Transcript
Speaker: Happy New Year to the Swakuho Nation.
Speaker: With Executive Board approval of the direction put forth in the first four demo episodes, this podcast is now officially, quote, a thing.
Speaker: For those of you who have been listening since the beginning, thanks for your support.
Speaker: For those of you new to the podcast, I welcome you and hope you take Deckard Cain's sage advice and stay a while and listen.
Speaker: A couple quick housekeeping items before we begin today.
Speaker: You may have noticed we have a new podcast logo this month.
Speaker: The new logo was designed by Ashley Beckman from the University of Texas at Dallas.
Speaker: I do feel obligated to say that her design and artistry capabilities far exceed the logo she made, but I specifically asked her to make it simple, less than perfect, and a little rough around the edges because I felt that more accurately captured the charm of the show in these early days.
Speaker: Please check out some of our other photography work linked in the show notes.
Speaker: It's also been fun to hear from listeners.
Speaker: Someone asked me if they knew what Katie Pelton's emergency alarm was that interrupted episode four.
Speaker: I went back to the unedited rough tracks and confirmed it was an Amber Alert and not some maintenance crisis.
Speaker: But wouldn't that have been so meta had it been a crisis that could have been averted due to preventative maintenance?
Speaker: I also want to give a shout out to one of my oldest friends, Craig Van Blercom, who works in the Big Apple, but not in campus housing.
Speaker: He messaged me saying, quote, I've listened to all four episodes and I still don't know what Swakuho is.
Speaker: So to demonstrate how I consider and respond to listener feedback, Craig, Swakuho is the Southwest Association for College and University Housing Officers, the Regional Professional Association for Housing Peeps in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Speaker: The real lesson here, though, is if Craig in New York City with zero housing experience has listened to every episode while not having a clue about what Swakuho is, then I really see no good reason why housing folks in our region aren't listening yet.
Speaker: So make sure to encourage your colleagues to listen to the podcast.
Speaker: That's the price of admission here.
Speaker: I love hearing from listeners, so feel free to drop me a line at swakuhopodcast at gmail.com and ask anything you want, related or not, or just send some critical feedback.
Speaker: You never know, you may get a shout out on the podcast like Craig, but if you send some hate mail, it just might be graded on air.
Speaker: Moving on, today we're talking to another Swakuho past president and one of my all-time favorite housing people, Tanya Massey.
Speaker: Tanya has worked at Oklahoma State University for the past 16 years in various roles.
Speaker: Her Swakuho volunteerism includes serving as time and place chair, secretary, president, and annual conference host committee chair.
Speaker: She enjoys the relationships and family feel of the Swakuho region.
Speaker: Tanya has also served on the Akuho-I programming committee and more recently made the somewhat sketchy decision to apply for her local school board during the pandemic.
Speaker: She is a mother of three, an avid fan of college football, and a survivor of her spouse's successful completion of a PhD program.
Speaker: She also loves babies, dogs, and Christmas trees, of which she has 11.
Speaker: Tanya, welcome to the show.
Speaker: Well, thank you, JC.
Speaker: I'm excited to be here.
Speaker: I'm so glad to hear that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So tell me, since you mentioned the prior podcast, did you ever get that leak fixed above your kitchen sink?
Speaker: You know, I'm glad you asked.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Actually, I did not personally figure out what it was.
Speaker: My lovely wife actually figured out that it was one of those damp rid moisture things in the closet upstairs that had broken.
Speaker: It pulls moisture out of the air and it broke and was leaking down in the closet through apparently a crack in the
Speaker: floor that was then running along the soffit.
Speaker: So thanks to my wife, we figured it out.
Speaker: It was not some major maintenance plumbing problem like I was assuming.
Speaker: But I guess that's the lesson here is that sometimes in maintenance, you solve one problem only to reveal other problems because now I've got a pathway for pests and probably some air control problems that I'll have to deal with later, but no plumbing.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Well, you know, that's the joy of homeownership, right?
Speaker: Isn't that the truth?
Speaker: Always something needing done somewhere.
Speaker: So first things first, Tanya, you were a residence life coordinator at Kansas State when I was an RA there.
Speaker: I never worked for you directly, but I heard complaints that your on-campus apartment often smelled like pickled eggs.
Speaker: That is unfortunately accurate.
Speaker: And while you never directly worked for me, I hold you personally responsible for the pickled eggs through your connection with my husband and the desire to learn how to make pickled eggs from your favorite adult downtown spot.
Speaker: I think, you know, when I came home and opened the fridge that first time and there was a huge jar of pickled eggs in there, I thought I'm going to kill somebody and I don't know who.
Speaker: And yet Josh and I are still here.
Speaker: So glad you did not act upon that.
Speaker: But I guess I forgot that you were the one that was complaining about it, not other people.
Speaker: No, I think my staff seemed to enjoy them.
Speaker: And obviously even Josh enjoyed them.
Speaker: But the rule after that was that all pickled eggs must be kept in a fridge away from a private property that I have any sort of ownership for.
Speaker: I think that's a fair outcome.
Speaker: And they certainly weren't as good as the Aggie Lounge provided, but we did our best.
Speaker: It's a process, I think.
Speaker: And I, you know, one of the things that I appreciate about you, JC, is you always have the most interesting hobbies.
Speaker: You candle making, pasta, you know, learning how to hang sheetrock.
Speaker: But I don't know that I would ever brag on being the best pickled egg maker out there.
Speaker: So that's one you can skip.
Speaker: Well, I think that's a lesson for all our listeners is it's good to try things, even though we're not going to be successful in all of them.
Speaker: And that's what I've learned that, you know, I failed as much as I've succeeded in life.
Speaker: So Tanya, housing staff across the region are gearing up for the start of the spring semester and moving residents back in from the break.
Speaker: What's your most memorable move-in experience?
Speaker: Oh, probably two that I would outline.
Speaker: One of them was at Kansas State and we had
Speaker: tornado warnings happening right in the middle of move-in.
Speaker: And so the parking lot was full of cars and it's how do you get everyone in?
Speaker: And there's a very interesting phenomenon, I think, in that region of the country that you could kind of tell where people were from by what they did when the sirens would go off and those type of things.
Speaker: And there was definitely a population that all went to the basement and were quiet and orderly.
Speaker: And then there was a larger population that all ran to their cars.
Speaker: because they were going to chase it.
Speaker: And so not being of the region, I think that was very interesting for me to watch how, knowing they were adults and they could do what they want, but the mom in me was like, that's not safe.
Speaker: What are you doing?
Speaker: But that was an interesting one.
Speaker: I also think watching during COVID move in was very interesting.
Speaker: And how do you...
Speaker: structure the fun and joy of the college experience where you don't want to touch anybody, you don't want to touch their stuff, you don't want to get close, and you have to kind of maintain what your safety protocols are in the midst of this very emotional time for families.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: The COVID one of managing expectations and everyone's boundaries, that certainly threw a wrench in things as well.
Speaker: At one point in your career, a big part of your job was the human resources component.
Speaker: Why is human resources so important to be able to do well?
Speaker: Well, for me, I stepped into that role for a couple of different reasons.
Speaker: One, I had had a very traditional residence education background on the res life side, but I had worked a lot with our committees for hiring and recruiting of student staff and our graduate staff, as well as the training functions for both of those levels.
Speaker: And we were doing some reorganizing as a department, and we were going to put our committees with our human resources and our payroll and budgeting.
Speaker: And so knowing that those were passion areas of mine was a bit of a nudge to kind of think about, do I want to look at this other role?
Speaker: And the two things that I think most ResLife people don't have enough knowledge of when they want to move up is budget process and facilities process.
Speaker: And I had been really lucky to be part of a construction project at Kansas State for a major renovation of the building that I ever saw.
