Lane Community College recently promoted Dr. Jane Reeder to Dean of Student Success. Dr Reeder previously held the position of TRiO and TRiO Stem Director. Originally from England Dr Reeder talks about navigating the college system and what she intends to do to make the system easier for LCC students.
Dr Reeder. Could you first walk us through what the Dean of Student Success is responsible for?
The Dean of Student Success oversees multiple departments on the student affairs side of the house, such as the TRiO STEM departments, the Veterans Center, First Year Experience, and Career Counseling. It’s kind of a broad overarching umbrella of helping those directors and colleagues do what they need to do to help students be successful.
What are you specifically bringing to the table as the new director?
I think what I bring to the table is that I’ve worked for 15 years as the TRiO director of multiple programs both at Southern Oregon University and Klamath Community College so I already have that experience with grad programs and working with the TRiO population. Students eligible for TRiO are either low income, first generation students, or students who have a disability. So the program is really a wraparound holistic services system that is grant funded. It is free to all students and helps them from when they enter the program through to graduation and transferring on. And that can be through advising, tutoring, workshops, and helping students navigate through the system. I know that when I first came to America navigating the system was super hard for me. And not knowing it was a whole different system than I was used to so it’s been my pleasure to be doing that for 15 years. Also before that I was a crisis counselor. So I think what I bring to the table is that holistic piece.
I’ve also learned how to be able to pivot quickly. I remember sitting there putting posters up two years ago that say hey we’ll be back in May we’re just doing this in an overabundance of caution. And, two years later, here we are. So I think the advantage of having that crisis work is that ability to be able to say, okay now we’re doing this so that we can move forward, we will get through this.
My doctorate is in adult education, so I think I bring that to the table too. Also my experiences of being an immigrant who came here with the advantage of a lot of privilege, but without the advantage of understanding how a college system works. So you know we can’t ever put ourselves into somebody else’s shoes, but we can use our personal experience to say, even with my privilege, this is what I experienced. What about students who don’t have that? How do we make this a more friendly environment and not make assumptions that everybody knows everything?
What issues or problems are persisting within student life right now?
I think the biggest one is our mental health, our students’ mental health. Students’ mental health is huge. We know nationally that this is a big problem for students and staff as well, and the fact that we’re coming out of a pandemic. We’ve also forgotten how to interact with each other. We’ve been interacting on screen, while we’ve been doing our email or petting the cat or whatever else. And so you know we have to learn how to get along socially again. We have to take into account that you know people are very frustrated, this is a super frustrating time and we add into that loneliness and, of course, the drug addiction, that we have in eugene. Dealing with those feelings of students feeling helpless and hopeless and knowing that there is help for them, so I think that’s the major one. When our mental health is not healthy it’s hard to concentrate on anything else that we’ve got going on. So I think that’s going to be one of our big struggles, adapting to what our new normal is. You know not not all of our students have the technological capability to whizz through things.
What are your plans to stoke campus morale?
I think in terms of student affairs there are certain things that we have done recently to make life hopefully easier for our students. Instead of having advisors all over campus and sending students running all over campus we’re centralizing them in Building 1. So Building 1 will be a kind of a one-stop shop. It will have our advising department in it, it will have our career counselors in it, and it will have our early outreach stuff there too. So instead of sitting there saying, ‘Hey, Molly, that’s great and I’m sorry that I can’t help you, but could you run over to Building Six and wander aimlessly around Building Six until you find the relevant room?’ So I hope that that’s going to help students to know that this is a central piece of where we are and that we can help you in these different ways. I know that one of the things that was frustrating for me was this: go to Building Three, go to Building Six, you’re going to do this and you’ve got to do that. So I think, I know that that was very distressing for my morale in terms of that, I think that that’s going to help.
One of the things that we’re going to do in Building One that we’re coordinating with the art department is to have student artwork displayed in Building One. The art department is going to be curating students’ artwork and that will be a rotating exhibit through the term. We will also be coordinating with our digital media programs to have student work put up on the monitors in that building so that current students and incoming students can see, this is what happens when you come to college.
In September, we are doing in person orientations for the first time in I forgot how long now. We’re running those through the summer and we’re going to keep them by necessity short because our attention span, we know from the pandemic is reasonably short, these days. I know that when I was a student and you get all this information we don’t hear a lot of it. So what is it that you need to hear to start to be successful? We will have students mix and mingle while checking in, and we will do snacks because who doesn’t want snacks? We will also have a tabling event for student groups. They will sign up for the orientation and when they arrive, they will receive a folder with hundreds of pieces of information about all the things that we do on campus, and it will have their first term academic plan.
We will know if the student has some unfinished financial aid requirements. Or, did they identify they were a vet or did they identify that they need disability accommodations? We can customize those folders for the student and sort out all those problems before the term starts. That’s kind of just streamlining the process and helping students to start that relational piece. You know coming in that you’ve got this information, you know where your contact list is going to be. I don’t know about you, but I know that students seem to spend a lot of time, the first of every term in different offices trying to figure things out.
Is there anything else you would like to add about the upcoming term and your role?
So my goal is to help you achieve your goals. Because I have goals, for example I want to get carpeting down so it doesn’t echo in the buildings. But what is important for me is what is your goal, and how can we help you get you there? What is it that we can do better? What is it that we do well, and continue to do, but that constant improvement and constant looking back and saying hey, how do we work together to help a student? I’ve been to lots and lots and lots of graduations and I know that it’s time to quit my job when the hairs on my arm don’t stand up anymore when they start pomp and circumstance. You know you guys work incredibly hard, how can we support you in that? Remembering that we were students once too.
