OSU WElcome Center
strategic goals
The Welcome Center’s Strategic Goals
In alignment with Oregon State University’s Prosperity Widely Shared strategic plan which guides the university’s work from 2024-2030, the Welcome Center recognizes that we are an active part of moving the university strategic plan forward. The Welcome Center is well-positioned to support the goals of the plan, and we have committed ourselves to three goals that will guide our work. These three goals were established in October 2024, and the Welcome Center professional staff team will provide biannual updates on progress made toward each goal.
Goal 1. Serve as the storytellers for Oregon State University
The Welcome Center has the distinct privilege of being storytellers for the university. Oregon State University as a premiere research university makes big discoveries that drive big solutions (Prosperity Widely Shared goal 1), and we feel honored to share those stories with our visitors. As part of this goal, the Welcome Center strives to stay in-the-know with the latest academic and research accomplishments across the institution so that we can share these with prospective students. We commit to engaging in ongoing staff training where we can learn from our campus partners about the excellent work happening in all corners of campus and beyond.
This goal also inspires the Welcome Center to be the storytellers of our own work. As part of this goal, we strive to connect with OSU departments campus-wide both to serve as a resource, providing tours to departmental visitors or new staff, and to remind our colleagues that every staff/faculty member can contribute to a positive visit experience for prospective students. Finally, we endeavor to better tell the story of our own work, demonstrating how our campus visit experiences directly contribute to university enrollment goals.
- Schedule ongoing staff trainings, including fall/spring trainings and biweekly staff meetings, and invite campus partners in to discuss updates in their work that we can share with visitors.
- Create and maintain new “About Us” Welcome Center webpages. These pages will publicly include our goals that support the strategic plan, and it will also highlight visitor data to illustrate how our work supports larger enrollment goals.
- Connect and meet with departments across the campus to be a better resource to our campus partners. Help all of our campus partners understand that they are part of the admissions process and can make a positive impact on our visitors.
- Led a successful new ambassador onboarding/training program during winter and spring 2025 for 23 new TOUR Ambassador student staff members.
- 14 student staff training meetings held from October 2024 to June 2025. Training meeting content included:
- A “surprise” fun staff meeting incorporating team bonding activities, snacks and crafts
- Training from the College of Liberal Arts to update our student staff on their current majors, undergraduate research opportunities, student clubs, etc.
- Training from the Center for Advocacy, Prevention and Education regarding the type of confidential support that they provide all OSU students
- Scavenger hunt to familiarize student staff with quick facts about OSU buildings and departments that they can incorporate into their tours
- 1 new web page built dedicated to our strategic goals. This page is our new creation to provide transparency around our progress toward our goals.
- Early conversations between Welcome Center staff and Enrollment Management IT web development staff have begun about options for additional web pages that can house visitor data to highlight the work of our unit in contributing to OSU’s larger enrollment goals.
- Our TOUR Program Coordinator staff member will be meeting with our campus partners, specifically our 10 academic college recruiters, throughout summer 2025 to continue building relationships and supporting their visit offerings.
- Hosted a successful robust 5-day fall training program for our TOUR Ambassadors that featured trainings from 22 campus departments, including 9 academic colleges and touring all 7 cultural resource centers.
- Held 6 staff training meetings since June 2025. Training meeting content included:
- Regular updates and reminders on office duties, customer service, tour talking points, admissions data and improved visitor experiences.
- Training from the College of Science to update our student staff on current majors, undergraduate research, student clubs, etc.
- Training on how staffing our Beaver Open House day program works.
- A “surprise” fun team bonding meeting featuring holiday crafts, popcorn, hot cocoa and a movie.
- A Jeopardy-style OSU campus facts training game.
- Our TOUR Program Coordinator staff member met with 9 academic college partners and representatives from the cultural resource centers during summer 2025 to improve our ambassadors’ tour talking points with accurate, current information and inclusive language.
- Supported our campus partners by welcoming 48 special visitors on tours for job interview candidates, new employees, esteemed guests, etc. since July 2025. Providing these tours helps the Welcome Center increase our visibility on campus and spread awareness about our tour offerings to our colleagues.
