Haley Smith

I really owe a lot to my undergraduate professors. I had the pleasure of having some very strong women teach me in my undergraduate career. They opened my eyes to a lot, encouraged me to learn more about cultures and individuals outside of my own experience and background. In doing so, that really pushed me to want to better myself, not only just for my own personal gain, but to be able to work hard for other women around me. I'm very passionate about women's rights and women's equal pay, and so learning a lot about that and being able to take that and use that to help other people has been something that I do attribute back to those professors and advisors.

I think, especially when working in higher education, the best thing that you can do is to be an active listener. I've always been encouraged to actively listen and try to meet the student where they're at, rather than expect them to meet me where I'm at, because everybody's path in life is different. So it's important to do everything that we can for those individuals to help them succeed.

I'm lucky enough to work at an institution where I have always had a female boss, but I know that not everyone in higher education has that same experience. Traditionally, higher education is a male-led field. So I think it's really important to go above and beyond and educate yourself as much as possible. It's really important that you know all the ins and outs of what you're doing. And then, in turn, you take that information and speak up for yourself and stand up for yourself. But also, don't be afraid to express your ideas, because those ideas could hopefully eventually lead to active change, just like with my dual enrollment proposal.

I think that there's a lot of shift in education as a whole. In high school systems, there's a big push in AI, and that's trickling into higher education as well. In higher ed, one of the things that we have to do is evaluate your prospective population. So, what is the current high school population interested in? What's the most effective way to communicate with those students? What are they interested in? It's a changing wheel that you have to come back and evaluate every single year. But I also think education as a whole has drastically changed in the past year, just with everything shifting more towards trades and for people to go directly into work, rather than going into higher ed. So that's been another field that we've had to navigate.

Something that's really important to me is making sure that not just in my professional life, but in my personal life, I am a good role model to those around me. As I stated previously, being an active listener is really important professionally, but I also believe that it's important in your personal life as well. It's hard to grow as an individual if you're not listening to those around you. I think it's really important to listen and learn from your colleagues, but also your peers in your personal life as well.