Speaker: And so knowing that I wanted to do more budget work, the human resources role was a really good opportunity to understand the payroll budgets and what compensation and benefits look like.
Speaker: The other thing that was really interesting to me is how we develop our staff and our teams leads the way on how our students are treated on our campus.
Speaker: And so I
Speaker: I wanted to have a role in really thinking about how we develop our graduate assistantship and what those graduate assistantships are doing on a day-to-day basis in the buildings.
Speaker: And so I took that role along, kept it for about five years, and then transitioned back into more of a hall management, overseeing multiple halls on our campus.
Speaker: But it taught me a lot about budgets.
Speaker: It taught me a lot about internal processes.
Speaker: And about onboarding software, we onboarded Banner as a payroll system while I was in that role across the university.
Speaker: And if you've never lived through one of those major onboardings, they're not always fun, but they teach you a lot.
Speaker: Those transitions could be, you could feel the problems from those for a long time.
Speaker: Yes, absolutely.
Speaker: So you've probably interviewed and reviewed a ton of resumes in your day and cover letters.
Speaker: What's your biggest irritant on a resume or cover letter?
Speaker: You know, I think for me, one, not proofreading your cover letter and having a glaring error like another school listed.
Speaker: I've done that a number of times.
Speaker: But I also think your cover letter is your chance to tell your story.
Speaker: And I was talking to a friend the other day of, you know, I haven't put together a cover letter in a long time.
Speaker: I haven't felt the need to.
Speaker: And so even sitting down to write one, as we talk to our grad students about going into the job search next year, sitting down to even start the cover letter is a challenge.
Speaker: But that's a chance to really highlight some things from your resume and talk about not only what you accomplished in there, but where you want to go moving forward.
Speaker: So it's a really good snapshot of what you see is your story.
Speaker: That is something that I don't know that everyone in student affairs does really well is tell our story.
Speaker: And so how do we figure out how to share what we are passionate about with where we want to go and what we've accomplished along the way as part of that application material?
Speaker: What do you think about a bulleted cover letter, like just a cover letter where they're listed bullets?
Speaker: You know, I think that that's interesting because I've seen more of those come out in the past couple of years.
Speaker: And really, I think it depends on what type of role you're looking at and where those bullets kind of land in the grand scheme of things.
Speaker: I think if you're talking about these are my major accomplishments during this role, then it could very well fit into a cover letter.
Speaker: I love the bulleted cover letter.
Speaker: And it took me a lot.
Speaker: I'm a very structured, like I don't like change on those things, but like took me a long time.
Speaker: And it's like,
Speaker: I'll never go back because I feel like I can maximize the content instead of like introducing narrative paragraphs about whatever is going on.
Speaker: It's like, here's all the things I've done and how they're relevant.
Speaker: Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think that that's the key point of it is, you know, your cover letter has to talk about what you've accomplished and how it fits into what you're looking for.
Speaker: Oh, definitely.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: In candidate interviews, are you one of those interviewers who likes to ask follow-up questions or do you stick to the script?
Speaker: Well, I think it depends on what part of the interview it's at.
Speaker: I think, you know, when you're really evaluating candidates, you have to make sure that you're removing your bias and that you're comparing every candidate to an accurate assessment of what the questions are that are asked.
Speaker: And so I tend to stick to the script.
Speaker: where we're looking at this is the question and this is how I'm ranking their answer.
Speaker: But I do think I really like to use those conversations after the interview is over to find out more about maybe the why some of their decision making or if they said something that kind of struck me personally as interesting to learn a little bit more about who they are as a candidate.
Speaker: But I think when you're evaluating those candidates, you need to make sure that your metrics are uniform across the board.
Speaker: just to really kind of remove some of that bias.
Speaker: I like the follow-up moments.
Speaker: And at my last job in the wrap-up sessions, we'd always offer like a do-over and we'd preface it by, we know these days are long and anxiety is like, are there anything upon reflection, you're like, I just didn't nail that question.
Speaker: And that was always kind of a nice little candid moment of like, yeah, I was meeting with so-and-so and I really felt like,
Speaker: my answer didn't come across or whatever.
Speaker: And so there are contexts and time and place.
Speaker: I agree with you.
Speaker: You've mentioned in those follow-up questions, is there anything on a resume that if you see it, you will always ask about it in those like follow-up moments?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I really like to know how people contribute to the profession, both on their campus and away from their campus.
Speaker: And so I
Speaker: If they're part of an association, if they have served on a board or through regional leadership, I like to know a little bit more about why.
Speaker: Like, what was their experience in doing that?
Speaker: Why did they choose to do that?
Speaker: Would they do it again?
Speaker: But I also like to plug a little bit about how do they balance that workload of association work with their campus work?
Speaker: And, you know, I think that's a fine line.
Speaker: We want to advance the profession, but we can't do it at the risk of our students on our campus.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: We'll definitely loop back around to that.
Speaker: What goes on in your head when interviewing someone for their first full-time job and they say, my long-term goal is to be a university president?
Speaker: There's not enough presidents out there for everyone I've heard that answer from.
Speaker: You know, I think I have definitely interviewed some graduate candidates that I can see they're going to get there.
Speaker: You can see that they have a drive and a determination and a path.
Speaker: But I don't know that student affairs is traditionally the way to get to that university president role.
Speaker: I think, you know, much like when we talk about directors, it used to be that that PhD was kind of the end goal and that gave you the next stepping stone.
Speaker: But I think that there are sometimes better skill sets to get you where you really want to be.
Speaker: Budget experience.
Speaker: I think fundraising for university presidents is essential right now because as we see state legislators cut back on higher education, that fundraising is going to be paramount to how they succeed moving forward.
Speaker: And so sometimes I think some of those roles are
Speaker: are more important than a PhD.
Speaker: Not to say that a PhD is not valid, but I also think sometimes the research components and the knowledge in some of those areas may be a better launchpad than the student services.
Speaker: Not that one is more valuable to the other, but I think when you think about the university structure, they play a part that is probably valued more from a board of regents.
Speaker: That's kind of a weird question.
Speaker: It's one that I love.
Speaker: It's like an abstract idea I think about because whenever I hear it, and maybe this is just my thing, but whenever I hear it, I just immediately have so many thoughts in my head.
Speaker: And from a practical standpoint, I'm like, okay, there's a pathway to get there, probably through a VP job.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You don't even know if you're going to like being a director yet.
Speaker: And so I think sometimes having, I'm all supportive of having long-term goals, but anytime someone asks me in an interview, it's like, what's your five to 10 year goals?
Speaker: I really just want to find a job I enjoy and I can do well in.
Speaker: And as I grow and develop in that, we'll see what happens after that.
Speaker: But what if I hated being a vice president of student affairs?
Speaker: Do I really think then I would enjoy being a president?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I think when I think about what universities, universities are many corporations and they're multifaceted and the student services skill set can do lots of amazing things in that area.
Speaker: But the budgeting, the fundraising foundation side of things, the public perception, being able to handle kind of that
Speaker: just how to spend things appropriately for the public.
Speaker: Those are not always skill sets that student affairs has the market on.
Speaker: Those tend to fall in other areas.
Speaker: And, you know, I don't know that I think student affairs professionals are always great politicians because they're genuine.
Speaker: And that doesn't always come across well when you're trying to spend things for public perceptions.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: And campus politics is, I did a, I actually did a session on departmental politics with Swakuho U this past year.
Speaker: And it's one of those things that I think everybody experiences, or at least they think they are to some degree.
Speaker: I've never really seen any training sessions or graduate programs on campus politics or whatever, but, and it's maybe an unfortunate thing you just learn by doing and you learn from failing at it from time to time.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think that's valid.
Speaker: I think my mindset is we do StrengthsQuest with our staff on a pretty regular basis.
