Memories of GBC & My Next Chapter

I remember being so frustrated with the state of the academic job market in the Delaware & Philadelphia area in 2012 as I was finishing up my Ph.D. coursework at Penn State University. There just weren’t any EdTech-related jobs open in the area, but I was very conflicted about moving. My parents were both healthy at the time but I continued to have progressively strong feelings that I needed to be nearby to help them if they needed it. As a result, my post-Ph.D. job search “net” was much more restricted than many of my Ph.D. peers by choice. Instead of reviewing job openings country or worldwide, I looked for positions within an approximately 45 minutes radius from our home in the Pike Creek area.

I felt extremely fortunate when Goldey-Beacom College invited me to do exactly what I had been training for - to join the college as their first Instructional Technology Coordinator. I had a job lined up - and a whole year before my planned graduation date! I could finally relax about my future employment prospects. With the exception of the fact that in less than a year I was going to be working full-time at the same institution as my husband, now that made me a little nervous!

Around the same time, a very kind PSU mentor took me out to breakfast in State College and advised me to do my best to publish while I working at GBC and to make a plan to move on to a larger institution within 5 years. I knew this mentor was 100% right - if I wanted to potentially move on to a larger school at some point I needed to publish academic work to make myself even begin to be competitive on the extremely competitive job market, and as my Ph.D. advisor likely would have told you if asked, I wasn’t the most enthusiastic writer or academic researcher. Roy Clariana was extremely kind to give me my first real opportunity to publish - in ETR&D no less! - and even recognized my extremely slow contributions (imposter syndrome for me was so real at the time!) by including me as an author. I will always be grateful for his prodding, encouragement, and generosity.

When I joined Goldey-Beacom College in Summer 2014 as their first Instructional Technology Coordinator, I was determined to leave them with educational technology practices, systems, and services beyond where they were when I arrived. I realize it sounds perhaps less than optimistic given that I started the role with a focus on how I wanted things to end. But you see, I’m a planner, I love to line things up systematically and I believe in starting both academic planning as well as organizational operations with the end in mind and working backwards from there. Also - this is how I was raised - do your very best to leave a place better than how you found it.

I also had my mentor’s words in the back of my mind so I was determined to publish and present a heck of a lot!

Shortly after joining the college, I realized that I was very much a fish out of water. Despite having graduated from GBC (twice for undergraduate and masters degrees), my time away - both as a high school teacher for nearly a decade, and as a Ph.D. student at Penn State, had brought me back with a lot of “big school ideas”. My supervisor, Alison White, and those I worked with like faculty member Debbie Leitsch, were very kind to me and never actually told me this, nor did they say to stop bringing up PSU. I’m sure I did this way too much for someone working at a new institution and did I mention that nearly every square inch of my first office had PSU decor? Yes, well when I’m excited about something, “subtle” is not a word I’d used to describe my enthusiasm.

A few months in, I was really starting to worry that I had made a massive mistake. I was living near my family (fulfilling my major goal), and I was learning ALL THE THINGS about running instructional design / EdTech training for a college since I was the only one doing this work at the college (I was a department of one), but I was supremely professionally lonely and not doing any publishing because I didn’t know what to write about, didn’t particularly want to publish by myself, and was still struggling with imposter syndrome regarding whether I had contributions the academic community would actually want to read.

The president at the time, Dr. Gary Wirt, gave me an opportunity that would change the trajectory of my career. He suggested that I partner up with Rusty Michalak - the college’s library director (head librarian at the time) to work on revamping the information literacy program and I remember him saying very enthusiastically that we should publish on what we learned throughout the process. I was excited to have a project, and to be working with anyone (remember all that solo work I mentioned earlier?) so I jumped at the chance. Honestly, Dr. Wirt could have told me that my task was to count ceiling tiles and publish about their comparative impact on I don’t know, student satisfaction with classroom temperature, and I would have jumped at the chance to do that too. Fortunately, he suggested a topic much more in line with my experiences and interests.

