Living in the Upside Down: Reflecting on a Year of COVID

We all have those moments when we remember exactly where we were when something significant happened.

I added Wednesday, March 11, 2020, to my personal list when I was sitting in the back row at the County Board of Legislators and County Executive Picente pointed to me and said, “The Governor just closed you.”

I remember wondering what that even meant. I know we close for snowstorms or power outages, but a virus? I called the office and the College’s Crisis Response Team (CRT) was already assembling. The next week was filled with all-day CRT meetings trying to make sense of it all, each day culminating with an email update for our students, faculty, and staff. It was mentally draining to slog through so much unknown territory only to count the day’s primary accomplishment as a single email to the College community.

By Monday, March 23, the entire College was operating remotely with a few exceptions of essential staff. The CRT met all day every day for several weeks then had daily check-ins through mid-July in an effort to develop the details for creating a COVID-friendly operation filled with density reduction, 80% remote instruction, residence life protocols, centralized health-screening check-in stations, bracelets, door monitoring, testing, and other details that did not exist prior to the disruption.

Everything was new. Setting up home offices, spending all day in front of Zoom squares, and having the normal rhythm of daily life turned upside down was unsettling to say the least. 

One of my most vivid memories of the early COVID lockdown was driving to the Newark, N.J., airport with my wife to pick up our oldest daughter as she caught the last flight out of Togo, West Africa, when her Peace Corps experience came to a sudden end. We drove on a dark and desolate five-lane highway at 10 p.m. with the NYC skyline on the horizon and not a single car in sight — a post-apocalyptic feel that I’ll never forget. Watching the nightly news and reading headlines trying to understand what was going on was mentally exhausting. Playing trivia games with friends via Zoom on the weekends helped ease the discomfort, but simply wasn’t the same.

The College’s Workplace by Facebook platform helped maintain some connection with the “Social Distancing Together” thread filled with random artifacts of working remotely — new coworkers and “officemates” of cute kids and funny animals and precious “throwback” pictures that we likely wouldn’t have seen otherwise. “Virtual happy hours” and different departmental strategies to stay connected despite the remoteness helped keep folks together. A virtual graduation ceremony was an emotional moment for me to consider the impact of what our students were going through and just how powerful our work is here at the College.

Summer was like living in parentheses — it was normal in a sense because of outdoor activities, but it wasn’t because there were no gatherings of any kind. At home, the relaxed pace provided an opportunity to inventory the upsides, like having both of our girls home with us and spending bonus time together, having our health, and having our jobs as we watched the devastating impact of the pandemic around the country. 

As August came and the College began a new academic year, all the anniversaries of our normally robust fall semester were hard to emotionally navigate. The absence of gathering at Fall Opening, new student orientation, sunny fall afternoons with vibrant campuses, soccer games and meaningful student activities made it that much harder to push through as the pandemic continued. The holiday-spike in positive cases and deaths were a sad development that quickly gave way to a return of 1% positivity rates and the optimism of the vaccines arriving.

I now find myself in a “COVID-normal” state of mind that provides a manageable routine without getting too anxious about things. I continue to be amazed at the dedication and commitment of faculty and staff that has been demonstrated over the past year. It’s as though the respect and trust I hoped we had developed in the culture here was amplified in ways that exceeded my expectations. That seems to be how we’ve made it through together — believing in each other and holding ourselves accountable to do what needed to be done.

And now it’s hard not to look to the future. What will it look like? If 2020 was the year of the upside down — full of shock and awe — 2021 is likely more a year of transition to something different, rather than a return to pre-COVID life. While we’ll likely have a “masked normal” for an extended period of time, I believe things will change dramatically when the social-distancing guidelines are fully lifted. Until that happens, we’ll continue managing within the parameters we have with an eye toward carrying out our mission in the best way possible — striving to do our best work while being patient with each other and ourselves … and the world as we know it.

If you have any questions or comments, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.

Staying Tethered in the Workplace – Personal Guideposts

While the COVID-19 pandemic has upended most every aspect of life for all of us, I have been thinking a great deal about one situation in particular — college students getting ready to secure their first career-related full-time job.

Many may be interviewing and onboarding via videoconference, starting their work remotely, missing out on the informal cultural cues they would have gotten under the old normal circumstances. Thinking about the world of work in the current context has also made me reflect on the core principles I’ve embraced throughout my career that guide me to this day. I share them here with the hope that they might be helpful to new college graduates starting out, as well as individuals further along in their careers who can compare and contrast them with their own guiding principles for success.

