登录查看更多内容

Who’s in charge around here? The role of staff in universities.

Maria Glymour

Professor and Chair, Department of Epidemiology, Boston University (Additional affiliation: University of California, San Francisco Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics)

发布日期: 2024年9月8日

I’ve written a few LinkedIn essays for people considering graduate school in epidemiology or public health.?This one is for people starting graduate school.

When I began my graduate studies, I had a mental model of a university as operated by faculty members. This may seem absurd but I really imagined a big tower full of professors who made everything happen by dint of their incredibly big thoughts. This mental model was challenged as I moved through graduate school, when the most important university personnel in my life were arguably the department receptionist (Noreen), the rotating staff members at the registrar’s desk (this was in the olden days when forms signed in triplicate were required to add/drop/change courses- I saw those folks frequently), and the clerk at the coffee shop (Kei- who somehow poked gentle fun at my anxiety and cheered me on while selling me a 17th cup of coffee during exam week).? No shade to my wonderful faculty mentors, but I saw Noreen and Kei nearly every day when I was a student and they always made me feel like I belonged. Their generous warmth and good cheer created a community and conveyed optimism that I would succeed.? Compared to these lovely and inspiring interactions, the outcomes of meetings with faculty were… less predictable.?

The role of “non-academic” staff in running the university became even more obvious when I started a faculty position. I realized that I didn’t know much about how the university worked!? I was pretty good at running regressions, but I could barely operate the copy machine, much less figure out how to do the most essential university tasks, ranging from submitting grants to buying pizza.? My skill set was shockingly narrow, and it remains so. The only way a university works is an incredible group of hyper-competent people who bend the large and inscrutable bureaucracy to their will. Universities are organizations of Byzantine complexity, with a lot of arcane knowledge about how to make things happen. They are multi-layered human collaborations with a disproportionate number of notoriously tone-deaf individuals (i.e., people with PhDs). In short, the university is profoundly dependent on the staff, and a lot of what determines how nice it is to be at the university is how awesome those colleagues are. And yet, a lot of times these folks are overlooked - nobody receives a Nobel Prize for getting payroll to work.? JAMA never publishes about the modern-day miracle of collecting all the biosketches needed for the grant application. And no matter how comprehensive the budget, it hardly ever gets featured on the website as the astonishing accomplishment it is.?

The Boston University School of Public Health has awards to recognize staff, and this year I realized I wanted to nominate so many of the staff members in our department I might accidentally overwhelm the review committee. I don’t think I ever adequately expressed to Noreen and Kei what a difference they made - and I’m sure I was just one of hundreds of students who benefited from their kindness. As you’re walking through the university, please take the time to look around and say thanks to the fantastic people who make it work. And remember that whatever we may accomplish that is useful and good in the university, everyone here is a part of that accomplishment.

****