Dear colleagues,

In my conversations last week, interesting questions were raised on where our graduates are placed and the common job titles of our graduates. After all, the placement and careers of our alumni are the best indicators of NMSU’s contributions to the society. In one conversation last week surrounding our initiatives to improve student retention and graduation rates, “Steppingblocks” ended up providing answers to these questions. Steppingblocks is a cloud-based administrative set of dashboards named Graduate Insights that utilizes a sophisticated set of algorithms to generate reports related to NMSU graduates.

NMSU's graduates at all levels – bachelor's, master's, and doctoral – choose the state of New Mexico to live and work, followed by a smaller percentage of graduates in the surrounding states of Texas, Arizona, Colorado, and California.

Steppingblocks identifies the top employers of NMSU graduates at all levels as Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Las Cruces Public Schools, and Intel Corporation. The top job titles of NMSU's master's and doctoral graduates are professor, software engineer, owner, teacher, and principal. At the bachelor's level, the top job titles are owner, project manager, teacher, president, and registered nurse.

With over 30,000 working alumni in New Mexico, and with "owner" and "president" being the two of the top job titles, we are producing entrepreneurs and leaders who continue to contribute to the state's economic development. We are NMSU.

Lakshmi N. Reddi
Interim Provost
New Mexico State University