Alexis Cusumano

I would say to never feel like you need to make yourself lesser or quiet your voice about things in spaces where you might have an impact. Obviously, while doing everything professionally and respectfully, definitely always push through that. I think higher education as a landscape was built, foundationally, for white men, and in some ways, being a woman can still be hard in higher education, despite being a large majority of the staff population being women. The biggest thing is to kind of not dim your light for other people, and if you push through, do the work hard, that will definitely pay off, but to always make sure that your voice is heard, especially when it needs to be.

I think being open-minded to change is really important in being successful in higher education. As we as professionals continue to get older, our students are younger and younger, and kind of far removed in age from us. As I'm growing as a professional, the students that I'm serving are getting into a bigger age gap from myself and even maybe the people who are directly reporting to me. I think it's really important to be open to changing things and being open to really figuring out what maybe is working for the new generation. What has consistently worked might not be working for the new generation. Each generation really has different priorities in how they approach things and how they use technology, even how we're seeing things like AI and ChatGPT. I don't think that it is helpful to be resistant to that change. I think it's really helpful to work with that change to be a successful leader so that you are working with your students rather than against them. We've been having conversations with students just trying to understand how they're using AI in the classroom and outside the classroom in their everyday life. It is informative for us to figure out how we can meet them in the ways that they're using it and either tailor our programs or the way we communicate things to how students might be using it, or teach them how to effectively use those tools since we know that they're going to use them.

I always say I always would like to be student-facing in some capacity. The whole reason I got into higher education is because I love helping students and love really making a difference for them on campus. I had a really great experience when I was a student, and I really attribute a lot of the positive experiences and outcomes that I had to some of those mentors that worked at the institution at the time. So I definitely would say continuing to be that figure for the incoming students and new students at whatever institution I'm at at the time. Seeing the students that I made an impact on get to graduation and succeed and go off into the world to make a larger impact, that makes it all worth it. I still have students reach out around graduation, and they're always like, thank you, you've made this impact on me, I'll be grateful for this. Seeing the students that have maybe had a rougher time proceeding to graduation, who maybe had a rougher journey, and when I was the person helping them through that, and then seeing them go to graduation and graduate and be successful, I think that is usually the thing that makes it all worth it.