Baskin Engineering welcomes new director of the Office of Student Success 

The Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz has hired Lynell Spencer to lead the Office of Student Success, expanding efforts to close equity gaps and promote a thriving engineering community. 

Baskin Engineering, as a high-performing professional school within the fast-paced environment of a research one university, has a wide range of opportunities for students to get involved with cutting-edge research and scholarship. With a student population that is more reflective of the diversity of the state of California than most engineering schools in the U.S., the school has an impetus, reinforced by a compact between California’s Governor Newsom and the UC system, to ensure all students can thrive within this environment. Goals of the compact include closing equity gaps, supporting student success, and enhancing workforce preparedness and high-demand career pathways.

Baskin Engineering has a history of forward thinking in this area, initiating and expanding programs to support student success and diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. This includes initiatives such as the MESA Engineering Program and the Baskin Engineering Excellence Scholars Program (BEES), and fellowships that support anti-racist research in engineering. This year, Baskin Engineering was selected to lead the Western Regional Hub of the NSF’s Engineering PLUS Alliance to support the success of people underrepresented in engineering.

In 2022, Marcella Gomez was appointed as the inaugural Baskin Engineering Associate Dean for DEI, and with the creation of this office came an opportunity to reorganize and expand DEI and student success staffing to increase the capacity of these efforts. The new student success position was created in the wake of this reorganization to support the undergrad experience efforts under Associate Dean for Undergraduate Experience Jim Whitehead. The leadership team envisions many opportunities for collaboration with the office of DEI.

“As the number of students interested in pursuing an engineering degree has rapidly increased, it is a top priority that we do all that we can to make sure everyone who wants to be part of our Baskin Engineering community can thrive academically and interpersonally,” said Alexander Wolf, Dean of the Baskin School of Engineering. 

“Our role as engineering educators is a challenging one. In their short time with us, our students need to acquire many critical skills and habits of mind. We are acutely conscious of our responsibility to create curricula and student success programming that will allow students to successfully complete our degrees in a timely manner while acquiring the skills they will need to be effective and ethical practitioners of our profession. I’m proud that we are taking these major steps to enhance and expand our efforts with senior staff to work hand in hand with our faculty leaders.”

Spencer comes to UC Santa Cruz from Portland State University, where she has most recently worked as the Interim Associate Vice Provost of Advising and Career Services. 

“Our students will benefit from the deep experience Lynell Spencer brings to the role of Director of Student Success,” Whitehead said. “Her role is broad, ranging from success in the classroom, to expanding extracurricular access, to career success, all consistent with our holistic view of student success.”  

Read on to a brief Q&A with the new director. 

Q&A with Lynell Spencer

What drew you to Baskin Engineering? 

UC Santa Cruz has been on my radar for many years. I’m from Portland and worked at Portland State. One of my first projects there was to engage the campus in an advising redesign, and my job was to research advising models at other institutions, and I really liked UC Santa Cruz’s. I started learning more about UCSC, I was impressed by the residential college model, and enamored with Sammy the Slug! Since then, I’ve had my eye on the institution. 

I’ve spent a lot of my time in education engaging with STEM and STEM students — learning about the kind of obstacles and challenges that exist for them, so being given an opportunity to work directly with those populations in engineering is really exciting to me. These can be intimidating fields, and so when you come to college and you don’t have that sense of belonging, or that immediate identification with the work, it can be hard to persist. I am excited to help in those areas. 

How will this role fit with the student success team?

So much of the work to be done in student success is developing a partnership between faculty, staff, and students, and being able to create systems and improve processes to better support students. In this role, I will be able to look at data and hear from students, then coordinate with other faculty and staff to identify, plan, and implement practices that support students’ educational journey. 

What are some of your goals in the position?

My very short term goals are to build great relationships with my team. I’m already so impressed with them and the kind of work they are doing. I think understanding how to support their work and scale up their programming will be critical in the first year. 

My second goal is to understand, improve, and scale up the use of student data to inform current and future practice. We are very fortunate to have access to so much information about how students experience the university — I want to make sure we are using it to the fullest so that we can really be a student-ready division. So I’m interested to dig into that as part of the role, to find out how we assess our current  programs and make sure they’re working for our students.

And then my third goal is to spend as much time as I can down in the [Slugworks] makerspace, because I have so much fun down there talking to the students and hearing about what they’re working on! 

What are you especially looking forward to at Baskin Engineering, or Santa Cruz in general?

I really believe in what Baskin Engineering says it is trying to do to improve the experience and outcomes of students from marginalized backgrounds; about being a flagship institution where all types of students can be really, really successful in engineering. One of the things that stood out to me as I was researching UCSC is there seems to be a lot of excitement around having the Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (AANAPISI) designations. And not just having the designations, but really making them mean something by creating programs and spaces that support, celebrate, and elevate our diverse student body — I get excited about doing that work. 

I’m also excited about buying a kayak! I love kayaking and I’ve never kayaked in the ocean, so I can’t wait to do that.