So my story starts down on a southwest Georgia town called Albany Georgia, and I was born there in the middle of the last century, and my parents had eight kids on the seventh of the children. All of us grew up in a house, so there were 10 of us in a house of two bedrooms. And over the years, I've really begun to appreciate how education has been able to change the trajectory not only my own life but the life of all of my sisters and brothers as well. So I went from there to an HBCU, Historically Black College University in Atlanta, Morehouse. Eventually, ended up beginning my career path in Washington, D.C. working for an agency called the National Endowment for the Humanities, and then I went from there to teach in one of the Penn State campuses and eventually decided that while I love being a faculty member working with students, that I really also wanted to be able to impact higher education in a different way. So I began to move away from being a faculty member to the more administrative path when I moved over to a new college called Western Governors University out in Salt Lake City, which was competency-based education institution that was founded by a couple of the governors, Roy Romer from Colorado and Mike O. Leavitt from Utah. The job at the time was to try to help build up this competency based experience. I did that for a number of years before I moved back east now the East Coast, just north of Boston in Manchester, New Hampshire, where I spent years as vice president academic affairs before I took this job back in 2012 and became first a chief academic officer and now the president of the global campus here at Southern New Hampshire University which basically handles all of the online experiences as well as some of the global experiences we have around the world in places like refugee camps, some of the inner-city experiences that we have as well, so that's how I ended up here. I often say to people that when I look back on my life, a lot of the experiences I have had came about by experiences that I did not anticipate so little things that I did along the way that ended up being the types of things that just sort of made a difference. For example, I mentioned that I moved to Washington, D.C. I had no intention of moving Washington D.C. until I happen to just one day at Morehouse after I graduated, walked by someone sitting on a bench and said hello and started talking to her and end up getting a job offer. So sometimes just the little things in life make the biggest differences in the way you move forward and so I always try to say, "make sure you're the person you want to be every day. Make sure that the things you are doing are the things you want to be remembered for." I just happen to say hello to people when I see them as I'm passing by most of the time and that instance, it made a very big difference to things that I decided to go do as a result of that, the same type of thing is going to be true when I took a couple of the other jobs in my life, a lot of it was fun to decide what matter to me what I wanted to do with my life and so when I moved from faculty to administration, a lot of people said, "Well, you know, that's an unusual move," but for me, it felt like I could have a bigger impact there. As I said, I still love the time I get to spend with students and with faculty but being able to say where does your passion meet your skill is a good thing for any mentor to try to recommend for their mentee. So find the things that you like to do and the things that you're good at and you will probably find something that will make a very good career for you.

Working hours, I am told for my team that I probably should get better at working a little bit less and that's probably true. My job is really to handle most of the academic experiences that we have across SNHU, and that includes, of course, the online experiences. But we have a number of hybrid experiences. We have a number of different learning experiences around the country as well. So when you think about academics, people think, of course, about teaching in a class, giving the online work that includes a whole lot of other things that we have to do as well. The instructional designers, the assessment specialists, the negotiations that we do with companies when it comes to the learning resources that we use, for example, people know the companies like Pearson, McGraw Hill some of these big text book publishers, but we also spend a lot of time working with companies that do simulations and other types of learning. So how do you negotiate those things? How do you do what's best for the student you're trying to think about not only experiences but the cost to the student. If something is too expensive, then students aren't going to be able to access anyway. So it's everything from building out what those experiences are going to be, what the skill sets are that we're trying to think about, and the partners that we're trying to work with as we move those things forward. I also, of course, have to spend a good deal of time with my colleagues throughout the university, who do the other parts of it. We certainly think about the classes, but you got to think about the work with a chief marketing officer, the work with the admissions team, the work with the student advisors, the work of the administration if you've got a campus or technology infrastructure, all of those types of things, and trying to make a decision on what they look like are a big part of the job as well. So academics are a core function of the university but they're not the only one, and one of the things I've learned over time is to make sure you appreciate the talents and the skill sets that the others bring to the table that also impact your work as well. So my job is the handle, a lot of those things, but also to make sure we're thinking about what the future is going to be every day, particularly right now in an environment where things were changing very quickly, being able to say what we want the university to be in five years, what do we anticipate happening in 10 or 15 years, how do we prepare for that? A lot of that is educating yourself on the things you're trying to do, but it's also listening to your students. So we're trying to get better and better at understanding all the detail that goes into the learning experience for students, getting their feedback into that and then iterating or changing that to make it better tomorrow than it was yesterday.

