Stacy Ness

I think the biggest important piece of any job is just to really focus on your relationships with other people, to learn and grow, and to be open to feedback, because everyone you meet is going to be teaching you something. I never thought I would be in the position that I'm in when I started teaching. If someone would have told me I'd be an associate dean at a college, I would have laughed. But it just took me to find my passion of working with students with disabilities, and then just being open to letting my road and journey go in the direction that it did, and just see different opportunities that I had sitting in front of me. You have to do a good job for networking to work. You can be a subpar at your job and be a good networker, and still not get that advanced. You have to be good at your job, and then when you network, they see the good job you're doing, and then it's easier to advance.

I would say find your passion, and then you can go as far as you want with it, no matter what. I never thought I would be in the position that I'm in when I started teaching. If someone would have told me I'd be an associate dean at a college, I would have laughed. But it just took me to find my passion of working with students with disabilities, and then just being open to letting my road and journey go in the direction that it did, and just see different opportunities that I had sitting in front of me. I think the biggest important piece of any job is just to really focus on your relationships with other people, to learn and grow, and to be open to feedback, because everyone you meet is going to be teaching you something.

I think right now, our biggest challenge is figuring out artificial intelligence, and how we incorporate that ethically and professionally into our programming. We want to help our students to use it responsibly, because we still obviously want them to learn all the content, but also how to use it in their field to help with their workflow and production and ideas. We're trying to balance them to learn to think on their own, and come up with their own ideas, and then using AI to enhance their ideas and provide additional opportunities to figure out creative solutions, creative ways to do their job and their skills, no matter what field they're in. We're doing that a lot, trying to find that balance. Education is our top priority. We want our students to be able to critically think and analyze, but then we want them to use the tools to enhance that. I think it's good if it's done the right way. We're trying to teach our teachers the basic skills of being a teacher, and then later on, saying, hey, now that you know how to do this by yourself, this is what we can do to help speed up or generate ideas.