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K-State Today

March 26, 2015

2015 President’s Award of Excellence for Unclassified Professional Winners

Submitted by Jaime Parker

Four Kansas State University employees have been selected for the 2015 President's Award of Excellence for Unclassified Professionals.

Recipients are Gloria Holcombe in the Team Building, Group Activity and Service to the University category; Mark Clarke in the Productivity, Creativity and Innovation Award category; Tanya McGee in the Distinguished Accomplishment category; and Tim Carson for the Leadership Award category.

Holcombe is an editor in the publishing unit of Communications and Agricultural Education. She organizes and carries out projects on behalf of the College of Agriculture plus K-State Research and Extension. Her projects automatically influence every country in the state of Kansas and our alumni around the U.S. and the world.
Holcombe is an amazing unclassified professional in every sense of the word. She has been working on campus nearly 30 years and has changed and adapted to new positions, locations, technologies, systems and working arrangements. She was nominated by Steve Graham, assistant to the dean and director.

Clarke is a computer information specialist in the College of Engineering. Programs/applications that Mark implemented were user-friendly and have greatly enhanced the productivity of operations for the College of Engineering as well as others across campus. He was nominated by Gary Clark, professor and senior associate dean. Clarke developed the following Web-based applications:

  • College of Engineering scholarships — This program merges and sorts data from more than 600 scholarship fund sources, with more than 1000 scholarship applications.
  • eProposals and eSign — Web-based proposal review and approval process is used campuswide.
  • Prospects database — Clarke developed a student prospects database program for both engineering and agriculture that allows each college to tract and contact prospective students.

McGee is the associate director for the Office of Student Financial Assistance. She developed a new process that greatly increase our office productivity for summer financial aid processing. Previously, the office would have to manually set up summer financial aid for each student. It is estimated that this process will save employees 100 hour of work. She also created a process that notifies students of their Direct Loan disbursements through iSIS. This process will save $15,000 a year in postage alone plus labor, printing and other material cost.
She was nominated by Larry Vu, assistant director of student financial assistance.

Tim Carson is a computer information specialist/instructor in animal sciences and industry. His efforts make all of us look organized and professional, especially in highly visible activities. As a result of Carson's role in departmental teams, we have garnered a national and international reputation for excellence in animal sciences. Carson has accomplished this through development and maintenance of our website, teaming with specialists on various youth and adult education programs, and in classroom instruction. He goes beyond normal expectations to meet the needs of students, faculty and the public. He is one of those people that gets things done to allow all of us to look good. Carson was nominated by Mike Tokach, professor animal sciences and industry.