Author: Caelin Bragg

2022 electronic W-2s are now available in the State of Kansas Employee Self-Service Portal (ESS) for State of Kansas employees.

Employees are encouraged to consent to receive W-2s electronically. Instructions for completing the consent are detailed by clicking this link.

If you experience issues when trying to complete your W-2 consent, try a different web browser such as Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.

For assistance with the State of Kansas Employee Self-Service Portal passwords, please call the State of Kansas Help Desk at 785-296-1900 or 866-999-3001.

For employees receiving a printed W-2, the form will be printed and mailed by the end of January 2023. 

The 2023 Craig W. Barton Speaker Series event with Cody Keenan, former director of speechwriting for President Barack Obama, is no longer available to view. Thanks to all Shockers for helping welcome Keenan to Wichita State and making the event a success.

We look forward to you joining us for the 2024 Craig W. Barton Speaker Series event.

The honorees for the 2023 University Faculty Awards will be recognized at 2 p.m. on May 5 at the Frank A. Boettger Auditorium in Woolsey Hall.

The awards recognize excellence in teaching, research and creative activities. RSVP on the University Faculty Awards homepage.

There 2023 University Faculty Award honorees: 

• Excellence in Teaching
  • David Long
    • Department of Biomedical Engineering.
• Leadership in the Advancement in Teaching Award
  • Amy Drassen Ham
    • Department of Public Health Sciences.
• Young Faculty Scholar
  • Mythili Menon
    • Department of English.
• Academy for Effective Teaching
  • John Hammond
    • Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
  • Perlekar Tamtam
    • Department of Engineering Technology.
• Excellence in Research
  • Nils Hakansson
    • Department of Biomedical Engineering.
• Excellence Award for Community Research
  • Lisa Parcell
    • Elliott School of Communication.
• Faculty Risk Taker
  • Mehmet Bayram Yildirim
    • Department of Industrial, Systems and Manufacturing Engineering.
• Young Faculty Risk Taker
  • Hongsheng He
    • School of Computing.
  • Aubrey Neihaus
    • School of Education.
• Excellence in Online Teaching
  • JaeHwan Byun
    • School of Education.

The Excellence in Creative Activity Award and the Excellence in Accessibility Award will not be presented in fall 2023. 

Zach Gearhart, chief of staff, will update faculty and staff on legislative issues raised related to Wichita State from the Kansas state government.

The meeting is open to all faculty and staff every other Friday in the Morrison Hall board room. The next meeting is scheduled for 9 a.m. Friday, April 7.

Learn more about Tais Solis and her study abroad experience in Spain at the University of Deusto during the fall 2022 semester. Tais shares how she has benefited from her study abroad program.

The upcoming Shocker baseball series versus the University of Houston starts Thursday, April 6 in Eck Stadium.

Here is the schedule of games:

• 6 p.m. Thursday, April 6.
• 6 p.m. Friday, April 7.
• Noon Saturday, April 8.

Students receive admission to all Shocker Athletics home games with a Shocker ID at no additional charge, and faculty and staff receive admission to Friday baseball home games at no additional charge.

Wichita State senior Alyssa Pfeifer took an elective film class in high school as a break from academics she considered more stressful. It didn’t take long for film to become her passion. She made short films, entered competitions, and experimented with cameras and lighting on music videos.

Now at WSU’s Shocker Studios, students like Pfeifer have even more opportunities to hone their skills with a state-of-the-art, 700-square-foot editing suite for their video projects. The studio features theater lighting and seating, a 4K digital cinema compliant projector and a 200-inch screen. Students work on PCs and Mac Studios. It is equipped with DaVinci Resolve Color Panels, and keyboards are hot-keyed for Adobe Premiere Pro and/or DaVinci Resolve.

One of the methods that Wichita State students use to connect to BeoShock High Performance Computing (HPC), a powerful computing system designed to process large amounts of data or complex simulations, is by using a web browser, and Open OnDemand is the software engine that makes this possible. In April 2020, just as BeoShock HPC was getting off the ground and attracting its first users, WSU system administrators set up Open OnDemand.

During a recent talk given by the developers of Open OnDemand, Dr. Terrance Figy, associate professor in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics, praised them for putting together a tool that came in a the right time during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the reasons Figy worked hard on moving BeoShock HPC forward, with help from the system administrators from Kanas State University and WSU’s Information Technology Services, was to ensure students still had access to it at home, especially when the data analytics degree programs were getting started.

The Mortar Board Senior Honor Society’s philanthropy is “Reading is Leading,” and it encourages children to find joy in reading and use it as a skill. Its main event to promote it is a campus book drive.

This semester, it is having another book drive from Monday, April 3 to Thursday, April 14. The campus community can donate new or slightly used books at the Heskett Center, Shocker Hall, Shocker Dining Hall, Rhatigan Student Center, Ahlberg Hall or the Ablah Library. It is also hosting a competition for the book drive: The WSU student organization that donates the most books will receive $100 towards the group’s budget or philanthropy of choice. Officers or advisors of a WSU student organization that would like to register for the competition can contact Rachel Smith at: wsumortarboardsecretary@gmail.com. Emails should include the sender’s name, their position in the organization and the name of the organization.

Last semester, 282 books were donated by the WSU community to Minneha Elementary, and Mortar Board and Minneha are extremely grateful for the successful turn out.

Wichita State is holding a blood drive from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Wednesday, April 12 and Thursday, April 13 in the Heskett Center. All donors will receive a free Peanuts T-shirt featuring Snoopy.

Encourage friends, family and the community to also make at appointment today on the American Red Cross website with the sponsor code “Wichita State” or call 1-800-733-2767.