Speaker: Every couple of years, we'll do it again.
Speaker: And this year, one of our staff convinced me to go ahead and buy the whole pack, you know, not just the five that we get as part of our training, but go ahead and invest in knowing what every one of my strengths are.
Speaker: And I have always joked that Woo is my bottom.
Speaker: Like it's three out of 35 or 36.
Speaker: I think there's 36.
Speaker: So when I got it, I was really shocked that Woo was not dead last.
Speaker: Now it's in the 30s.
Speaker: So it's really high up there.
Speaker: But yeah.
Speaker: I don't know that I will ever be good at playing a political game, but I will trust the work I've done and my diligence and follow through will carry me towards where I need to be because people will trust that I know that I'm going to do what I say I do.
Speaker: Yeah, and that's a perfect point because I made a similar comment about in this presentation of breaking it down into some very basic understandable of like, you know, there's longevity capital.
Speaker: People have been there a long time.
Speaker: They have additional capital, people with higher job titles, people with unique skill sets.
Speaker: But it was like the number one thing you have is like solid, consistent performance.
Speaker: And while that may not work compared to some situations or whatever the case may be, solid performance is...
Speaker: going to get you there too.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I've always thought Wu would be my lowest or one of my lowest also, but people are like, no, no, no, you're really great.
Speaker: I think it manifests though through other things.
Speaker: It's like, I really don't care about Wu, but because of the other strengths I have, it sometimes manifests itself.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think that was really interesting.
Speaker: I was shocked that adaptability was my lowest strength.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: And I thought, are you serious?
Speaker: Because I feel like I can pivot really well.
Speaker: But I dug into that a little more.
Speaker: And what I realized is discipline is my number one.
Speaker: And so because I work ahead and I'm very analytical and strategic in how I process through a lot of things, I'm usually ahead enough of the game that when those last minute things pop up, I can manage them because I'm not behind.
Speaker: And I'm not on a timeline crunch to get other things done.
Speaker: I've already planned that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or you're not needing to adapt because it's planned within, it's strategic plan for those contingencies.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And so, you know, the student crisis that comes up, really, that's not adaptability to be able to step out and go handle that.
Speaker: That's, you know, knowing what the process is, being very clear about what your role is and what the support networks look like and how you connect those students to the right network.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: We talked about interviewing.
Speaker: You also mentioned working with the graduate program and the training and what they're doing.
Speaker: Do you think that staff performance issues are typically a training issue or a recruitment issue?
Speaker: I think it can be a little of both.
Speaker: And I think through that with the context of one of my favorite team members has consistently had to address a staff issue on her team.
Speaker: And I was having a conversation with a coworker thinking, OK, is this staff member really hard on her staff?
Speaker: I don't think so, because I think she's very clear.
Speaker: And, you know, Brene Brown will say to be direct is to be kind.
Speaker: And I think that what I appreciate is you can recruit people who look phenomenal on paper, but you don't really know how well they're going to do until they're in the environment doing the work.
Speaker: right?
Speaker: They could have had what I think of as the Sunday school answers in the interview.
Speaker: They could have had really great references that were very much about promoting and cheerleading them and maybe not the best at being direct about what their areas of growth would be.
Speaker: And so recruiting wise, I think you can get people that, you know, you don't always know what you're going to get till they're in place.
Speaker: I think training wise, you can train, but
Speaker: Really, when I think in August and July, it's like drinking out of a fire hose, right?
Speaker: They're new to your school.
Speaker: They're new to the role.
Speaker: They're really for the first time on their own.
Speaker: You know, when you're an undergrad, you're still kind of connected to mom and dad.
Speaker: But when you're a grad student, you're like, OK, well, bills are your own bills.
Speaker: But yeah.
Speaker: they get all this new information and they're trying to adapt on where they're living and who their peer group is and what their academic program is and if it's going to be challenging from their undergrad.
Speaker: And so really, I think training can, has to be more than just that July, August timeframe training almost, it has to be a weekly part of the one-on-one.
Speaker: It has to be what I think of, uh,
Speaker: I joke because I introduced this on our campus.
Speaker: I call it the mullet 101.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: You know, I do have a thing for the mullet in general, but really I need to know in every one-on-one, I'm going to ask the same type of questions in the same type of order.
Speaker: I'm going to want to know about your students of concern and your staff because the people matter most to me.
Speaker: And then I'm going to ask about facilities and the budget stuff in your area and your conduct and
Speaker: And then we're going to kind of get into what the party phase is, whatever you want to talk about.
Speaker: You know, if we want to ideate, but really, if we're not covering that business in the front, then what we're talking about in the back isn't serving our students.
Speaker: And so I think that's where a lot of the training goes on.
Speaker: So I'll get a new staff member and every week I'm a checklist person.
Speaker: So, you know, in the one-on-ones, I pull out that checklist and I'm like, okay, do you understand this skill set?
Speaker: Do you understand how to do this?
Speaker: Do we need to refresh on this?
Speaker: Tell me what questions you have that have come up during the week and how do I best support you moving forward in the next week?
Speaker: But really that training has to be ongoing or they're not going to flourish.
Speaker: The mullet one-on-one, you heard it here first, folks.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: Putting you on the spot a little bit here, what's the most embarrassing thing you've done as a candidate in an interview process?
Speaker: Oh, I spit out my drink at a dinner.
Speaker: We were at a group, a table of people, and one of what would have been my peers at this school said something that was kind of out of pocket, but so funny in what I think of as like Michael Scott's
Speaker: from the office type mentality that I had just taken a drink of water and blew it all over the table.
Speaker: Did you get the job?
Speaker: I got an offer.
Speaker: I did not take the job.
Speaker: Um, at that time it was not what I thought was going to be a good fit, but I did realize in that, uh, session that I, um, there are some things that,
Speaker: you will just have to recover from, and they're going to be embarrassing in the long run, but it's just, it happens.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's important, I think, not to overthink those moments.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So tell us about a small niche skill you developed that had a big long-term positive impact on your career.
Speaker: My favorite football coach, Dabo Sweeney, talked a lot a couple of years ago about
Speaker: how Alabama was the elephant.
Speaker: Not only, you know, is that their mascot, but that they were this impossible beast to really get past in college football.
Speaker: And he talked a lot about how do you eat an elephant?
Speaker: Well, you eat it one bite at a time.
Speaker: And I think a lot of times in life in general, but in student affairs, we think about the big, huge problems.
Speaker: I was having a conversation with
Speaker: how our students right now view volunteerism.
Speaker: They want to solve world hunger, but they don't know what small steps to take to solve world hunger.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: But I think about one of the things that I learned early on in my career is that sometimes there's an elephant.
Speaker: We don't understand what it is, but we have to figure out how to move forward.
Speaker: And when we sit and fret and don't make decisions, decisions get made for us or we
Speaker: students are impacted negatively.
Speaker: And so what I have learned how to do is to just think about, I can't fix the whole problem, but let me start chipping away at it.
Speaker: What are the small problems I can fix?
Speaker: Can I fix it in one community?
Speaker: Can I fix it in one building?
Speaker: Can I fix it for my campus?
Speaker: And then start to put those smaller plans together till you develop a larger comprehensive plan.
Speaker: And I think about that
Speaker: you know, really, when we think about COVID, COVID was so overwhelming in a lot of ways.
Speaker: And it was a massive problem that none of us, regardless of how much pandemic SARS preparation we had been through, if you'd been through any of those crisis management courses, we were not prepared for COVID.
Speaker: I don't think, you know, there might have been some of the groundwork laid at the
Speaker: 50,000 foot level.
Speaker: But when you think about actual implementation on the ground, I don't know that there were very many student affairs professionals that were really prepared.
