Welcome to SquaredPeg, where 3 distinct voices of higher education professionals will be weaving together to bring you posts on many different areas. As for the name, it seems like every day when we come in to work we (you) are all trying to accomplish the same goal: put the square(d) peg into the round hole. You smash it, you get resistance. You try to remold it, it still won’t go. But somehow, someway, you figure out your problem, only to restart the process.

Brad J Ward has been working in the Higher Education setting for 5 years, starting as a student assistant in the Marketing Department at the University of Illinois at Springfield. As a student in 2003, he created a personal website with photos, forums, and videos for both current and prospective students, which was later used as a primary recruitment tool by the University. The site averaged nearly 29,000 page views per month over its 2 year span. After graduation, he served as the Marketing and Recruitment Specialist at UIS for 1 ½ years. He has now been at Butler University since June 2007, serving as the Electronic Communication Coordinator in the Office of Admission. His work is heavily focused in social media / social networking, web content, email, and usability testing. He oversees the Butler Bloggers and the BUForums community and is the co-creator of http://www.bloghighed.org, a site that aggregates many popular higher education blogs. You can contact him at brad(at)squaredpeg(dot)com or on any of the sites listed here with questions or comments!

Jesse has been in Higher Ed for 5 years, first as an admission counselor, then moving into web development, and now into his current position as Information Systems Coordinator. He is the Butler University recruitment SIS administrator (Recruitment Plus/Peoplesoft). He also is the admission project manager for different web applications and reporting projects. You can contact him at jesse(at)squaredpeg(dot)com with any questions or comments!

Chris has been in Higher Ed going on five years now, and has been at Butler since graduating in 2003. While a student here, he was the Student Government Association President and so was fortunate to learn many ins and outs about Butler and higher education, in general. Upon graduation, Chris began his employment here as an admission counselor, and is now the Senior Assistant Director of Admission, partially overseeing the seven other counselors. In addition to staff oversight, a big part of his responsibilities is to serve as the main liaison between the admission office (enrollment management) and the rest of campus. Thus, he is involved in many strategic decisions, especially on the marketing of Butler, but also other business decisions. He coordinates most admission-related activities and communication strategies with the five academic colleges and works extensively with the Deans of each college as well as other administration officials . His work on both the counselor side and the administrative side have given him a wide variety of experiences and perspectives. Professionally, Chris is a member of the American Marketing Association, the National Association for College Admission Counselors (NACAC) and IACAC.

Join us as we leave our ramblings and thoughts here, and feel free to comment on what you think. Welcome to SquaredPeg.

*Note - Each post is the view of each author, and do not necessarily reflect on the views of past and present employers.