- Campus tours are now promoted as part of all new employee's onboarding process in the optional "New Employee Welcome 101: Onboarding" presentation, which is offered 3 days a week and provides info/materials for new hires. We are proud to be partners in supporting successful onboarding for new staff members.
- Our Welcome Center director was invited to present to University Housing & Dining Services’ Operations & Facilities supervisors on November 12, 2025 about the Welcome Center and our operations, allowing us to continue increasing our visibility among our campus partners.
- Convened two meetings (August 20 and November 19) that brought together the Welcome Center staff and our academic college partners to discuss visit operations, important updates and to gather feedback from our campus partners. While these meetings have been regularly hosted for many years now, we recently received a request to host them more frequently (once per quarter, rather than 3 times per year) because our college partners find such value in them.
“Your identity is a big part of what you bring to this job. You’re going to reach students who share a quality with you.”
Atticus I. | Class of 2025
“This job pushes us to be better as students. It’s hard to talk about the university and how good their programs are if you’re not doing well in school. And also, you want to have something you can talk about from your own experience, so it drives you to be more involved, to go to different things so you can share and talk from your own personal experiences [on tour].”
Keoe H. | Class of 2025
Goal 2. Create intentional visit experiences for future college students
The Welcome Center creates unique and intentional visit experiences for prospective and admitted students and their family members. Our visit experiences focus on the needs of our visiting students to ensure that we provide transparent, accurate and timely information about the admissions process and the university. The Welcome Center staff commit to welcoming each student and their family with genuine enthusiasm, highlighting all that OSU has to offer to students. Our jobs are to help visiting prospective and admitted students develop an affinity for OSU and to feel like they can belong on our campus. We view our work as part of the new student onboarding process; whether or not our visiting students choose to attend OSU, we want all prospective students to know the offices and resources that support students from the time they apply for admission to the day they graduate and beyond. These efforts will support the university’s goal that every student graduates (Prosperity Widely Shared goal 2).
This goal also challenges the Welcome Center to ensure the quality of our visit experiences. We will achieve this through ongoing staff training and evaluation, and by supporting our college partners who provide visit experiences. We commit to remaining nimble to the needs of future prospective students by updating or refining our visit experiences to meet the needs of the incoming demographic of prospective students.
- Be innovative in designing our visit experiences in ways that encourage visiting students to build affinity for OSU by meeting current OSU students, connecting with campus staff/faculty, learning about support resources, etc.
- Use visitor survey data to inform the information we share during visits.
- Create and implement quarterly tour quality control checks, where TOUR Ambassador student coordinators will shadow one tour for each ambassador in their small group each quarter to ensure consistent information and overall tour quality.
- Create and implement the Visit Experience Review process, where Welcome Center staff members will shadow college visit experiences. This will help reduce information redundancy, ensure positive customer service experiences across all visit experiences, and create opportunities for Welcome Center staff to offer custom trainings to support the growth and development of college visits.
- Began implementing quarterly tour quality control checks:
- In winter term, 32 of 50 ambassadors received a tour quality control check.
- In spring term we first prioritized evaluating our newest ambassadors to approve them to give solo tours, with 16 of 23 new ambassadors earning approval by the end of spring term 2025.
- Due to the time spent with spring term new hire evaluations, this meant that fewer of our existing staff members were able to get quality control checks during the spring. However, we still completed 9 additional quality control checks, prioritizing the ambassadors who didn’t get a check during the winter term.
- As we have implemented this new process in winter/spring 2025, our staff has made note of how to streamline and improve this quality control check tour process for the next academic year. We expect improvements and more efficiency with it moving forward.
- Expanded offerings on our free self-guided OSU campus tour app by inviting all OSU academic colleges and other campus/locations to create content for a self-guided tour. This app can be used while on campus to guide them around to tour locations, or it can be used from home for visitors to listen to and see each tour stop which expands access to visit opportunities.
- As of mid-June 2025, the College of Engineering’s tour has been built out into the app and is now live for users.
- Several other colleges are compiling tour materials to be built out in the app soon.
