Kelly Grady

Assistant Dean, Graduate Student Academic Affairs, NHS
Age: 48
Hometown: Ashburn, Va.

What is your job description?
There are two categories: advisor to students, with graduate students you usually only work with them if there’s a problem, though I wouldn’t want them to think of me as only the problem person! So with grad students, life events come up, some good events: they get married, have a baby or sad things like a parent is sick. So I do a lot of advising and adjusting to the academic workload. And then the other thing I do is help with the overall program management: things like, I’m in charge of orientation so if we see that there’s a problem where people maybe aren’t understanding expectations I would go back and fix orientation or, you know, policy procedure.

What’s the biggest challenge of your field?
When I think of my field, from the standpoint of education, not necessarily from the nursing standpoint, and for our specific students, I think the problem they have is that they have complicated lives, so to find the time or have the ability to manage working full-time and being in a rigorous program, maybe aging parents or maybe they have young children. So the students I work with have very full, complicated lives and that’s the hardest thing. They’re certainly bright enough, it’s just you have to have enough time to do it well.

What’s a memorable encounter you’ve had with a student?
Recently, one thing that happened that made me feel good. At the end of a conversation with a student she said, “Wow, I feel like this was a TED talk!” So that was really nice. But I think that the calls or the things that are really rewarding is that students are often coming to me in crisis and they’re not sure how to make it work, and I guide them so that they can figure it out, and that relief they feel when they’ve figured out a plan is very rewarding.

Do you feel your program is supported by Georgetown?
Yeah, we are. We’re definitely forerunners, because we’re the first online, and so we have had the growing pains of being a new program, but people have gone from being skeptical to really embracing it. Because you know, as old as our university is, to think, “Wait, you don’t have to physically be here and it’s still really rigorous,” took some people a little getting used to the idea, but now I think everyone’s on board.

Interview by Katy Berk