Brent Brown, a faculty member of the School of Public Programs, served for many years as ASU's chief lobbyist. The interview covered a number of topics including: working to get ASU to be viewed as a player at the Legislature and Board of Regents, planning for West Campus, Downtown Campus, and Polytechnic Campus, the arrival of the NFL and becoming a Research 1 University.

David Schwalm came to ASU in 1986 as Director of Composition and retired in 2009 as Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at the Polytechnic Campus. The interview has five main sections:
1, Pre-ASU Years where Dave discusses growing up in Fort Wayne, his education, and professional jobs.
2. Director of Composition addresses Dave’s increasing understanding of the university through his work on general studies and English articulation agreements.
3. ASU West covers Dave’s efforts to grow the student population and with Cathy Church to untangle the West and Tempe campus programs
4. ASU East has extensive coverage of how the campus was started and populated using an alliance with Chandler Gilbert Community College. Doing all this on a shoestring of a budget. Dave discusses why various faculty and programs were moved to the Polytechnic Campus.
5. Reflections allows Dave to reminisce about the “good old days” as well as the good new days.

Marigold Linton, Director of American Indian Programs at ASU Polytechnic campus, came to ASU with her husband Bob Barnhill in 1986 and stayed for twelve years. During her twelve years Marigold worked sequentially as Director of Educational Services in the College of Education and then the Mathematics Department before moving to the ASU Polytechnic campus.

Marigold is an enrolled member of the Morongo Band of American Indians and grew up on the Morongo Reservation in southern California. She received her undergraduate degree from UC Riverside and a PhD in experimental psychology from UCLA. While at ASU and later at the University of Kansas she was engaged in creating, sponsoring, and directing a wide variety of programs aimed at helping Native American Indians be successful in their educational efforts. She was an active member of SACNAS (see Note 2 below)

This thesis is broken into two parts: the research and the toolkit. The research portion examines the benefits posed by the Barrett Student Engagement team to the Barrett Polytechnic community. Literature on student retention and attrition, inside and outside of an honors curriculum, was reviewed to better understand likely factors contributing to an increase of attrition rates. The primary question in focus is: “What are the benefits student engagement poses for Barrett Poly students?” followed by the secondary question of: “How can the student engagement team best support Barrett Poly students?” Data from the past five semesters has been collected and analyzed to determine the general trends and the strengths and weaknesses within each of the six engagement pillars. As the position of Student Engagement Assistant requires a fair amount of training for short-term employment (can be held until graduation from ASU), it is beneficial to have a training manual in place for workers to reference. The project has been made available in a hybrid format to best accommodate future changes in procedures and resources. A summary of the additional materials has been included at the end of this report.