As the first month of the year winds toward a closing, I cannot help but reflect on how much gratefulness I have in my heart.
We are here. We wake up each day with a new opportunity and a fresh start.
I really enjoyed a two-week holiday as a beautiful personal equinox from 2025 to 2026. I spent time in reflection, relaxation, and did some prioritizing and organizing inside and out.
During that time, many people will set new year’s resolutions. You know the good old lose weight, travel more, spend more time with friends and family. This year, I knew I wanted to be determined. Determined to stay happy, healthy, and whole, inside and out. I began building boundaries around my thoughts, my heart, and event my actions. You see I’m a problem-solver, let me save the day, kind of girl, but those around me need to know how to survive with or without me. My child is a beautiful adult finding her way in live and college. My staff are maturing and growing, that comes with both beauty and trials. It is in my nature to want to carry every burden and solve every issue, but they have so many good ideas inside ofo them too.
I have made other personal commitments and walked into the new year with “intentionally-determined” as my objective for the year.
Did the chaos around me stop
Kind of. It was very entertaining to see the world come flying back into my life when daily non-home life resumed, but it didn’t feel personal anymore, so I just tried to stay neutral in all things. It was return to work and jump into walk-ins, as you all may remember, I’m just a sucker for! I love helping students navigate our complex processes and systems. I love problem-solving with advisors and campus stakeholders about complex issues. I often times reference inspector-gadget in my thoughts (I try not to mention him out loud too often anymore, it dates me) because I love the investigative process of following the data thread through admission, documentation processing, any number of status updates and changes. Oh, it’s fun! I’m a complete nerd for it.
It is really one of about two times a semester or academic year that I get to really directly interact with the student body and boy do I miss it and love it! I cannot even explain how much I still know and believe that my career change from medical office staff to university staff was a transformative shift to the purpose for my life. I love what we do. I believe in every single step of the process and the collaboration and coordination it takes along the way.
Has peace spread across the land
Not even close. Our office has been impacted by so many losses and personal traumas as we stepped into the new year. Team members moved on, team members experienced personal loss, the office culture is still not unified or healthy in many ways, but is absolutely inspirational in its teamwork, collaboration, and healing in other ways. It’s just this duplicity of being right on the cusp of some positive shift, when disruption comes. I’m looking back on September 2025 blog posts and recognizing, this is another area I need to be intentionally determined about this year.
Upcoming invitation to share innovative ideas
Next week our division is invited to share any innovative ideas about the upcoming incoming freshman cohort of students.
After walk-ins I feel like my heart is screaming about how complicated and complex our university system is to anyone outside of it and most of those inside too. We become so blind to how complex our processes and procedure are to students. They grasp for any knowledgeable and helpful sounding person that will guide them through those steps. Some well-intentioned people give them invalid information and they become even more frustrated and confused.
I believe that the University should invest in campus-wide onboarding and training programs for every level of staff and faculty depending on roles and responsibilities. I believe that a unified training process would ensure that administrative assistants to department chairs would have access and knowledge on available resources, departmental connections, and university policies. There is no university training based on user-class and role, on how to look up the major code of a student in the Student Information System. Not to mention the complexities added by the segmented processed created by campus-code, classification, and don’t get me started on the physical complexities of which office processes which part of each process. Attempting to help departmental advisors, chairs and deans over the years, it is clear there is no university onboarding to their roles either. It can be frustrating to navigate university policy and systems without a good mentor. Some of them have succession planning and good mentors to their new roles and some are thrown into the deep end of the pool. I spent a lot of my resources trying to point individuals to university source like catalog and processes.
Within these university driven, produced, and maintained training programs, I believe it is very important to Start with Why! In the words of Simon Sinek, people don’t buy what you do they buy why you do it. When there is a clear vision of why we do what we do, then everyone can align accordingly.
I think this university wide innovation would provide an opportunity for a unified message about the campus “why” would provide new members to our community and opportunity to buy-in.
For our student body, from undergraduates to doctoral students, I believe that the University should invest in a “How To” resource or course explaining how to navigate the systems and procedures. With staff and administrators able to have this single resource every time someone needs to know there is a link/module available to share or review together.
A university website, a link to a video, text, and audio option would provide access to all potential and LU students. This could be a single links page or an organized public facing learning management system with modules and embedded resources. With staff and administrators able to have this single resource every time someone needs to know there is a link/module available to share or review together.
This is true for every one of our areas. If a student doesn’t know their student account ID or password, they are locked out and frustrated. Video, text, and audio resources could help guide students calmly through the process. Many of our offices have templates and guides and we do our best, but I feel this is a great opportunity to show our why in action by helping our students and staff have unified resources and information to reduce frustration and errors, cost and enrollments.
Implement 4DX as led measures will give lag/yield measures. Requirements, standards, documentation, deadlines. Expectations that understand why students need to show the initiatives and ownership of these responsibilities while we also ensure that every team member from student-staff to executive administration know why we do what we do and why it matters so much.
The Advisor That Cares 