thank you for having me. My career path is not a straight line, which the further I get in my career than where I realized how normal that is. I actually spent the 1st 10 years after I finished college working for a non profit volunteer organization similar to the Peace Corps and during my time with that organization. I started getting into writing and doing marketing for them, kind of as a hobby and help to our team and our office. And then that continued to grow into more and more responsibilities. When I did decide to leave that organization and started looking for my next step in my career, I really was drawn to higher ed for the purpose driven, um, kind of ethos and values behind it, on delivering education, too, students to allow them to grow and to expand and to make a difference in the world. And so I started applying for jobs and higher Ed and I could not find a single job in marketing. I couldn't even get an interview. Um, and so because I was so interested in higher ad, I decided to pivot a little bit and say, Well, if I can't get a job in marketing. Maybe I could get a job in a different area that's still working for a university. And so I did land a job, and I would say, if you look at the career trajectory, it was a step back. But it was a foot in the door into the higher ed industry. And so I started working in an admission office, reading transcripts, calculating GPS. Andi. I had a college degree, and that was the job that I could get. And then, as I got familiar with the admission office and the process for how that works at a university, and it was a large public university, um, you know, I started to earn the respect of my colleagues and leadership, and I met with my boss and just let her know that if there was ever an open position in marketing or communications, that I would be interested. And within the next year, our marketing person actually did decide to leave the university for a different job. And so they interviewed me and along with several other candidates, and that was really my first step into marketing within higher ed. Since then, I really progressed what I would consider a little bit more rapidly. But I do think that there was this willingness on my part to kind of take a step back on, do a job that wasn't necessarily in the marketing stream in order to get into the industry where I wanted to be. And that's really paid off, because since that I've been able to move from a public university to a private university. I've advanced probably toe through about four positions, kind of up the ladder since then. But the experience that I gained reading transcripts and calculating G. P. A s is still really valuable on the work that I do. And I can, you know, have a report with the colleagues in our office who still do that. And I think the insights and perspectives that I gained from that are still really valuable even to the work that I do today.

well, it's definitely interesting right now, working remotely. Our office is still working full time remote eso. The responsibilities and decisions that I handle right now are really setting the strategic priorities of my team. So I supervised four people directly, and then I have about four more people who have dotted lines to me. So between the six or eight of us working on our projects from week to week or month to month, I'm in charge of setting those priorities and deciding what projects are we saying yes to what projects are we saying no to and how much time are those projects were saying yes to getting because there's just not enough hours in the day to get everything that our office would ideally want us to get to right? And so we have to say no to things. So a lot of my job is sorting through those things and having conversations. Sometimes there's political reasons behind why we have to say yes to something, because maybe somebody higher up is asking for it. So figuring out how to navigate that on how to do it in a way that's polite and professional but also strategic is a really big part of my job, and then another big part of my job is really equipping my team to do what they need to dio. I always tell them that one of my biggest priorities is to clear away any obstacles. So if they feel like they're hitting a brick wall, getting an asset they need or finding the right photo or they need funds toe by a new font or something like that, I really see it is my job to make sure that that happens so that they can do their jobs because they're really good at their jobs and they do stuff that I don't necessarily know how to dio. But I want to make sure that they could be successful. Eso when I think about the top three priorities, Obviously, even though universities are non profit organizations, for the most part and the one where I work is a nonprofit organization, we do still have goals that the university leadership wants us to achieve. Sometimes people think, Oh, it's nonprofit, you can kind of do whatever you want and that z really not the case at all. We still want to bring in the brightest students, a really diverse class. Eso my top priority is just ensuring that that happens from the marketing and communications perspective. So are we targeting the right audiences, sending the right emails, building the right kind of website to make that happen. Running the right social media campaigns. So getting are enrolling classes Always. Number one priority number two Priority is supporting our staff with the programs that they want to do. So our counseling team puts on a wide variety of events that are all happening virtually right now and so ensuring that students know that those events were happening through invitations the website, social media advertising that they can register for those events that they know how to get into those events with all the zoom links and everything like that. Um, that's my second priority. And then I think that their priority is just ensuring that things run smoothly for my team. Like I said, ensuring that they have everything that they need to make those first two things happen for Emory Weekly hours. I think I'm really blessed and fortunate at Emory that our boss is very protective of work life. I think balance is kind of a false word because you never really feel balanced. But just maintaining that between your family life, what you're doing at home, especially now in this virtual space. Um, you know, there are seasons where I'm working 50 55 60 hours a week, but it's not like that year round. Um, they're definitely seasons where I may only be working 35 hours a week or 40 hours a week. Right now, I'm gonna busier season where I am working probably 40 45 hours a week, but especially working remotely. I have a lot of flexibility to sometimes finish that work at night or work for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon on. That's really no big deal. Our office really respects the weekends. For the most part, they don't pay me unless it's an emergency, and I really appreciate that about where I work

um, I think the biggest challenges that I face right now I alluded to in my previous answer, but it's really deciding. What do we say yes to And what do we say no to? There are a lot of requests and creative ideas and fun ideas that either my team comes up with or people come to my team and want to pursue. So, for example, this earlier this semester we had two of our staff who said, Hey, we see the Emory has a really strong instagram channel. We want to do our own Instagram live show. We want to do an episode every week, and we want to do that for the entire semester of 12 or 14 weeks on. That's a really fun, exciting idea. And at first glance, you like Yes, of course you want to say yes to that. Um, why not? And then we started really researching. Well, how do you do on Instagram Live researching best practices and the logistics of that and the equipment you need and how do you advertise it, really building out what it would take to do that. And as we started to do the research, we realized Wow. Doing an episode every week is probably not where we want to start. So we really scaled it back a little bit and we said, Why don't we try twice a month to start with? And we're just going to commit to try this for two months, See how it goes. See what the traction is, see if the audience is responding, Andi, then take it from there and evaluate if we want to do this further, see how well it's being received. See what we need to tweak. Do we need to do it more frequently? Less frequently changed the start time, all those kind of questions just to kind of evaluate where we were on bond going through that process, not just with my team, but with these two other staff members who I would consider clients who came to us with this idea. It's a lot of navigating right because you're all professionals, you're all experts of what you're doing and you want to respect each other. But you also have to figure out how to balance that tension between this new idea and also realizing that my team members have you know 15 other projects that they're working on. Two. They're not solely focused on hosting Instagram lives for the office. Eso Some of the strategies in there were just, you know, doing a little bit of research on best practices, having conversations with other schools who are hosting Instagram lives, doing some test runs to see what works and what doesn't. And then also setting realistic timeframes and goals and not biting off more than you can chew has really helped our team be successful. And in this case, the Instagram lives. We're going great. They've been really successful. So we're trying to figure out how do we expand on that for the spring semester? Bring in some new guest speakers and things like that because, yeah, it's just been really successful. We've gotten a lot of great feedback about it, so I think there also has to be a willingness to say something isn't working and to stop doing it on demand to be prepared to do that, which we were in this case. We just said we're going to try it for two months, and if it's not working, we're going to stop. We communicated those expectations with our clients from the beginning so that just in case we had to cancel it, there were no hard feelings