ARPAS President
UC Davis, Vet Med Teaching and Research Center
Hi and welcome to spring 2023! With hardships and difficulties in maintaining and recruiting new memberships in the past several years due to COVID, ARPAS has been focused on updating its organization, recruiting, renewing memberships, and showing the benefits of belonging to ARPAS. It truly has been a team effort and several of these efforts are described below.
We have an updated strategic plan. The new strategic plan has a big goal of increasing our membership by 50%, with clear objectives to reach that goal. It also includes growing the AAS journal, promoting the expertise of ARPAS members, and increased partnering with other animal science related professional organizations.
The ARPAS bylaws have also been updated, primarily to shift standing committee duties to be more involved with promotion of ARAS and recruitment of members. We have also drafted a second document that is not part of the bylaws but can serve as a suggested outline of what these standing committees can be working on. (See below)
The bylaws have also included a new way to draft standing committee members. During the membership-renewal process, members can self-nominate for standing committee service.
Last year at the annual ADSA meeting, we were able to partner with the ADSA graduate student association and co-sponsor a mixer focused on helping graduate students learn about opportunities in industry and mentoring through ARPAS. We had a great turnout of graduate students and several ARPAS members attended as well to talk to them. We are hoping to continue working with the ADSA graduate students and expand this partnership to ASAS, PSA, and AMSA graduate student associations. To facilitate this partnership, included in the new revisions to the bylaws is expanding the number graduate student representatives from 1 to 4, one from each society. Special thanks to Brittany Morstatter for helping us connect to these other associations.
The first HQI memberships have been approved (thank you, Shelby Filley) and we are eagerly awaiting more nominations so if you know someone who might be interested, please nominate them.
Other projects we will be working on are updating the ARPAS website, virtual proctoring of exams, notifying lapsed members to renew, and obtaining sponsorships. Both Brittany Morstatter and Al Kertz have been working on these and many other projects to promote and grow ARPAS, and we all owe them a big thank you.
Draft Bylaws Changes to ‘Duties of ARPAS Standing Committees’
- Ethics Committee chaired by Northeast Director
Ethics violations
Maintain badges, logos on individual members cards, web pages, LinkedIn, etc.
Keep database of member registration and their expertise for referrals
- Membership Committee chaired by Western Director + Graduate Student Representative
Recruitment at society meetings through graduate student divisions
Mentoring of early career and graduate student program
Review of PAS HQI applications
- Program Committee chaired by President-Elect
Membership of this committee is the ARPAS Executive Committee
Plans symposium at annual meeting
Symposium fundraising
- Communications Committee chaired by Southern Director
Members are regional representatives
Maintain website information: current officers, meetings, etc.
Highlight regional individual member (1 per month)
Publicity through Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Maintain contact list/database of all national and regional officers, committee members
- Professional Relations Committee chaired by Midwestern Director
Fundraising (Annual Registry Sponsorship, Annual Symposium Sponsorship)
Promote hiring of ARPAS certified members
Promote certification at universities and within industry