Our guests after the midterm exam are:
Melissa Rathburn – TRAC (Advising) - http://www.ugs.usf.edu
CAS Standards: Academic Advising Programs, Learning Assistance Programs
I will post their blog answers as soon as I have them! Please check back before class.
Below are Dr. Maher's responses to the guiding questions.
ReplyDelete1.) Describe your career path, how you started and how you got to your current position.
It is common in College Learning Support that folks come into the field from many avenues. I am an educator by background: BA in Special Ed., MA in Learning Disabilities; Post Masters Certification in School Administration; and Ph.D. in Adult Education. I have been a classroom teacher, worked in state Human Services with disabled adults, Director of a non-profit organization serving children with autism and their families, and finally college learning support as director here at USF. My interest and passion has always centered on the learning process. My career changes each came about for different reasons, either opportunity or need based.
2.) Explain the particular challenges of your work. What are the special rewards?
Budget and resources are the overwhelming challenges right now. The rewards are huge: Our center is for students and staffed primarily by students, so we interact with hundreds of students each day. Rewards include being a part of our tutors’ development and watching them progress and move on. Last year 2 went on to Medical School, 1 went to UC Berkley for Grad school, etc. Also, our reception staff are all FWS student employees. It is very rewarding to provide the opportunity for them to work professionally while supporting their financial situation. And of course there are the many students who come in looking worried and stressed who leave smiling and chatting about how much the tutor helped. We have many students who attribute the shift from failing to passing to their tutoring help.
3.) Are there any problems you've faced that you would now handle differently? Can you describe one of them.
-No response-
4.) What advice would you give to a student preparing for student affairs work?
At USF our department is in Academic Affairs, not student affairs. This is becoming increasingly more the “norm” nationwide as our services are linked directly to academics. But overall I would suggest that in any position on any campus it is critical to make connections with any department that might be a potential collaborator. The issue of independent silos in higher education can be a major roadblock for the development of effective services. Be a bridge-builder!
Melissa Rathburn's responses...#1 first
ReplyDelete1.) Describe your career path, how you started and how you got to your current position.
I was originally a Business (Marketing) major in my undergrad at USF. I didn’t realize until my senior year that this was not a good fit for me. Had I done more research when selecting my major, I would have found out that Advertising was a better match for my interests. Ironically, I worked in a career center as a student assistant until my junior year, so I had easy access to the information, but I just didn’t take advantage of it. Whenever I took a career assessment, one of the suggested fields would always come up as Education, but in my limited scope I only thought about K-12 and I knew I did NOT want to do that! When I graduated with my bachelor’s degree and it came time to look for a job, I knew I didn’t want to look for anything in the Marketing field, so I thought about what I had done so far in my short career and what I liked best. I realized that I enjoyed my experience as a student assistant in the higher education setting, so I just had to figure out what specifically I wanted to do. I took a full-time position as a staff assistant in the Testing Center at USF and worked there for about a year and a half before I decided that academic advising sounded like a good fit for my skills and personality. Since most positions required a master’s degree, I enrolled in the CSA program and began my coursework. A couple of months into the program, I landed a job as an academic advisor at Hillsborough Community College and that became my full-time assistantship for the remainder of my time in the CSA program. I graduated in May 2006 and in February 2007, I was hired as an academic advisor in the Transitional Advising Center at USF. In July 2008, I took on the responsibility of managing the University Experience course in addition to my advising duties. In addition, this summer I was named as the Director for Summer Stampede, which is a summer bridge program for academically and/or economically disadvantaged students. I also teach the University Experience course online each semester. I don’t do as much advising these days because my other roles demand more of my time, but I think I maintain a good balance of student contact and administrative work.
Questions 2 and 3 from Melissa Rathburn
ReplyDelete2.) Explain the particular challenges of your work. What are the special rewards?
I think the biggest challenge I face is balancing my time and my priorities. I tend to be a workaholic and sometimes it’s tough to decide when to call it a night because I hate leaving things unfinished. I work a lot of 10 and even 12 hour days, especially in the summer when we’re busiest. However, too much of this can lead to burnout and then I don’t do my job as well. I’m essentially juggling three full-time roles (advising, UE, and Summer Stampede), so I have to prioritize my tasks and projects to make sure everything gets done while still allowing myself personal time to relax in the evenings and on weekends.
The greatest reward in my position is that I get a unique perspective on the administrator’s role for very different functions. In my role as Director of Summer Stampede, I supervise two academic advisors, so I’ve learned a lot about supervising full-time professionals, delegating projects, and building a program that’s only in its second year. In my role as the Program Manager for University Experience, I’ve learned course development, custom textbook design and publishing, student recruitment and marketing, and how to maintain a standard curriculum across 80 sections of the course while still allowing instructors to have academic freedom.
3.) Are there any problems you've faced that you would now handle differently? Can you describe one of them?
I think the only situations in which I have any regrets are the ones where I do not assert myself as much as I should. Earlier this year I had an incident where a student was being disruptive in our office, to the point of being verbally abusive. I regret not speaking up sooner to put a stop to the behavior before the situation escalated to the point that it did.
Question 4 from Melissa Rathburn:
ReplyDelete4.) What advice would you give to a student preparing for student affairs work?
The field of student affairs is like a small town – everyone knows each other. Even if you’re applying for a job at another institution halfway across the country, there’s a good chance that someone there knows someone in your network (probably Dr. Miller!). You can’t afford to burn any bridges in this field because word travels and it could hurt your chances for a job later on. So much of what we do involves working collaboratively with other individuals and other departments that you should always try to maintain positive relationships no matter what happens. Always try to be consistent in everything you do, because you never know when someone is watching you or who that might be. I certainly never thought when I was a CSA student that I would work for Dr. Conway someday, so I’m very glad that I never made any missteps in her classroom that would have given her a bad memory of me when it came time to hire. If nothing else, remember that your professors are going to be your references in the not-so-distant future, so make sure they have a good impression of you!