Interim Director of Student Success Programs, Millersville University

Hi, I'm Darlene Newman and right now I'm the Interim Director of Student Success Programs. So, basically what we talk about, we look at academics, we talk about their classes. How are they doing right now, do they have all their books? Is their anything that they need? What do you like about your professor? What do you dislike about your professor? How are you getting organized for classes? Have you been to your study halls for this week? Do you need tutors? You know, there are so many different things that we are asking them. Students that don't have majors, they may ask us to help them with major clarification and that's when we bring in different professors and stuff like that to talk to them about their area of interest and stuff like that. So, it's constantly, you might have a student that's homesick that come in. We have commuters that come in from Lancaster that are probably a part of our Lancaster Partnership Program and a lot of times we have to feed them 'cause they don't have meals and so we keep food at the office all the time and you'll see a big lunch party. I think that they had ordered 26 pizzas for the students. But it was pretty awesome, though. For 26 years I was Assistant Women's Basketball Coach and I did academics with that. I did the recruiting, I was in charge of when we traveled, the hotels and stuff like that. I set up the meals and everything as we traveled. But the major part with that was again, was academics I did a lot of academics. So, I signed the students up for tutoring. I worked with not only our basketball team with at-risk students, I had a lot of coaches that would call me and get me to help with their students. I set up study hall programs for our students and other students, more of an academic plan, academic plan for success to get students on track and keep them on track and stuff like that. I worked with camps. All of our camps that we had in the summer I set up. Start with the little kid's camp all the way up through Nike Camp and team camps and AU tournaments and stuff like that. And besides that, being on the road recruiting students for the program. So, for 26 years, it was like long, long days. So, I'm not missing the long, long days but I'm definitely missing the students. And I shouldn't say that because they still stop in to see me, so. (laughs)