Spotlight On: Silviana Falcon, Associate Provost, Florida Southern College

December 2025 — As associate provost at Florida Southern College, Silviana Falcon is focused on tightening the connection between the classroom and the regional economy. In a role created to bridge academics and industry, she is building a more intentional “concierge” pipeline that aligns students, internships, and employer needs across disciplines. “We are laser-focused on making sure our curriculum responds to the fast-changing needs of the businesses around us,” Falcon told Invest:.

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How has your role as associate provost shaped Florida Southern’s strategic direction?

I stepped into this role about a year ago, after initially balancing it with my responsibilities as a business faculty member. The college made a deliberate decision that we needed a point person who could truly be the bridge between the academic side and our partners in the business community. In the past, individual deans maintained strong relationships with companies, but we did not have someone in the provost’s office charged with coordinating those relationships across all schools. My mandate is to make sure our business partners see Florida Southern as an academic community of experts, with faculty who understand theory and practice and students who approach problems with fresh perspectives.

We have always had opportunities to connect companies with our students and faculty, but not in a systematic, organized and strategic way. Now my work is to build that structure, collaborate with companies across disciplines, and ensure that those relationships help shape where we place students and how we design educational programs for the workforce.

How are you building a more intentional internship and workforce pipeline for employers and students?

Before we put this new model in place, students often did what many of us did in college: apply to dozens of internships or jobs and then accept whichever opportunity responded first. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it does not always create the best alignment between the student’s goals, the company’s values and the specific role. From the employer’s perspective, that can be a poor investment of time, energy and dollars if the intern does not stay.

What I am doing now is getting ahead of that curve and becoming more intentional about who we place and where we place them. Because Florida Southern is a smaller institution, I have the opportunity to really know our students and understand what they are looking for. When a company calls and describes the type of student and background they need, I can look across that pool of students and make a thoughtful match. The goal is that the student will stay with the company that invested in training them, because many employers are not just “giving back” through internships, they want to grow their workforce.

Our concierge approach is designed to make those relationships more meaningful and productive for both sides.

How is national recognition in rankings translating into competitiveness, value, and outcomes for students?

We have worked very hard not only to earn recognition from organizations such as The Princeton Review and U.S. News & World Report, but also to remain in those top-ranking categories over time. One that I am particularly proud of is being ranked No. 24 in Best Value Schools in the Southeast. College can be almost prohibitive in terms of cost for many families, so value matters.

From my perspective as a faculty member, if students are paying a significant amount of money, we need to be able to answer the question: at the end of four years, are you going to be employable and are we giving you value for that investment? For us, value is not just academic; it is about who you become as a person. We want to help students grow as good humans who are kind, who can question ideas in ways that keep conversation going, and who can agree to disagree amicably. That kind of mindset is essential for a country that wants to evolve through critical thinking and constructive debate.

Our outcomes data reflect that approach. Our numbers indicate that about 99% of graduates are either employed, enrolled in graduate school or have an internship lined up. That means most students are not leaving campus wondering what comes next. One factor behind that success is our advising model. Faculty members, not just professional advisors, serve as academic advisors. When the person guiding you academically is also the person who sees you think, respond and grow in the classroom, they can recognize potential you may not yet see in yourself.

That allows us to help students navigate the sea of opportunities so that, by the time they graduate, they have a concrete next step rather than sitting at home trying to figure out what to do.

What trends in experiential learning, AI, and applied research are most shaping your approach today?

We are laser-focused on making sure our curriculum responds to the fast-changing needs of the businesses around us. There are core elements that all students need, but increasingly they must be able to prompt AI, work with it and understand more than one system so they can be true AI natives. To do that well, we listen closely to our business partners and adapt our curriculum so that our graduates have the skills employers are asking for.

A key piece is requiring that students complete at least one internship with a business or organization. That gives them a real-world taste of what it is like to work in that environment and apply what they are learning in class. Our location along the I-4 corridor between Tampa and Orlando is a major advantage. Many companies, including Home Depot, Ace Hardware and Amazon, have large distribution or manufacturing centers in the Lakeland area. We have adapted our curriculum so students learn tools such as Lean Six Sigma, observational methods and time-motion studies.

When we work with these companies, we often find that they benchmark critical processes but have not validated those benchmarks in years. They may believe a process takes five hours from start to finish and base their budgeting and hiring on that number, but no one has recently sat down to observe and time every step. They often lack the internal capacity to do that work, even though everything else depends on accurate data. We prepare our students to conduct those time studies, validate standards and see how even seemingly lower-level observational tasks are foundational to broader business decisions.

That is one way we have been able to respond academically to the needs of local employers while giving students a clear understanding of how their skills create value.

How are you partnering with employers to design customized learning programs that go beyond traditional executive education?

A second component of my role is developing academic programming directly for businesses. Many institutions, from Harvard to Duke, offer executive education, and they do it very well. We wanted to build something rooted in Florida Southern’s own strengths, developed and delivered by our faculty, and tailored specifically to the companies we serve. That means moving away from canned leadership or executive programs that might be impressive but are not always what an organization truly needs.

My approach is to spend a lot of time listening and understanding where a company’s pressure points are. Sometimes an employer will tell me, “I need A,” and after digging into their situation, I may come back and say, “You really do not need A; you need C.” They can buy A anywhere, but it will not solve their underlying issue. When we have those conversations, and when businesses are open to that kind of honest feedback, we are able to create programming that meets them where they are. The result is customized academic content that addresses their real challenges, delivered by faculty who know the material deeply and can connect it to the local context.

That, in turn, strengthens our relationships with employers and reinforces Florida Southern’s role as a partner in building the regional workforce.

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