- Began planning the first ever all-OSU-ambassador retreat to be hosted in early fall term 2025. This will invite the student ambassadors from all colleges and the Welcome Center to come together for social networking, job training, professional and leadership development, and to remind ambassadors the importance of their jobs. Professional staff from the colleges will support the planning process and will present sessions at the retreat so it will be a truly cross-campus collaborative event.
- Starting in fall 2025, we added a new daily visit experience: Q&A panels with our student TOUR Ambassadors. This provides visiting families with increased access to our student ambassadors and allows them to ask their unique questions to ensure they’re answered as part of their visit day. We have welcomed 68 students and 105 guests to these panels so far this academic year.
- Hosted the first-ever all-OSU-ambassador retreat on September 27, 2025 with 107 student ambassadors in attendance representing all academic colleges, the Honors College and the Welcome Center. Feedback from the retreat was incredibly positive and we’ll look to host another one during the 2026-2027 academic year. The retreat included:
- Icebreakers allowing students from different colleges/staffs to get to know one another and what they do as part of their ambassador jobs
- A selection of 4 breakout sessions entitled “Telling Your OSU Story,” “Public Speaking 101,” “Using Your Ambassador Experience in the Job Search,” and “Pathways and Perspectives: Understanding the Students You Represent”
- College spotlight presentations given by college ambassadors sharing unique college experiential learning opportunities that they have engaged in
- During our fall 2025 Beaver Open Houses, we added a new Beaver Briefing breakout session focused on undergraduate research presented by the Office of Undergraduate Research, allowing visiting families to hear about all the opportunities for students to engage in research at OSU.
- Launched the Visit Experience Review in fall 2025, where our Welcome Center director and assistant director began shadowing our college partners’ visit offerings to identify strengths and opportunities, in an overall effort to ensure a cohesive visit experience for our visitors across the campus.
- Revamped our office training process by bringing in our full student staff for hands-on training on office tasks, resulting in a higher level of customer service and efficiency for the visitor experience.
- By the end of fall term, 47 of 50 ambassadors were cleared/approved to give solo tours, demonstrating the successes of our ongoing staff training and evaluation processes.
- Continued our self-guided OSU tour app success by building out the College of Forestry and College of Science tours into the app since June 2025. Multiple other academic colleges are currently in the process of gathering content for their self-guided tours to be built out soon.
“The team is so special, they’re people from all different walks of life and are interested in all different majors. They’re people I probably wouldn’t have ever met outside this job.”
Aislin E. | Class of 2025
“As a tour guide, all of us really appreciate that we can be ourselves… Being myself shows people that they can be themselves and be in leadership roles here at OSU, even if they don’t feel welcome like that in their own community.”
Annalise W. | Class of 2025
Goal 3. Develop outstanding student leaders who are prepared to work collaboratively and solve problems in the workforce upon graduation
The Welcome Center strives to be the best student job on campus. Our student staff members are essential to the success of the Welcome Center, as they serve as peer mentors to our visiting prospective students. TOUR Ambassadors come from all across the country, represent majors within all the academic colleges, and are involved in student organizations and undergraduate research widely across the campus.
The Welcome Center’s third goal focuses on developing our student staff members into future leaders who will contribute positively to the workforce upon graduation (in alignment with Prosperity Widely Shared goal 3, fueling a thriving world). The Welcome Center knows that campus employment can increase student retention, and as such, the Welcome Center plays a role in supporting students through to graduation (Prosperity Widely Shared goal 2). We commit to being a student-centered place of employment where we grow and support our student staff members by treating them with care and empathy. We aim to provide our student staff with transferable skills that they will utilize in any future profession, including communication, teamwork, public speaking, critical thinking, adaptability, problem-solving and more.
- Create and deliver professional development workshops for our student staff members that cover topics like discussing transferable skills from the TOUR Ambassador position, how to list the TOUR Ambassador position on their resume or LinkedIn, and how to talk about their job duties in a job/internship interview.
- Provide leadership opportunities through the student coordinator position, which allows students to have an elevated level of responsibilities and professional growth aligned with their future career aspirations.
