation. I have a nice team of NMC PROA’s working on a theme, to really make the café more inviting and enticing for our students and everyone,” said Fernandez.