Speaker: And I remember joking with my staff team that it was going to be like the Spanish flu of 1918.
Speaker: And they laughed at me and I set a pandemic and they laughed.
Speaker: And then they have eaten their words since then.
Speaker: But I think when we talk about what we did during that time,
Speaker: Some of it was like, okay, how do we get stuff out of the halls?
Speaker: That's a small problem.
Speaker: Let's work on that problem first and document that.
Speaker: And then let's talk about how do we maintain services for students who don't have a home to go to?
Speaker: Here at Oklahoma State, we have a large population of students who have aged out of foster care.
Speaker: And so their Res Life housing is their housing.
Speaker: And they don't have, you know, they don't go home for breaks.
Speaker: We stay open for those opportunities.
Speaker: Or we have students without reliable internet in their hometown or because of their identity, they may not feel comfortable in their family home.
Speaker: You know, whatever that looks like.
Speaker: We have a number of students that needed to stay.
Speaker: We had about a thousand students that remained on campus with us.
Speaker: So how do we provide housing for them that is safe and secure?
Speaker: How do we staff that, that, you know, is safe and secure?
Speaker: How do we maintain that our staff are safe?
Speaker: that are on call and that are responding to things.
Speaker: And so really, I think the thing that I developed early in my career is find out what the problem is and then start breaking it down into smaller pieces to figure out how do you make a plan forward?
Speaker: And so I think people that have worked with me will realize I don't always have one plan.
Speaker: Usually I have plan A and I have plan B and I have plan C. During COVID, I think we had seven
Speaker: occupancy plans, just in case.
Speaker: But I realized that the logistics of things are where I've developed a skill set that I can put to use and then say, okay, here's our plan.
Speaker: And if this plan fails, here's the next plan.
Speaker: And I like to vet things before I show them to people.
Speaker: So I've worked on it and I've put it to the side and I come back to it and I work on it some more.
Speaker: And
Speaker: Then I'll go to some trusted peers and say, hey, look at this and tell me where I'm crazy.
Speaker: But I think that has helped me become one of those go-to people to get things done because they know that I've put the time in.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: If this was a YouTube video, you would have seen me nodding basically the entire time.
Speaker: And I know it's probably aggravating to staff I've had for years about
Speaker: Emphasizing the small things because everybody wants to do big and glamorous things, but it's like there's that concept of the aggregation of marginal gains where like 1% improvement in everything has more compounded
Speaker: value long-term?
Speaker: That's a whole genesis of this question really that you got to the heart of.
Speaker: I literally tell people, here's this big picture of this project.
Speaker: They're like, great.
Speaker: We're going to do this weekly program.
Speaker: I was like, no.
Speaker: You're going to do monthly at the most.
Speaker: We're going to start small and scale up instead of starting too big and not being able to sustain it.
Speaker: I couldn't agree with you more on any of that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So looking back at your entire career, what's an opportunity you said yes to that afterwards you wished you would have said no to?
Speaker: I joke that it may be school board, but it really may be school board.
Speaker: We have a rule in our house that you cannot complain about things unless you bring potential solutions.
Speaker: Love that.
Speaker: And so we spent most of last year in distance learning.
Speaker: I was complaining about it at the dinner table one night and my high schooler said, well, I heard the school board member resigned.
Speaker: Maybe you should go up there and do something about it.
Speaker: And I thought this is kind of a put up or shut up moment in life, right?
Speaker: I can either live my truth and do what I've told my son to do, or I can say, nope, I'm busy.
Speaker: And I've got the COVID, you know, hotline number that calls me all the time.
Speaker: And I,
Speaker: have work and when, you know, I've got to take care of the family.
Speaker: But I did, I submitted an application to school board and was appointed to complete the term.
Speaker: And we were really, really lucky in Stillwater that the city was pretty unified in our moving forward about how we were going to handle COVID.
Speaker: We had a lot of people that were frustrated about school and a lot of it was trying to figure out solutions.
Speaker: And
Speaker: You know, I had people tell me it's not my job to decide public health.
Speaker: And that's what the school board was doing.
Speaker: And I said, but my job is children's education.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so if I have a kid that goes to school and gets sick and then takes that home and infects their grandparents or their parents and they pass away, that child's entire education is going to be impacted by that one event.
Speaker: And so there is a role there.
Speaker: And it was a lot of time and energy during the worst parts of COVID.
Speaker: Now we're looking forward to what a bond looks like for our town and moving forward with that.
Speaker: And so I can see that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, the rough part of the tunnel.
Speaker: But I also could think there's a lot of nights that I spent away from my family and a lot of phone calls where I really should have probably been doing something else.
Speaker: But I think those things matter.
Speaker: And if you're going to
Speaker: If you're going to say that service matters to you, if you're going to claim that servant leadership is something that you value, then sometimes that takes putting some skin in the game and it's got to be painful at times.
Speaker: And so.
Speaker: Well, and now you can legitimately complain about it at home.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: I can say that school board's awful.
Speaker: I'm on it.
Speaker: I think my two favorite parts about that story is one, your son was...
Speaker: engaged enough to know that there was a vacancy on the school board.
Speaker: And two, that his comment about there's a vacancy, why don't you do something about it?
Speaker: Is I think something you've probably told me on a number of occasions, almost verbatim.
Speaker: So I think your son is his mother's son for sure.
Speaker: You know, I think that's accurate.
Speaker: I think if you're not going to try to fix the solution, then really what are we doing here?
Speaker: And so, um,
Speaker: I do know that I have told you more than once, JC, it's your turn.
Speaker: And so it comes around.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: We pass it on as it comes.
Speaker: So what about a missed opportunity?
Speaker: Anything you wished you would have said yes to that you passed on?
Speaker: You know, I think about that kind of in both the short term and the long term.
Speaker: I think there's been opportunities that I, at the time, I was like, I'm not going to do that.
Speaker: And then I went through a brief phase where I was like, man, why did I not do that?
Speaker: Whether it was jobs or, you know, a house that we looked at in town and we didn't put a bid on, whatever it was.
Speaker: But I think at the end of the day, what comes across to me is sometimes I may not have made movement because it didn't, you know, either laziness or busyness on my part or sometimes fear, you know, fear of what may be out there or fear of rejection.
Speaker: or fear of leaving your comfort zone.
Speaker: But I think after time and reflection, I really realize I'm where I need to be.
Speaker: And when it's time to go for whatever that is, you know, when it's time for what the next opportunity is, it's going to be very clear to me for what that looks like.
Speaker: And so I am not very impulsive by nature.
Speaker: So I can see some of them...
Speaker: You know, with all of my plans.
Speaker: There were opportunities that I kind of wanted to take on, but I also long-term look at them.
Speaker: I don't regret not.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So one of my favorite questions, what's the most ridiculous meeting you've ever sat in?
Speaker: You know, it's interesting enough because I'm pretty sure in your first podcast, you interviewed Kent Stamson and I
Speaker: Kent was in this meeting with me.
Speaker: Oh, this is great.
Speaker: He may not have felt like it was ridiculous, but at the time we had a building called Wentz and Wentz did a program called Wentz Days.
Speaker: And so every Wednesday, a different floor in the building would do an event.
Speaker: And some of them were very small, like, you know, let's make macrame key chains, but some of them were larger events, whatever.
Speaker: And one year, Wentz put out that they were going to do a rave.
Speaker: And some campus administrators looked at that and thought that it was going to be a mass event of destruction and wanted it shut down.
Speaker: And by this point, it had gained some traction on some very early social media on campus.
Speaker: On MySpace?
Speaker: Well, no, it was on Facebook, but it was on Facebook when Facebook was college only.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And it was getting passed around in friend groups and really kind of caught fire in a way that I thought, well, we're not stopping this now.