- Professional staff members will continue our own learning and development on student supervision skills to ensure we are thoughtfully supporting and challenging our student staff members.
- Graduated 17 student TOUR Ambassador staff members who successfully completed their bachelor’s degrees at OSU at the end of spring 2025
- Created and executed our first ever “exit interviews” with graduating senior staff members. Of the 17 students who graduated from OSU at the end of spring 2025, we held 6 exit interviews, with another interview planned for later in the summer. These conversations gave seniors an opportunity to reflect on their work accomplishments with us and share their feedback regarding their student employment experiences, including transferable skills they’ve developed.
- Provided a professional development workshop presented by OSU’s University Ombuds Office for our staff members. Our student and professional staff engaged in the “Received and Giving Feedback: Why It’s Important, Why It’s Hard, How to Make It Better” workshop on Tuesday, May 6, 2025, providing them with the skills to discern appropriate ways to provide feedback to their colleagues in a work setting. Staff members also practiced skills on how to receive and interpret feedback given to them from colleagues.
- Organized a workshop from the Career Development Center to help student staff members improve their resumes and cover letters to incorporate their TOUR Ambassador student job experiences
- Two professional staff members attended the annual Collegiate Information and Visitor Services Association (CIVSA) conference in Charlotte, NC in late May 2025. They were able to network with fellow collegiate visitor services professionals from across the country and bring back ideas to implement into our student staff training.
- Two professional staff members are registered to take part in OSU’s search advocate workshop series during summer 2025. Upon completion of this series of trainings, both members will be approved to serve as search advocates on hiring committees across the OSU campus. They will be prepared to serve as content-neutral, external advisors to support inclusive excellence in hiring processes.
- One professional staff member completed the Dialogue Facilitation Lab training in winter 2025, led by the Office of Institutional Diversity. That staff member was then selected to serve as the co-facilitator for the summer 2025 Dialogue Facilitation Lab cohort.
- One professional staff member was elected to OSU’s Faculty Senate as part of the Associate Faculty apportionment unit and began their tenure in winter 2025.
- Three professional staff members engaged in their annual performance review during spring 2025, offering them an opportunity to reflect on their professional accomplishments and goals for growth in the next year to come.
- Our assistant director serves as a mentor in the Collegiate Information & Visitor Services Association (CIVSA) for a newer professional in our field at a different university, furthering his own professional development.
- Our TOUR Program Coordinator serves as the chair of the OSU Recreational Sports Advisory Board responsible for advising on the departmental budget, program and services, furthering his own professional development.
- Our Welcome Center director sits on the Destination Experience Committee for the City of Corvallis/Visit Corvallis, furthering her own professional development and networking with local businesses regarding the sustainability of tourism in our Corvallis community.
- Our assistant director and Group Visits Coordinator completed OSU’s search advocate training during summer 2025, preparing them to serve on OSU hiring committees by understanding and advocating for equitable hiring practices. We have utilized their training knowledge in the Welcome Center by using the search criteria matrix as a tool for screening our student job applications.
- Multiple professional staff members have served as references and/or written recommendation letters for our student TOUR Ambassadors who are seeking jobs, internships, scholarships, grants or graduate school admission.
- Student coordinators have begun co-presenting group visit presentations alongside our Group Visit Coordinator, giving students elevated opportunities to practice professional communication skills via presentations and with communicating with group chaperones. We had 4 co-presentations this fall term.
- Empowered student coordinators to take the lead on student staff hiring recruitment and promotion by creating promotional materials for social media, TV screens and flyers, and by hosting one in-person information session and one (new this year) virtual information session about the job. As a result of their efforts, student job application numbers have nearly doubled compared to last year’s applicant numbers at this point in the hiring process.
Top 5 transferable skills that graduating seniors say they developed from the TOUR Ambassador job:
- Public speaking
- Networking, interpersonal skills
- Awareness of bias or difference
- Teamwork
- Leadership
“I feel like I can easily see how far I’ve come from where I started. I remember in my interview, I felt really shy and I didn’t know who I was. Now I can definitely define myself.”
Kyla A. | Class of 2025