While students are making plans for the summer, the Virginia Tech administration is making a plan for the next six academic years. Yesterday evening, Provost Mark McNamee presented the draft of the University Strategic Plan at a town hall format meeting. The plan encompasses the internal mobilization and reallocation of university funds and academic departments from 2006 to 2012.

The plan summarizes the university's goal to link tuition, private funding, state funding and other fund sources to support the reallocation of investments. The draft of the plan will be presented to the Board of Visitors in June for finalization and adoption.

?The university got the Strategic Plan in 2001, which was a 5-year plan built around a 10-year plan for the university. We decided this would be a perfect time to do an update to the plan, and give it a chance to evaluate what we've done in the past five years and what we wanted to do. We decided to take advantage of this year to look at the process,? McNamee said.

The current draft of the plan emphasizes the elements of learning, discovery and engagement into the scholarship of the curriculum. The plan follows a model of organizational development for a higher-quality diverse and inclusive academic and working environment.

According to the current draft, ?The 2006-2012 Strategic Plan Update highlights areas of immediate strategic focus within the broad array of programs remaining consistent with the university's comprehensive mission in three Scholarship Domain areas.?

McNamee said faculty, staff and administration officials built upon relations and input from the students to collectively build the strategic plan. Student feedback and links of student life within the classroom and outside the classroom were heavy concentrations in development of the plan, he said.

The university plans on encompassing higher levels of quality research, capstone experiences, international and foreign language studies and stronger academic and career advising to improve upon the undergraduate experience. The university also hopes to integrate VT Pathways for Learning, a plan for the remodeling of core requirements in the undergraduate curriculum.

The university also hopes to increase the enrollment of graduate and doctorate students by obtaining national partnerships and acquiring joint degrees.

Plans for improving upon student life as well as academic life are also being considered by increasing the quality of life for students, multiculturalism and ethical leadership development.

Additionally, the university hopes to increase the investment put into research. The current draft proposal considers the current possibilities of energy research and discovery of distribution and utilization of clean coal, fuel cell, bio-renewable energies, solar energy and winds and nuclear energy. The current draft also takes into account research in material sciences and improving upon environmental health.

Research will also examine multiple social and individual transformations, innovative technologies and complex systems of bioinformatics, systems biology, transportation and computational science and engineering.

The plan also suggests the advancement of the new pre-kindergarten through grade 12 elementary education program. Further education engagement also focuses on implementing an ?International Strategic Plan? for the expansion of international regional centers.

?It seemed comprehensive. There was clearly a lot of time and effort put in by the departments, faculty and staff to ensure that the long range goals of the university are achieved,? said Tom Head, director of administration for Learning Technologies.