Asst. Director of Student Involvement
Q: Where did you go to college?
A: I went to Western Carolina University for undergrad and The University of Tennessee for graduate school.
Q: What were your favorite activities at each university?
A: Probably being an orientation leader, which I did for two years. Being in my sorority and being president was always challenging. I also liked being a tour guide, definitely, because I got to meet so many incoming students and their parents that way. That was such a blast. And on the side, I liked being outdoors in the woods, hiking and that kind of stuff.
Q: So what brought you to the University?
A: The job definitely. I came here originally as assistant dean of students to work with leadership development and community service and did that for two years and then took this new position to work with student involvement, which is still leadership development. The addition is working in the Student Activities Center with the 536 student organizations that we have at U.Va.
Q: What are your responsibilities in your new position?
A: This new position is mainly working with Student Council to provide CIOs with the resources they need to be able to plan programs and function. So basically I do anything from walk-in advising, help on how to plan a fundraiser or how to plan a program to how to deal with different kinds of challenges that come up in student organizations like officer transition, conflict or recruitment just about anything. Then also, my responsibilities include building leadership programs and working with U.Va. Lead and the women's leadership development program and the new premier leadership program, Blueprint, which was hugely successful. It was the first time we ever did that this spring.
I'm also working with leadership 2003, which is our summertime leadership program that we run in conjunction with the vice-president of student affairs. And then next year my outreach will be primarily to community service organizations to continue the leadership development programming and what we started here and to really build a relationship with community service groups and try to figure out what kinds of support they need in terms of resources.
Q: What are your hobbies?
A: I love to cook, and I tend to try out new recipes. I also love to grow fresh herbs to use in my cooking. I love to hike and to do anything outdoors, and I've been doing some mountain biking lately. Anything with arts and crafts -- they give me a hard time and like to call me Stephanie Stewart sometimes. And I just love leadership. I think that leadership is a fascinating subject. I love teaching it, and I'm working on a textbook on leadership.I also really like the combination of leadership and outdoors education. And travel, definitely travel.
Q: If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?
A: There's nowhere in the world I think I wouldn't go. But I'm particularly interested in going back to Dharansala, India, which is where the Tibetan government in exile lives. I'm very interested in working with the orphan Tibetan children and possibly even in the department of education there. I'd like to look at their leadership model, which tends to be very hierarchical and traditional with the men in the higher positions and women as teachers and that type of thing.
Q: If you could teach any class, what would you teach?
A: I would continue to teach Paradigms and Strategies of Leadership. I think it's a class that should be permanently on the curriculum and unfortunately it's not at this point. I think that leadership can be a very academically rigorous topic, and I hope that the rest of the faculty ends up supporting that one day.
Q: If you could teach your students one thing what would it be?
A: I guess there would be two of them. One is to act with integrity because I feel like no matter the outcome of the situation, as long as you've acted with integrity, you have to feel confident in your decision. The other one is to learn from failure and mistakes. We all make them, and college is the best time in the world to make really stupid mistakes and learn from them. And I think failure is a very essential part of leadership.
Learning how to take the time to reflect and figure out why things failed and to make changes and find a better way of doing things is really important. A lot of students really struggle with not getting into organizations or things not working the way they were planned and really having a hard time with failure, and it's really important to take failure as a good thing and a learning opportunity.
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