During my years at StudentVoice, I have been most fortunate to visit many, many colleges and universities across the United States and in Canada too. The University of Toronto was one of the first campuses that I ever visited to talk about StudentVoice. Almost exactly four years ago, I was driving the QEW (crazy 4-5 lane highway) – not only was I worried about being stuck in Toronto traffic and being inexcusably late to the meeting, I was also somewhat worried about the questions that might come up. Sure, I had used StudentVoice while I was at the U of Utah as their Coordinator of Assessment for the months prior, but this was different. What did I really know about how assessment could or should be coordinated and executed? Wasn’t every campus unique with varying challenges and issues? I knew at the time that Canada did not have accrediting bodies like in the states, but I knew little about what accountability measure were actually in place. Just when I was pretty sure that I wanted to bag the whole visit and head over to the Eaton Center instead to see how my American dollar would do during the summer sales, I arrived, found parking, found the building (if you ever go to U of T – make a point to visit their amazing Student Union and the Hart House too), and was greeted by a friendly group of administrators (Thanks Jim and Deanne!) that were actually somewhat excited about assessment. They seemed to know that U of T staff members were ready to take assessment to the next level and they just needed easy-to-use tools and resources to make it happen. I could answer their questions and more importantly, I could learn from some of their unique challenges. For example, assessing residence life is a little different when some of your residences are former downtown Toronto hotels. Since 2004, U of T has done over 100 assessment projects – from large scale studies on student technology usage, satisfaction with student services, and campus climate studies – to more focused, programmatic assessments of their leadership programs, orientation programs, and LGBTQ programs. Since that first visit to U of T, I have been incredibly lucky to go back to U of T a few additional times and to visit 70+ campuses. I continue to learn many important lessons from each visit (beyond just being sure that you know where to park on an unfamiliar campus!) that I will happily share in future blogs. One memorable lesson that stuck from my U of T visit is that sometimes you need to jump into assessment and not get bogged down with over planning or over assessing how you will assess. Few perfect assessments or assessment strategies exist at inception, rather assessment processes and projects evolve over time. U of T jumped into their assessment work and empowered staff to utilize the tools in meaningful ways – all the while staying focused on improving the student experience.