Rusty and I then went on to regularly publish together for the next six years. Those that know us are familiar with a story I often share - briefly, we had a very rocky start in the beginning and were quite oil and vinegar in terms of our personalities. Let’s just say we are both very opinionated! We then fairly quickly realized we had many (many!) things in common and became great friends from that point on.

I went from being petrified to write and share my work with the world, to publishing 29 peer-reviewed articles in well-regarded academic journals like College & Research Libraries (C&RL), the Journal of Distance Education, and the Journal of Library Administration. We published two books (edited collections) and continue to publish a quarterly column about technology and libraries in JLA (posIT). We also presented a lot thanks to the support of the college and having the opportunity to speak with friends like Trevor Dawes at conferences including ACRL, ALA, Charleston Library Conference, Middle States (MSCHE) Annual Conference, Association for the Assessment of Learning in Higher Education, and ER&L were true highlights. We even had the opportunity to give invited presentations, like the time we spoke at ARL in Atlanta (thanks to Trevor!) and paid workshops like “Pivot Tables for Librarians” for the Charleston Library Conference.

During this time I continued to grow in my role at GBC as well and had the opportunity to expand my knowledge and skillset when I was promoted to Director of Institutional Research & Training in 2016. I continued to grow the impact of my department by regularly offering a variety of trainings, continually updated and expanded our managed services, and even co-hosted a year-long SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) community of practice with several full-time faculty members. The fact that we were able to get any number of full-time faculty to willingly show up for anything consistently over a year in my opinion was something just short of amazing! It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun, and I’m glad we were able to learn from one another.

I had the opportunity to hire employees over the years, and Briana Daly who I first taught as a freshman at GBC shortly after joining the college, was a wonderful addition to my department. Originally a student worker for Rusty, then a part-time employee for both of us, and later a full-time employee for both of our departments, Briana truly made it possible for me to feel like we had a chance of achieving the goals I had for the department because it was no longer just me.

I have to give Rusty tremendous credit here as well though because, without his support and assistance, many of our challenging initiatives would have been difficult to achieve. I’m lucky that we had administrative support to collaborate together on so many college-wide projects, including managing and co-managing many college-wide technology services that I brought to GBC. GBC faculty, staff, and students now have access to the best EdTech technologies available!

But what I’m most proud of, regarding my work at the college, was transitioning us from a nearly 100% face-to-face on-ground institution - i.e. meaning we had only a few (<5 hybrid courses and no purely online at the time) to 100% online courses in less than one week due to the pandemic in March 2020.

How was I able to do this so quickly? Because I had worked consistently and intentionally for the nearly six years prior making sure we had the infrastructure and appropriate training in place to quickly move to alternative modalities of teaching and learning - specifically hybrid and online - if & when the College was ready to do so.

This was also possible because I had amazing support. First, my husband, Peter Rysavy. We worked side-by-side all day long for months during the pandemic from home and helped keep each other sane as we spent hours responding to emails and solving seemingly one problem after another.

And to my dear friends and colleagues, Briana Daly and Rusty Michalak. THANK YOU. This whiplash fast pivot from face-to-face to online instruction resulted in successfully continuing education for our students and never would have been accomplished without your help and support.

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly seven years.

Now, almost approximately 10 years past my first day at Penn State University, I've moved on to the next chapter in my career.

I had the great fortune of meeting a team of highly motivated & talented individuals that run two online courses - Building a Second Brain (BASB) by Tiago Forte (https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/) and Write of Passage by David Perell (https://writeofpassage.school/). Forte Labs (https://fortelabs.co/) is an education company and I’ve joined their team as the Director of Course Operations.

You’ll start to see some different types of posts from me around here - in just a few weeks I’m headed out to California for my first in-person company retreat for some in-depth future planning mixed in with getting to know each other fun. Thank you for your support, friends! Grateful for our blessings and the opportunities that have been extended my way.