(Photo: Emily Schneider)
By: Samantha Jewell, Humans Editor
What brought you to Regis University?
Well I was teaching at the time, and I had just had my son, I was teaching as an adjunct. I was teaching a little bit at Metro and Community College of Denver just to see if I wanted to teach. I had left the industry because I was raising my son. What appealed to me about Regis was that I could teach to essential values. That I could question the profit motive and those kinds of things and I wouldn’t get harassed about it. Businesses are in business to make a profit, but my argument has always been you can’t be for a profit. That philosophy is harder at some schools to speak your mind on that and for students to explore that idea. That is not the Harvard model, so that appealed to me.
How did you get into the business world?
I started back when I was in my teens essentially. I left my home when I was 17 and I started working right away. I worked in a factory and got promoted, and after doing that for a couple of years of I decided that I better go back to school. So I went back to school, and I had this position at a company called Guardian Industries where they gave me a car and helped me with my tuition a little; I started with them and stayed with them for ten years, I got my BA, and then I just liked it. I got my undergrad in political science and I wanted to go to law school, but I never stopped working to pursue doing that. I was in the business world, and I was good at it and I knew the ins and outs of it, so I stuck with it. I did not think I could afford law school so I just continued on and I did pretty well so I finished my MBA and went to work with medical devices and I loved that! I had a line mammography equipment that I represented, and it was great because it was a women’s issue, it was not like pushing pencils, and I got to work with engineers, I got to work with quality control, inventory, etc. So I enjoyed that and then I had my son, so I stopped working full and started teaching part-time to see if I liked that. By the time my son was in Kindergarten, I had started d my Ph.D. and after I finished that I started teaching full time.
What are your interests outside of teaching?
Well, I love gardening, and I used to run but I bicycle a lot, and I do a lot of walking. We once as a family rode the Katy Trail in Missouri. I thought oh well Missouri is pretty flat it should not be that hard, oh no, no no! It is not like Denver is at all! I love that. It is a great way to travel, and you get to see stuff. The Katy Trail follows the Missouri River, so it has all these tiny towns that were bypassed when the railroads came in. It used to be the river was the primary transport for all the good and exports and people and when the railroads came in it took all of these towns, and some are ghost towns, and it is fascinating. I love that; I love to travel and to see new places.
What has been your fondest memory at Regis?
My fondest memories are honestly being able to work with students, and that is honestly why I am here. That is my favorite part of my job. I think that is where I can be the most help and that is what gives me meaning in my position. I have stories of students who had the odds stacked against them, and they came around. I had students that came here from other countries, and they were just lost, and no doing so well and then by just working with them and they become an excellent and happy student.
What classes do you teach?
I teach most of the suite of marketing classes and then BA250. In the past, I have spearheaded the BA250 courses because I think that it is so important to get those fundamentals down and so that is my very favorite class to teach. I think part of it is that students come in and they have their mind made up already about business, about what they want to do and what they want to be. So I get a lot of new students.
What is your favorite Jesuit Value? Why?
‘How ought we to live.’ I think that if you keep that in mind, in general, you are going to make better decisions. What kind of world do we want to live in? It is particularly pertinent when it comes to business because business decisions do impact how we live. IT is a social entity, so if we live by standards that allow us to pollute or to mistreat people and put them in unsafe working environments then we are cheap and do we want to live in that kind of world? So that is the foundation for that I teach business.
Is there anything else you would like the Regis community to know?
In general, I would like the Regis community especially faculty and students to realize how business is integrated into how everything goes on in the university and that we can all begin to think about doing business by making business decisions. I think you need to understand that to be good consumers you have to be good citizens. Again it is going to touch everybody that is in the university. This is something that we are all involved in, and we should have ground rules that are both prosperity, we want to be prosperous, and the university wants to be profitable, we want to be sustainable over time. Also from a meaning point of view, if you understand business principles and business decisions it is not unlike making decisions in other areas, and you are more apt to include the process of moral thinking, ethical thinking, but I think it is appropriate for everyone.