Speaker: But in my mind, I was thinking, OK, well, a rave is just a dance.
Speaker: But what I realized after the fact is we got called into this meeting and an administrator was like, we got to shut this down.
Speaker: We got to have lots of police protection there.
Speaker: I've called in the city.
Speaker: I realized later that they were thinking of a flash mob, not a rave.
Speaker: But they didn't understand the vernacular enough to really know the difference at the time.
Speaker: And so I said, OK, I'm going to you know, they wanted lots of campus administrators there the night of to see if this was going to happen.
Speaker: And I made all of our grad students come and I was there and our director was out of town and we had a couple of other big things happening on campus.
Speaker: But I was there with all of my kids with me because I think my husband was out of town.
Speaker: And so there were 49 staff members that showed up and 14 students.
Speaker: I love that.
Speaker: And my oldest son, I think, was maybe six at the time.
Speaker: And so they passed him around.
Speaker: You know, he got passed in the mosh pit of the rave.
Speaker: But I remember thinking, we spent three hours on a meeting for 14 students to show up with some glow sticks.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And nothing ruins a good rave more than a bunch of suits standing around.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I love that because, I mean, that happens on every level.
Speaker: Like, you know, when you've got RA programs where the only people who show up are RAs and they're reporting like 14 RAs and one student.
Speaker: And it happens at every level.
Speaker: Nobody's bigger than the game.
Speaker: It does.
Speaker: And I think about that.
Speaker: There were some great conversations after the fact about advertising and really thinking about the context of how we share information and
Speaker: really understanding what our students talked about and that we need to know their language a lot.
Speaker: But I do remember thinking, I'm never going to get that time back.
Speaker: I hope your follow-up conversation with the Wynn students about marketing was how much their marketing must have sucked that only 14 people came.
Speaker: Well, it was only supposed to be for one floor and the floor had 36 kids on it.
Speaker: Yeah, those meetings, I just think about, I love calculating the opportunity costs of those meetings where if you went back and it's easier to do at public schools where salaries are available that go back and calculate everybody's hourly rate, salary rate, and then add up how much time, like how much money was spent for all these suits to sit in a meeting for three hours.
Speaker: Yeah, you know, and we actually decided to host another rave two years after that.
Speaker: And we, a phone party.
Speaker: It was actually a phone party rave.
Speaker: Oh, don't get me started on those.
Speaker: It was a huge event for students.
Speaker: They really enjoyed it, but I kept thinking, we don't have enough staff here.
Speaker: Got to call in the reinforcements.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: All right, let's move on to some Swakua involvement stuff.
Speaker: And that kind of has been alluded to a little bit.
Speaker: Really, it is your fault that this podcast exists because I remember one conference where after the day's sessions had ended, I was sneaking away to avoid the committee fair and I made the mistake of running into you.
Speaker: And as I recall, you physically grabbed my arm and forced me to go to the research committee meeting.
Speaker: And well, that one thing led to another, which led to another.
Speaker: And here we are.
Speaker: I guess the listeners can write in and say thank you.
Speaker: You know, I think that's one of our goals is we have a job to do, right?
Speaker: But we also have a responsibility to the profession to continue to pull up and engage younger professionals.
Speaker: And that's one of my favorite things about
Speaker: SWACUHO is it does have kind of a smaller family feel than some of the other bigger conferences.
Speaker: But I think it's an opportunity where, you know, you can have a conversation with someone in a session and then see them later in the hallway and say, hey, have you met my friend Diane?
Speaker: Or hey, have you, do you know Tiffany?
Speaker: Or whatever you think that is.
Speaker: And those relationships develop into some of the most fulfilling professional and personal relationships that
Speaker: you know, in your life.
Speaker: And so, yes, if you want to blame me for this, go right ahead because I do not regret any point of it because I think not only did it help you professionally, but I think it helps our profession.
Speaker: You know, your contributions, they matter.
Speaker: Oh, well, thank you.
Speaker: I'm certainly not mad at you, but Andrea, my wife, she might be writing some hate mail because I'm not home with her tonight.
Speaker: Tell her she can put it in next year's Christmas card.
Speaker: Well, spoiler alert, it is in this one.
Speaker: You mentioned fulfillment.
Speaker: And so I remember talking to you once and you told me like higher level of involvement in a regional association can provide fulfillment that you can't get in your day-to-day job.
Speaker: Do you remember that conversation?
Speaker: Vaguely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Did I have an adult beverage in my hand when we had it?
Speaker: It's possible, but I don't recall explicitly.
Speaker: But is that something that is true?
Speaker: I do think that's something that's true.
Speaker: I have a peer group that is often called the triplets.
Speaker: Lee Senior from Southwest nicknamed us that a long time ago.
Speaker: But I think about these are two women that I have never worked on the same campus with.
Speaker: I didn't go to grad school with them.
Speaker: But
Speaker: We connected professionally and then they became sounding boards and lots of different things.
Speaker: But they also became vacation buddies and people to really go to to be your cheerleaders and things.
Speaker: And so I think that's one way that you get those pieces of fulfillment.
Speaker: You develop those personal connections where you're traveling through that town and you get to stop and have a meal with that person.
Speaker: Or, you know, I like to take my kids to every college campus that we meet.
Speaker: come near.
Speaker: And so, you know, if we're on a college campus, I'm going to say, hey, can I stop in and see you?
Speaker: Or we're going to be coming through.
Speaker: But knowing and watching their lives develop and them seeing my life develop, I think that just kind of, it's the family aspect.
Speaker: And a lot of us
Speaker: have a family of origin, but a lot of us have professional families.
Speaker: And I think that that kind of relationship helps.
Speaker: But I also think knowing, you know, when COVID happened, I remember watching and connecting with peers at other Big 12 institutions and other SWACUO institutions about, hey, what are you thinking here?
Speaker: And is it working?
Speaker: And, you know, here's what I'm thinking and I'm not sure.
Speaker: And that type of support network
Speaker: On top of the friendships and connecting younger professionals into the greater profession, I think that that is fulfillment that you don't always get in your eight to five, got to get through your inbox grind.
Speaker: I say eight to five, knowing that no one in rest life works eight to five.
Speaker: In the day-to-day operations, those conversations and those relationships are
Speaker: give you passion and joy that you don't always have.
Speaker: Well, I've thought about this a whole lot over the last two years.
Speaker: And as people talking about feeling burnout due to the pandemic and housing and all that, is that one of the... And burnout is something I've studied quite a bit.
Speaker: And one of the key aspects of burnout is not feeling a sense of personal accomplishment, which is totally understandable in the last two years because people were delivering meals and we weren't doing programs and all the things in their job description nobody was doing.
Speaker: And so there was kind of that lack of personal accomplishment.
Speaker: And I've always felt that the fulfillment in the associations also comes from like, here's another way to feel a sense of personal accomplishment.
Speaker: And even better, it's not directly related to my boss.
Speaker: And it's something I don't have to report to or about.
Speaker: And it's just an additional contribution that is kind of on my own terms or their own terms, as it may be.
Speaker: Yeah, you know, I agree.
Speaker: I think...
Speaker: But it's a balance.
Speaker: I really struggled when we were going through COVID of how to balance what my family needed and their safety with what my students needed and their safety and what I wanted to accomplish professionally.
Speaker: And I did.
Speaker: I made the decision to step down from a Kuhoi programming committee because we, like many campuses, we're short-staffed.
Speaker: Our budgets are really struggling.
Speaker: And I felt like my campus needed me at that time professionally.
Speaker: So I needed to be there for them, knowing that, you know, those opportunities aren't going to disappear.
Speaker: I just may have to delay them for a while.
Speaker: But I think that the fulfillment of knowing you've supported your team and that you've made it through a really rough patch.