Some of the challenges include trying to think outside of the box. Education in its current form has changed certainly over time but if you take a look at a lot of the elements of it, some of those things have been around since the 15th century. Even down to the fact when we wear our graduation robes, these are basically almost monastery robes. When we think about departments, they're very much like the old guild system that you would have seen in the 15th-century in some ways, that's not to say everything's the same, but recognizing that some of these traditions and customs have been around for a long period of time and that we grew up in them requires us to be able to think outside of the box on, So what's going to happen next? So it's especially hard to do sometimes when things are working well. I think it's Bill Gates who said that sometimes success is actually worse than failure when it comes to trying to think about what the future is because you make the assumption that you're doing something right. When, in fact, that may or may not be true and what you think, maybe the right thing may in fact not be. So trying to make sure we don't get complacent, trying to make sure we stay in form, and trying to make sure we consider all of the elements of what's happening. Higher education is in the midst of a very dynamic, changing period right now, so thinking about what will come next is critical. Also trying to make sure we think outside of the box. So this goes for not only lecture experiences where you have an instructor in front of the class, teaching 25 or 50 or even 100 students but also thinking about what it's going to happen in a time of economic upheaval where you have things changed very quickly. So if you're thinking about the recession right now, it's true that a lot of people are going to need new skills, but they aren't going to go back to school for four years and give up their current jobs to do that. How do we think about micro-credentials, nano credentials, different product lines that will build more with the way the world is changing so we could do those types of things, but I think we're doing a good job. One of the things we do from the very beginning is to try to think about the user experience, and that feels a little different sometimes when we're talking about classes and courses at a school, but we spend a lot of time thinking exactly about that. What are we trying to make sure we put in front of our students? How do we make sure those things are engaging? How do we have conversations with our students to make sure we are satisfying the needs they are coming to us for. If we do those things upfront, it makes everything a little bit easier. One of the things you will see if you read some books, like books by Clayton Christensen and others is they talk a lot about something called the "Jobs to be done philosophy" on. Basically, this requires anyone who's trying to deal with any type of business, but higher education is going to be included in that, is to think about what are students coming to you for and education across the board is not the same for everyone. Schools have different missions. Schools have different populations. So I went to an HBCU for my first degree. It gave some very different things than in the places I went to after that, like Duke or Georgetown, not so much from a higher education perspective, but because of some of the things I was looking for when I went to say an HBCU, as opposed to Harvard. Those experiences come with different types of missions and trying to make sure that a student understands what they're getting in those types of circumstances. Whether you're talking about a religious school, a military school, a state university, an Ivy League. All of these have slightly different missions, even if part of that is that learning experience that students were trying to get out of it. So when you're thinking about a gap year for some students, conversations around, what are you trying to accomplish? What do students want? Why are they taking that gap year? What are they going to do during that gap year? And if it's the right thing for them then again, that's the job to be done. But for other students it is they are not necessarily familiar with the opportunities that can lie in online education or hybrid experience or other types of learning experiences and making sure that they at least are aware of them is a critical thing that we all need to be aware of. So if we do those things well I think that a gap year may be fine for some students. For those who are going to move forward, I think it is on the institution to not have a one size fits all. Think outside the box. Make sure that the students are aware of what the institution should be held accountable for. We spend a lot of time in our confidence and the outcomes, trying to make sure we tell our students if you're going to go into this experience, here are the skills, abilities, and knowledge that you should basically have coming out of it and you should hold us accountable for saying either you have those things or you dont. If you don't you need to get better and make sure that all the students do those things moving forward.