I am pleased to announce that Midwestern University won three First Place awards in the recent Excellence in Communications Awards of the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine (AACOM). The winning entries were for Best Community Service Project, Best Alumni Magazine, and Best Web Site.

The Community Service Project Award was given for the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine's partnership with the Daniel Hale Williams Prepatory School of Medicine in Chicago. This high school offers an opportunity for inner-city Chicago students to gain specialized training for careers in health care and medicine. CCOM is the primary medical school partner for this high school. CCOM students provide mentoring and special programs for the high school students, who have visited our campus to learn more about careers as physicians or health providers. CCOM Dean Dr. Karen Nichols has been instrumental in leading MWU's involvement with this special educational project, and she along with the CCOM student volunteers deserve credit for this Best Community Service Project award.

The issue that was submitted for the Alumni Magazine award focused on faculty research (see blog from January 31 on "Days of Discovery"). This magazine combined great stories and projects being conducted by our faculty with interesting writing and compelling graphic design. Compliments are due to the publications team of Dana Fay, Marcia Faye, Karen Mattox, and Ellen Rowe for this well-deserved recognition.

Finally, we were pleased that our MWU web site has won its third consecutive AACOM Best Web Site Award. While we are in the process of redesigning our site, we feel that it has many wonderful features for prospective students. We have tried to focus the home page navigation so interested students can easily access their degree program of interest. Over the past few years, we have updated the virtual tour, added this blog site, enhanced the capabilities of InteractNow for accepted students, and most recently added a left-hand link to "Fact Sheets/Outcomes" for all of our programs. These new fact sheets provide some meaningful outcomes measures of interest to prospective applicants (eg, board score pass rates, employment data, retention and graduation rates, etc). We are working on even more improvements over the next year or two to best represent MWU and to better serve our future and current students. Congratulations to Abena Patton for her consistent and creative efforts in managing our web site.

We are very proud of these awards and pleased that AACOM has recognized the creative and meaningful work of our marketing and communications team. These awards are appreciated and also give us ongoing motivation to continuously improve and innovate for the future.