Speaker: You know, we all we do a secret Santa at the end of every fall semester.
Speaker: And we were sitting around having breakfast the other day and I thought, I love you jokers.
Speaker: I mean, you're all so different.
Speaker: There's been a lot of changes on our team.
Speaker: But I think knowing that if I had to choose who to go into a battle with, that's going to be the group that I'm going to battle with.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: On episode one, Kent Sampson and I talked about the timing and conditions being right to take on such roles like the president of SWACUHO.
Speaker: You were president in 2016 and 2017.
Speaker: What made it your time or your turn, as you said earlier, to be president?
Speaker: You know, when you talked earlier about what was the opportunity that you maybe should have said no to or
Speaker: you think through that.
Speaker: I almost thought about Suikuhu presidency as part of that.
Speaker: I had been involved when I was in UMR, moved here to start a position in January.
Speaker: I was a mid-year hire.
Speaker: And Kevin Solomon from Arkansas Tech was the time and place chair at the time.
Speaker: And he called and said, hey, I want to get you plugged in.
Speaker: And he was an OSU alum.
Speaker: And so much like JC, I did to you,
Speaker: He kind of drug me kicking and screaming to a committee meeting.
Speaker: And I really enjoyed those experiences.
Speaker: You know, a lot of that is logistics, but a lot of it is relationships.
Speaker: And so I started out time and place, served on a host committee that my institution was hosting, you know, a year later, and then got asked to run for secretary and thought, okay, you know what?
Speaker: Sure, let's do this.
Speaker: And I think when...
Speaker: I was going to run for president.
Speaker: My husband got sick with an autoimmune disease that we had not known even existed prior to that.
Speaker: And so going through, it was actually the 2016 coming home from that conference where he first started exhibiting symptoms.
Speaker: And I thought a lot to myself of, I don't know that I am in the right spot.
Speaker: And how do I support him?
Speaker: And how do I support myself?
Speaker: And how do we get through this?
Speaker: That's subsequently when we were also implementing Banner on our campus.
Speaker: But what I realized is, God, those friendships, that peer support, that got me through it.
Speaker: You know, notes from friends in SWACUHO that would reach out and say, hey, how are things going?
Speaker: Knowing that
Speaker: that once a month committee meeting was going to have some laughter and joy in it when lots of other things were bad.
Speaker: My faith is very near and dear to me.
Speaker: And I think that's where I think God puts you where you need to be, no matter what you think.
Speaker: And so that's where I realized that those plans are greater than anything we choose to do on our own.
Speaker: And so I think that path to the presidency is
Speaker: Was not necessarily, I'm going to take this and this is where I'm going to go and this is my next step.
Speaker: It was more where I see small things that just aligned in the perfect way to push me forward when I don't know that I was necessarily cognizant of taking those steps myself.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: It's like windows of opportunity come and go.
Speaker: And as quickly as they open, so do they close.
Speaker: And sometimes people push you through windows.
Speaker: Sometimes you rip the windows open yourself and jump through.
Speaker: And sometimes you just happen to fall into them.
Speaker: And I just think that the pathways is just so fascinating to think about.
Speaker: Because as I told Katie Pelton after last year's conference, and I rolled off of the secretary role, it's like,
Speaker: There's always something somewhere that someone can do.
Speaker: And I think I've found my involvement is mostly just identifying little things here and there that either nobody else said yes to or nobody, everybody else was quiet.
Speaker: And it's just, it's kind of neat to see those pathways.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, I think that goes back to that niche conversation of, yeah, you solve the need and you can't fix everything, but Hey, I can fix this one little thing.
Speaker: And,
Speaker: Somewhere.
Speaker: Sometimes I think that's where true service gets started.
Speaker: Do you remember what the platform you ran on was?
Speaker: I do not.
Speaker: You know, it seems like I should know those things.
Speaker: I'm going to blame it on COVID that I don't remember.
Speaker: I'm trying to think, what would that have been?
Speaker: I really, it might've been family because I really do.
Speaker: And I know I've mentioned that several times, but, but when I think of SWACUHO,
Speaker: the warm, fuzzy family feeling of it, that's what sticks out to me.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: And I'm definitely not someone who is like outwardly emotes in any sort of like way.
Speaker: But I remember when my wife had just finished school, I had finished school, we were considering moving back to the Midwest.
Speaker: One of the things, the biggest drivers of keeping me here was I just didn't want to leave the Swakuho region and the people and that family that you've talked about.
Speaker: You'll talk about my failure as a supervisor.
Speaker: Yeah, we'll come back.
Speaker: Where was that one?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I got a little out of order here.
Speaker: That's okay.
Speaker: This is your show, JC.
Speaker: We're just living in it.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I'm going to put that quote on the marketing materials.
Speaker: What is your favorite failure in your career?
Speaker: Like something you learned a lot from, but later set you up for success.
Speaker: I definitely would say my first year as a full-time supervisor, I was a failure.
Speaker: And I think I was hired to work in an all-male building at Kansas State University.
Speaker: I don't know if Derek is the smartest man I have ever met or the luckiest, knowing that it was going to work out in the end.
Speaker: But hired to work in an all-male building, but a building where the staff carried some baggage.
Speaker: They had a lot of baggage from the year before.
Speaker: They had some trust issues.
Speaker: And then you hire a female supervisor into an all-male building.
Speaker: And then three weeks in, I find out that we need to convert four wings of that building to female and that I am going to have to remove some staff from this all-returner team and hire some females in to take their place.
Speaker: And so I felt like
Speaker: I was kind of set up that knowing that there was going to be some big challenges, right?
Speaker: But I committed early on that I was going to win that staff over.
Speaker: And I don't know that I did that.
Speaker: At the time, I felt like I was like, whatever you need.
Speaker: You want to come by at 10 o'clock at night and ask a question?
Speaker: Knock on the door.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: You didn't get dinner and the dining hall's closed.
Speaker: There's always leftovers in my fridge.
Speaker: Whatever they needed, I wanted to make sure that staff
Speaker: felt like they had a supervisor that was there for them.
Speaker: And that's kind of how I started the year.
Speaker: And, you know, working with guys is sometimes different.
Speaker: That staff had a ton of potty humor and I was not a potty humor fan, but I learned to love it.
Speaker: But about midway through, I remember laying in bed after four or five phone calls after midnight thinking, oh,
Speaker: I have failed.
Speaker: I have not equipped these staff members to be good decision makers.
Speaker: I have not demonstrated balance for them.
Speaker: I have not committed time and space for my marriage, you know, that I should, because I'm always working.
Speaker: I should not be in this profession.
Speaker: And it was really kind of a eye opening couple of days for me thinking, what am I doing here?
Speaker: And I went to my staff team,
Speaker: Cause we met at 11 o'clock on Tuesday nights for two hours.
Speaker: Cause that was when it was convenient.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I told them, I said, I'm sorry.
Speaker: I suck.
Speaker: I'm not done y'all a good service.
Speaker: And what kind of came out of that conversation was they didn't call because they didn't know how to make the decisions.
Speaker: I think they just enjoyed the conversation and enjoyed being part of the group when we would go deal with it.
Speaker: Because I told them, if you don't feel comfortable, I will always back you up.
Speaker: I will always come with you.
Speaker: We can have conversations together.
Speaker: I will walk your rounds with you if that's what you want.
Speaker: But I think where I felt like a failure, what I learned is they felt like they trusted me and they felt like I was on their team.
Speaker: And we...
Speaker: One hall of the year that year.
Speaker: Sometimes I think we drug the hall kicking and screaming to hall of the year.
Speaker: But what I saw as a semester of failure, they saw as a semester of success.
Speaker: And I think it really challenged me to think about, we talk in terms of structure and balance and critical thinking skills, but our students think more in terms of support,
Speaker: and connection, and fun in lots of ways.
