Newer, Easier Professional Development Application
March 23, 2010 by Dale Robinson
They're not quite paper-free yet, but CUPEU's Professional Development application forms just became a whole lot easier to fill out. Thanks to CUPEU's Napoleon Soberanis, these sleek new forms do most of the work for you.
As anyone who has applied for Professional Development funds knows, the old forms required you to type in the same information over and over again. And again. And again. This new application package not only copies standard information such as your name, phone number and email address to all of your forms, but it also does all the math for you. You fill in the detailed amounts on the individual budget pages and those amounts are summed for you right away without any extra steps. It's also prettier. The forms are cleaner, there is more space to write, and text sizing is handled automatically for all you super-hyphenated folk out there.
It's good to keep in mind that not everything will be filled out automatically. Some items such as the locations, dates and titles of individual activities may apply only to a single form so they won't be replicated. This package was designed to streamline the application process and it does that quite nicely, but don't expect to blast in a whole bunch of information and immediately retire to the drawing room with a mojito. You'll still have to verify that the information on all the pages is complete and correct.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the package contains every single application form, whether it applies to you or not. Please review the application guidelines or the instructions on the forms page to determine what forms you will need to print and which forms don't apply to you.
We're pretty excited about this new package and we hope you are too. It is a welcome improvement to the PD process, but it's not the end of the line. CUPEU is still committed to implementing a web-based interface that will reduce the amount of paper consumed and allow you to apply and check the status of your application online. We will keep you posted.
In the meantime, our thanks to Napoleon Soberanis, the Digital Coordinator in the Center for Digital Arts, who took on this project without being asked and dropped the final product in our laps. Thanks from all of us!