Marlene Canlas

Assistant Dean, Georgetown College
Age: 34
Hometown: Succasunna, N.J.
Time at Georgetown: 11 years total (2 in registrar’s office after graduation, 9 in dean’s office)

How did you start working at Georgetown?
I graduated in 2001 and it was a bad economy because September 11 had just happened. I was interning for an environment non-profit downtown with an eye towards getting a job there but after September 11 happened, a lot of places stopped hiring people. They were on hiring freezes while we figured out if the world was going to end. And so that wasn’t going to work out so a friend of mine told me about the job at the registrar’s office. And honestly when I took it I wasn’t terribly happy about it. I was like, “Uhh um OK, sure.” But through that I got to know the people in the various deans’ offices. Then I went and I did grad school. When I was almost finishing up, the dean’s office here, the College dean’s office, called me and told me there was an academic counselor position opening up. They knew me because I had worked in the registrar’s office. I was like, “Ehhh, not really for me.” I’d just gotten this internship at USAID and I really hope that’s where my career is heading. So I turned them down and I did the internship at USAID and a year into that I was not liking it very much and I was going, “Oh god, what do I do now.” This is where all my schooling had been gearing me towards. Lightning doesn’t usually strike twice but it did in my case and the College dean’s office called again and they said, “Hey we’ve got this other thing opening up. Any chance your situation has changed?” And I was like, “Uhh yeah! Why not?” And I didn’t know anything about academic counseling at this point but this group of people I knew and respected thought I would be good at it. So I just… It was a big leap of faith on my part and I took it and 9 years later here I am.

What was the learning process like when you jumped into this job?
You know, there’s no training. It’s all just on-site training. So I would shadow people in the office and get the flavor of their advising conversations. There was some sort ofhard training in terms of learning how to work the student information system, how to read a student’s Degree Audit so that you could tell them what requirements they had remaining. But most of it was learning by doing. Something that you may not know about the College dean’s office is that on Tuesdays we meet regularly to discuss new initiatives in the college or news from around campus or students cases or petitions. And a lot of the learning happened in those meetings when we would really talk about student cases and make decisions of their behalf and things like that. So those meetings are always helpful and I’m learning more and more stuff, even now, as we move on.

What is your approach for students who come in and have absolutely no clue?
This is a good question. I think students place a lot of emphasis on things like a major. And that’s understandable because it seems like a huge deal to make that kind of commitment at this day and age. So part of what I do is just to sort of calm them down and realize that you are so much more than your major. You are the totality of skills and experiences that you have and only some of that is going to come from your major, which is only 10 of 40 courses for your degree. So I try to get them to understand that they’re more multifaceted than that and no one major is going to lead to one particular career path. Especially now we find that young people are the most sort of ADD professional generation ever. The age of being a careerist in one position has gone the way of the dodo and we find that students are doing a lot of different things through the course of their life. And career shifts and changes in direction are pretty common. Part of demystifying the myth that the major is this big important thing. It’s important but it’s not the end all and be all. So I try to start there. And then I try to have a student organically figure out what they’re interested in, rather than basing it on this preconceived notion that an economics degree is more marketable than other degrees. So I try to get at a student’s organic interests. So I’ll say, “You go into Barnes & Noble — as if Barnes & Noble exists anymore — you go into a bookstore, what section are you going to gravitate towards?” Or I say, “If you open up a newspaper, what section to you pull out first?” And I think by asking those indirect questions, you really get to the heart of what a student is naturally curious about.

What would you say is the hardest part of your job?
I think that there are certain tasks that are unpleasant that I don’t necessarily like. I mean they’re important to the institution but I don’t love them. For example, sitting on the Honor Council is never happy business to do. Or deciding cases of academic suspension or dismissal. That’s never fun. So those are just unsavory tasks but they’re important. I’d say the hardest part is trying to have truly in-depth conversations with students given the amount of students I have to advise. And not all 300 of my advisees are going to come in looking for that kind of relationship. But if I just had that much more time and space I could really develop a deeper connection with my advisees.

What are your thoughts on the system where students have deans for two years and then have a new one?
It’s something that’s come up repeatedly. And we’re dynamic in trying to think of strategies that are the best for the students. Students used to change deans every year and we learned from the students that they didn’t really like that because they weren’t really able to develop that deeper connection so we now changed it to two years. I actually like it. Students may want the same dean for all four years but there are a lot of benefits from our standpoint in that it allows us to specialize in the events that happen on this side, in the first two years. And it allows my colleagues in White Gravenor to specialize in events that happen in the later two years like study abroad and graduation and auditing to make sure that students definitely going to graduate on the four-year mark. And on this end, we really specialize in having that conversation about how to choose a major or the four-year plan. So it’s just different and I understand that students want that relationship for all four years but there are some benefits to doing it this way in that we get to specialize in the events that happen during our two years.

How do you perceive Georgetown students?
Very ambitious. Very smart. Too busy. I think even at a place like Georgetown where we put a high premium on things like reflection and retreats and taking time to deliberately pause and take stops, I don’t think that students do that enough here. I think there’s an immense pressure to always be doing something at every given moment, to always be busy, so I think that’s my frustrationsometimes. That there isn’t enough time or space to just hit the pause button and think about what is happening.

What would be one thing that you would change about Georgetown?
That’s one thing. I wish that we could create a culture of reflection, although I think we do a decent job certainly comparatively to other peer institutions. The other thing that frustrates me is just a question of money. I think I wish that we had a bigger endowment so that we could attract more students from a more socio-economically diverse range. I think that would add a richness to the classroom that isn’t here. We have things like the Georgetown Scholarship Program, which I think is trying to get there. But I anecdotally hear about how, reasonably, a lot of their decision is based on who is giving them the best financial aid package and unfortunately Georgetown doesn’t tend to be at the top of that and I would like us to be so that we can a more diverse range of students.

What was the transition like going from being a student at Georgetown to your administrative role?
Eye-opening. Really eye-opening. I saw my dean, and this is probably true of a lot of Georgetown students, I saw my dean twice. And that was when I was called into the dean’s office to declare my major or do my senior audit. It wasn’t a place that I sought out. Knowing what I know now, I wish I had taken more advantage of the kind of advising and mentoring that is available here. I think students see us as the principal’s office and not necessarily this place where they can come in and have a casual conversation about their overall goals. It’s really been eye-opening to see what we do provide as an office. And really just the stuff kids go through while at Georgetown. Both in terms of the tremendous accomplishments they have that I wasn’t aware of as an undergrad but also the tremendous struggle some students face in terms of personal family crises or mental or physical health issues or financial strain. I sort of took all that for granted but here I really get a good sense of the diversity of experience. I think that’s really been eye-opening. Georgetown students put on a lot of masks in terms of always appearing OK and they are hard-pressed to show themselves in any kind of vulnerable light to their peers because it makes them feel like an outsider. So when a student comes in they’re often ashamed to ask for a withdrawal or to ask for a medical leave and I always assure them that they’re not the only one. From this side of the desk I see that college is hard for a lot of people for very legitimate reasons. I wish we could create a culture at Georgetown where people are more open to admitting their vulnerabilities or to asking for help rather than just really trying hard appear totally put together because they assume everyone else is.

Interview by Ian Tice