I hope that you’ve enjoyed the recent videos as I’ve been interviewing the new deans that we have on campus to help you become better acquainted with them and the changes that we’ve made to our organizational structure. But there’s one more new face on campus, one more new dean. Christian Bradley has been hired as the Dean of the School of Creative & Information Technologies.

Christian, welcome to OSUIT.

“Well Dr. Path, it’s great to be here.”

In your case, welcome to Oklahoma as well. You’ve come a long way to be here with us.

 “I have, I’ve traveled across the country.”

You’ve really a joined our leadership team at a very interesting time in our history as we are reducing the number of academic divisions from ten down to four. We are doing this to create some operational efficiencies and better reflect the size of our institution, but we are also hoping to create some opportunities for collaboration between different programs of study.

List the different programs of study that are now in this new school and how do you envision them working together in the future? 

“I think we have created that collaboration with the combination of these two programs into the School of Creative and Information Technologies. We offer five programs:

• 3D Modeling & Animation (AAS)
• Graphic Design Technology (AAS)
• Information Technologies (AAS)
• Information Technologies (AS)
• Information Technologies (BT)
  • Cybersecurity & Digital Forensics
  • Network Infrastructure
  • Software Development”

And how do you envision the programs working together in the future?

“Well, that’s the exciting thing, these two schools have a lot in common. The IT degrees use a lot of creative processes in what they do and obviously our creative school is used to that. Vice versa, our IT degree can use a lot of the things the creative school brings to their program. There’s been a lot of talk about cross-collaboration between the schools.”

That’s pretty exciting to consider what is going to happen in the future. But the folks watching the video really want to learn about you, so if you don’t mind, tell us about yourself and your professional background.

“Well, I started making video games a long time ago, and you can see the combination of these two degrees from the beginning of my career. I was the artist in the video game industry and obviously I was around a lot of programmers and I learned some scripting early on in my career, so these two schools combine a lot of the things that I, myself, did in my career and I hope to bring a lot of that to these two schools. 

I also owned my own company at one time and contacted with a lot of video game companies. I moved into teaching at a certain point in my career and that quickly transitioned into administration. I’ve done this type of job as a dean, as an institutional director, for the last 15 years.”

So, you’ve come all the way from California here to Oklahoma now to be with us at OSUIT, what sparked your interest in this position at OSUIT?

“I wanted to move to the Midwest, but I also saw this school as standing on its own and that it’s not your traditional CTE program, it’s associated with a state college, but it also had those two parts of my career that define me as an artist, the programming and the digital arts.”

Now Christian, you have a wonderful faculty and staff to be working with here and I know that you are getting to know them right now, but what are some things that you have learned about your team so far?

“My IT group is incredibly dedicated to student success and what they are doing, they are as involved as I could ever hope to be. Truly the best programming group that I have been around in my career. My creative group as you can see from our background here, is creative. They go back a long way in some cases and there are a lot of graduates out there that still know a lot of our students.” 

I love this, we’ve got a new guy with some new ideas, you’ve got to have a vision. Tell me about your goals and ideas that you have for this division.

“Just to name a few, we really want to expand out what we consider our regional influence. We certainly are tied into the Tulsa and Oklahoma City areas; the state of Oklahoma knows we are here. As I mentioned, our senior faculty have covered that over a long period of time. But I would like to see our influence grow out into the Midwest.”

Now, as you’re starting your new job here, what are you looking forward to the most?

“There’s just so much that can be done. There are areas within web development, simulation and game design. There are a lot of areas that these two degrees would own within our campus. Our teachers seem excited about it, we’re going to look into seeing if those markets are existing, but that’s an area that I just am very excited about. It’s something that I have done in my career, my whole career, but I have never had this much upside.”

If there was one thing that you would like for people all across campus to know about you, what would it be?

“I think as a dean I am not somebody who likes to sit in my office. I am very hands on, I want to be involved in the classes and most of all I want to be involved in the community. Being in a new community, that may take me a while but I want everyone to know that they are more than welcome to invite me to their events and especially our employers and our stakeholders in the community, I do want to get to know them.”

Well Christian, thank you again for joining me here today and welcome aboard.

That’s it for now, but be watching where we go next time, when we take a deeper look inside OSUIT.