Speaker: And so when I think back of that year, now I think of it as one of my best years professionally.
Speaker: You know, I grew a lot as a supervisor.
Speaker: I think when one of my staff members needed his back waxed before he was going to spring break.
Speaker: And my supervisor walked in while I was wiping the, pulling the lights out.
Speaker: I was like, what are you doing?
Speaker: And I remember thinking it's what they needed.
Speaker: You know, my, my job is to give them what they need and it may not be comfortable for me, but I think as a supervisor, a lot of times we fall into the trap of thinking, I'm going to tell them to do what I want and how I want it.
Speaker: And I expect them to meet my needs.
Speaker: But yeah,
Speaker: I really think part of supervision and being a good supervisor is knowing your staff team and knowing how to meet their needs, which requires more adaptability on your part.
Speaker: But I also think as a supervisor, you have more flexibility to be adaptable, right?
Speaker: You have more experience.
Speaker: You've been longer in the profession.
Speaker: You've seen more staff and worked with more staff.
Speaker: So there are times where
Speaker: this is the way it's going to be.
Speaker: And this is what we're doing.
Speaker: But there are lots of times where if you have the flexibility, choose to learn and listen from your staff, because I think that's where you really kind of grow and learn some of those lessons.
Speaker: So I don't know.
Speaker: I look back on that year and I helped two staff members by engagement rings.
Speaker: I shaved someone's back.
Speaker: I
Speaker: I did lots of laundry.
Speaker: I told them, I said, I want you to know your residents and I will do whatever it takes for you to know your residents.
Speaker: So we would do roster quizzes.
Speaker: And if they got above 90%, I would do three loads of their laundry, you know, because that's what they needed.
Speaker: But they committed to buying into that and they committed to knowing their students and really taught me a lot about how people are
Speaker: coming from all walks of life when they get to college, right?
Speaker: And so our job is to really find what the need is and meet them where they're at, not necessarily say, my office hours are eight to five, make an appointment, because that's not always convenient for them.
Speaker: Clearly with an 11 o'clock staff meeting.
Speaker: You know, I won't do that again.
Speaker: Jeez.
Speaker: And I've always loved hearing that story.
Speaker: And I think it's an extreme example of a challenge is a lot of new professionals face in terms of like that availability and wanting to be there and all that.
Speaker: And I think the story resonates a lot for me because I knew all of them.
Speaker: And yes, they were all great.
Speaker: And like a very rowdy bunch when Haymaker Hall walked in, like it was like,
Speaker: a party and it just was like, they were just such a good group.
Speaker: And I don't think you were a failure, but I could see how you might've felt like one in the moment, but.
Speaker: But, you know, I think looking back on that, I think that's a really big challenge to, yes, there is a balance to all of it.
Speaker: Our staff should be very diligent in creating boundaries for their own personal wellbeing and role modeling that efficiently.
Speaker: But I think it's also knowing when to give and take.
Speaker: with your staff teams and, you know, knowing how to be very self-individualized in your supervision.
Speaker: As we look to wrap up here, just a kind of few miscellaneous questions for you.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: What's a book you most frequently share with others?
Speaker: Ooh, um, nonfiction.
Speaker: I would say start with why Simon Sinek, start with why.
Speaker: Context is not one of my top things, but I think if you don't understand the why, then you don't necessarily buy in to the what.
Speaker: So professionally, I would say start with why.
Speaker: He has a great TED talk about that also.
Speaker: Yes, but I don't recommend the TED talk because if you watch the TED talk, you don't read the book.
Speaker: And the book gives nuances that you're not going to get in the TED.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: I also will always recommend Lotsam Dove.
Speaker: It has been my favorite book almost my entire life.
Speaker: I think I read it in seventh grade.
Speaker: And I think when I think of great American literature, that is the one.
Speaker: Anyone I've ever met that has read Lonesome Dove has probably read it a hundred times.
Speaker: I've never met anyone that's only read it once.
Speaker: We have, I think, four or five copies at our house.
Speaker: I have one of them that is annotated about
Speaker: things that should have been answered in the other books in the series that weren't.
Speaker: I was hoping you were going to say you had four or five because of the Massey Family Book Club.
Speaker: Well, you know, I think my husband and son have read that book several times as well.
Speaker: So it is definitely a well-loved book at my house.
Speaker: But I also think
Speaker: You know, I'm a book lover that will reread things.
Speaker: I reread Bridge to Terabithia every August.
Speaker: And my staff will tell you, I tell them this at the beginning of training, people trust us with their children.
Speaker: And we have to be worthy of that trust.
Speaker: And I think about, have you read that book?
Speaker: No, I haven't.
Speaker: You should read.
Speaker: It's a young adult book or children's lit, really.
Speaker: It's probably fourth grade reading level.
Speaker: I'm ordering it right now.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So don't watch the movie.
Speaker: The movie is much more fantasy driven, but in the book, there is a boy who doesn't feel heard in his family and a neighbor moves in and this neighbor is very much different from them.
Speaker: I mean, she, her parents don't have the same rules.
Speaker: They don't own a TV.
Speaker: Life is about more than work.
Speaker: So it's a very different picture than what he sees in his own personal life.
Speaker: But
Speaker: like a lot of our students, he feels very unheard and misunderstood.
Speaker: And he goes to school and at school, the competition is all about who's the fastest runner and who can succeed on the playground.
Speaker: But he has a music teacher that is committed and invested in
Speaker: all of the students and notices his talent as an artist.
Speaker: And I think about if all of our students had a teacher or a person at college that invested in them the way that the music teacher invest in this student, they would all be successful.
Speaker: And that person is kind of the glue that holds him together when the book hits its crisis point.
Speaker: And I think about
Speaker: especially now when we think about mental health and all of the things, that's what all of us need.
Speaker: We need a person to be our lodestone that will ground us when things get rough.
Speaker: So read that.
Speaker: I read it every year.
Speaker: Ordering it right now.
Speaker: You've sold me.
Speaker: I try through all of it every year.
Speaker: Ordering it right now and we'll bring you back for a book club episode on Bridge to Territia.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: My understanding is you started a secret society while at K-State, but unfortunately it didn't stay secret very long when one of your induction ceremonies went awry.
Speaker: What happened?
Speaker: Oh, Dr. Derek Jackson probably has lots of gray hairs with my name on them.
Speaker: Um, we read a book in our team that talked about make work fun.
Speaker: And that became a joke of how do we make things fun?
Speaker: And so we did.
Speaker: We decided that we were going to make a secret society.
Speaker: And the way that we did that is we decided we were going to do the induction in his backyard when he was supposed to be gone for the weekend.
Speaker: And he happened to come home in the middle of it.
Speaker: And I'll never forget, he stepped outside and I looked up and I thought, oh, this is going to go bad.
Speaker: He waved me over and I walked over and he said, what are you doing?
Speaker: And I said, making work fun.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we never inducted anyone after that, but we invited him to our celebration.
Speaker: But I think part of it is, you know, a lot of us get into housing as a profession because we like people or we're good at programming and the fun is what gets us there.
Speaker: But as you move up, the liability and the
Speaker: the administration becomes the greater weight of your responsibilities, right?
Speaker: And so I think about that book is very correct that you have to make your own fun, right?
Speaker: You have to find something to laugh about every day or work's going to become a burden and not a joy.
Speaker: And so, you know, finding with your coworkers what you can laugh about or, you know, celebrating the mullet in your staff meeting, whatever that is,
Speaker: But work is sometimes heavy.
Speaker: If you're dealing with major facilities issues or COVID or a sexual assault or the death of a student, those things carry some secondary trauma for a lot of staff members.
Speaker: And knowing that, one, if you're dealing with that, there's resources that you should be engaging in.
Speaker: But two,
Speaker: You also have to think about what's the joy in your job and how do you find your joy?
Speaker: So I found my joy in my secret society that is defunct.
Speaker: I'm assuming it's defunct.
Speaker: There may be another one there.
Speaker: I haven't checked.
Speaker: My favorite part of that story that you've shared is imagining you in Derek Jackson's backyard and on the fly just saying,
Speaker: Making work fun?
Speaker: Well, and we were all wearing our master's robes.
Speaker: I think I was carrying a jar of grape jelly.
Speaker: I don't really know.
Speaker: I probably would look at it now as an administrator and think, that's hazing.
Speaker: What were we doing?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: At the time, I think it was really like, how do we just find laughter in the mundane, everyday things?
Speaker: Well, and props to Derek Jackson for not losing his head about the liability and all that.
Speaker: No, you know, I think really, I think of Derek as a second dad.
Speaker: He has always been even keeled and put up with my, you know, is this a,
Speaker: is this a hill to die on or is this a, I need to calm down or is this a, I'm on the right track, but I need to think about it different ways.
Speaker: But I think when I think about mentors in the profession, he will forever be one that really kind of puts us on solid footing with very level-headed, honest, careful decision-making.
Speaker: And he was a great first boss for me in that way.
Speaker: Yeah, I love Derek.
Speaker: I stormed his office once as a student before I was an RA about how I felt I'd been wronged in the early room preferencing process.
Speaker: Oh, did you have a dirty erping situation?
Speaker: I may have been.
Speaker: I wouldn't have called it that.
Speaker: I think I had exposed some logistical flaws in the preferencing order that may have given me advantage that Derek promptly took away from me.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: So you were taking advantage of the system and then were held accountable for it.
Speaker: No, I was abiding by all the policies and procedures put forth.
Speaker: And Derek was the person who didn't allow me to have a single room my junior year.
Speaker: Ah, semantics.
Speaker: But then I got hired as an RA in August that year.
Speaker: Yeah, there you go.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: My last question for you is, is it true that
Speaker: That one of your children stole a cookie from Reed Drummond's husband.
Speaker: How did you know this?
Speaker: I do my background research.
Speaker: It is accurate that I had met some professional colleagues at Reed Drummond's store in Paul Huska, Oklahoma.
Speaker: And I did have my youngest daughter with me.
Speaker: And she is very, very independent.
Speaker: And one day she is going to grow up to be a phenomenal adult who is very, very confident about what she wants in life.
Speaker: But I just want her to be quiet and eat her dinner sometimes.
Speaker: And we had shopped and we're going to eat lunch.
Speaker: And have you ever been to the Pioneer Woman's?
Speaker: I've watched the show, but not been to the restaurant.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So Paul Huska is a tiny little town of about 3,000 residents.
Speaker: but especially during that timeframe was getting about 13,000 visitors a day for this one store.
Speaker: And so it created a lot of downtown revitalization, but it also created, you know, some subsequent traffic issues and policing issues and parking and some other things that are attached to that.
Speaker: And I think that the Drummond family did a really good job of trying to support that
Speaker: in multiple ways.
Speaker: And you saw lots of businesses pop up around the mercantile.
Speaker: And so we were there with friends and visiting.
Speaker: But typically, if you want to eat lunch, you need to be in line by 930, because it's going to take a while, especially if you're in a larger group.
Speaker: And so we were in line and a group had decided to go up and look around.
Speaker: And the family brings out cookies that are they have a bakery upstairs.
Speaker: And so they
Speaker: if cookies are broken when they're putting them on trays, they'll break them up into smaller pieces and they'll walk the line.
Speaker: And they spend a lot of time really kind of connecting with guests while they're there.
Speaker: And Lad Drummond offered my youngest daughter a cookie and it was not the cookie she wanted.
Speaker: And she demanded that he go back in the kitchen and get her a chocolate chip cookie because she did not want sugar cookies.
Speaker: And she may have been six at the time, but he...
Speaker: turned around and went and got her a cookie.
Speaker: So if we all had that confidence and directness in life, life would probably be easier.
Speaker: But when I got the text message of what she had done, I was shocked.
Speaker: All right, Tanya, any closing thoughts?
Speaker: I don't even know where to go from here.
Speaker: You know, I think here's what I would tell people.
Speaker: There are lots of opportunities out there.
Speaker: Think about where you can make the difference for people.
Speaker: And not every opportunity is always going to feel great.
Speaker: But I think there's value in everything that you do.
Speaker: And so like this podcast, I think, you know, it may not seem when I told my kids I was going to be on a podcast, they were like, Oh, is it on Spotify?
Speaker: And I'm like, Oh,
Speaker: No, it definitely is.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, they don't think that I'm famous, even though I'm on TV once a month.
Speaker: They don't think that that's cool.
Speaker: What I would say is take those chances.
Speaker: Look for those new things.
Speaker: You never know what's going to happen.
Speaker: You might later on develop a podcast because I drug you to a committee meeting.
Speaker: Yes, we are definitely on Spotify and on all major podcast apps, Tanya.
Speaker: Hey, well, that is good to know.
Speaker: I just watch you off or listen to you off of this Wakuho post on Facebook, but I'm old school.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Well, that's a wrap for today's episode.
Speaker: Thanks yet again to past president Tanya Massey for coming on the show.
Speaker: This episode was a ton of fun, and I know Tanya's stories and experiences will resonate with a lot of our regional housing folks.
Speaker: And Craig Van Blercombe.
Speaker: Be sure to reach out to Tanya on her preferred social media platform listed in the show notes and thank her for volunteering yet again for the benefit of our region.
Speaker: Trust me, Tanya is a very special person you definitely want in your orbit.
Speaker: If you ever get a chance to work for Tanya, you take it.
Speaker: As I mentioned at the top of the episode, I've been contacted a few times by listeners already.
Speaker: I love getting feedback, but also want to start highlighting people who put something they heard on the podcast into action.
Speaker: Please email me at swakuhopodcast at gmail.com if you have any examples of stuff you've put into action or ways you've tried something new.
Speaker: Be sure to include the episode you listened to, what you did, and what the outcome was.
Speaker: If you don't want your name shared on the air, that's fine too.
Speaker: Just let me know.
Speaker: Don't forget the podcast has an advice feature where you can write in and ask for professional advice.
Speaker: A link to submit your questions is in the show notes.
Speaker: I anticipate airing responses to inquiries we received in the next block of episodes.
Speaker: Tanya talked about volunteering, and I'm now looking for volunteers to help out with scaling and elevating the podcast.
Speaker: It's certainly been fun running this thing beholden to no one, but it's time to get others involved.
Speaker: Specifically, I'm looking for people to write reflection guides, recruit and solicit guests, develop topic outlines, and even edit episode tracks.
Speaker: It isn't glamorous work, but it is important work.
Speaker: And if there's one thing I've learned about professionally growing in the field of student housing, it's that the best skill development with the most long-term benefits comes from doing the gopher tasks well and honing the fundamentals.
Speaker: Take it from me, you need absolutely zero experience to get involved in this podcast since guess what?
Speaker: I had zero experience when this whole ordeal started.
Speaker: Our next episode is our second feature topic, and it's going to be a lively one because we will be discussing student staff accountability.
Speaker: I'll be joined by Alana St.
Speaker: Cyr from the University of Central Arkansas, Victor Salazar from Our Lady of the Lake University, and Jason Titus from Texas Christian University.
Speaker: And no student staff accountability topic is off limits.
Speaker: I'm going to be holding our guests accountable for their performance and issuing demerits left and right if they fail to meet your expectations.
Speaker: So make sure not to miss it.
Speaker: And with that, I say to you, good day.
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