You Can Never Get Lost on the High Road

Roughly 20 years ago a colleague of mine (who was 20 years my elder) and I found ourselves in a difficult situation with no clear solution. Our only options were choices that neither of us wanted to make. After much discussion, he said, “Well, Randy — I always say, you can’t get lost on the high road.” And with that, our choice became very clear. Since then, I repeat this phrase whenever I am faced with a difficult decision. People often speak of integrity as something you must constantly nurture and never want to lose. This phrase helps keep integrity intact.

Under-promise and Over-deliver

Building your personal brand is more important than ever these days and having dependability at the core of your reputation is a great asset. I learned early on that making a habit of under-promising and over-delivering goes a long way to building your personal brand. I started my career in institutional research, which had me constantly responding to requests for data. Managing expectations is critical, so I’d always ask for a deadline on the request. If they said Wednesday, I’d ask if Friday was okay. More often than not, they’d say “sure” or “whenever.” I’d tell them they’d have it by Friday. When I gave it to them on Wednesday, they were surprised and very thankful. Under-promising and over-delivering whenever possible infuses positive energy into the workplace and strengthens interpersonal relationships with others.

Add Value Wherever You Can

I played a lot of sports growing up, and my parents always reinforced the notion that it wasn’t about me and my individual performance, but rather about the overall team effort and my individual contribution to the larger outcome. I was just happy to be on the field or court, adding value wherever I could. The same applies to the workplace. We all have our assigned jobs, but no task should be beneath anyone. I still take notes in small group discussions and pick up wind-blown trash as I walk across campus — whatever it takes — because I’m part of a team and just happy to be in the game. It’s about having a “give first without expecting anything in return” mentality that somehow pays dividends beyond whatever you give. I’ve kept this notion top of mind throughout my career and have found it to be a differentiator.

Listen More Than You Speak

Politicians, philosophers, and celebrities have all been quoted referencing the fact that we have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen twice as much as we speak. A related sentiment from these often-quoted individuals is how no one can learn anything when they are the one talking. It sounds simple, but it’s not easy to do. However, if you can apply it — particularly early in your career — you will accelerate your learning and influence through the knowledge you gain by simply giving others space to talk. If you focus on the quality of your words rather than the quantity, people will come to value your opinion and contributions.

Avoid the Rumor Mill

One thing that isn’t talked about enough in career advice is the rumor mill. I had a mentor early in my career who quoted Eleanor Roosevelt: “Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” Fortunately, she was the kind of supervisor who encouraged me to ask her questions and, rather than feed the rumor mill, would help me reframe and recognize that there are multiple sides to every story and that all organizations are complex. By encouraging me to focus on my own locus of control and what I could influence, I’ve always been able to stay centered on my own work and responsibilities without getting distracted by gossip and rumors. People know who feeds into the rumor mill and it usually works against the reputation of those whose names are always in the mix.

See Yourself as the Hero in Your Own Journey

And finally, embracing Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” and applying it to yourself — you are the hero in your own journey — is a concept that I rely on to this day. I liked this brief video so much that I watched the entire short film. While the film is a little quirky, the messages are useful and increased my understanding of how each of us has gifts and potential that, when nurtured through the lens of the hero’s journey, allow us to commit to the challenges before us, helped by mentors and guides that appear along the way to help us secure the success and treasure we all seek.

What are the principles that guide you for your own success?

If you have any questions or comments, you can contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.

Small Bets – Innovating at the Edge

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified many trends that were creating disruption even before 2020 and accelerated elements of our society that brought the future to the present overnight. With enrollment declines and dramatic decreases in state and local government budgets, funding models for public community colleges have become more fragile than ever. Since 2007, the convergence of technologies has fostered the development of new and disruptive educational platforms, and this has only been magnified by the pandemic. Augmented and virtual reality, as well as robotics and artificial intelligence, are developing at rapid rates with tremendous potential to disrupt learning even further. And the ever-widening gap between the “haves and have-nots” in this country has grown to the largest among any of the G7 nations, with the wealth gap between the richest families and the poorest in this country doubling between 1989 and 2016. This has been made even worse by the pandemic — burying our most vulnerable students behind layered and intersecting barriers to advancement.

It’s enough to make one curl up and just hope for survival. It’s overwhelming at times to consider how fast everything is moving amidst such complexity. However, if the idea of making small bets — innovating at the edges of an organization — is embraced, an organization can shrink the change, as Dan Heath suggests. MVCC has been nurturing our organizational culture to continually scan the environment to monitor these macro trends and take bold actions to make small bets that will keep the College well-positioned for the increasingly complex and ever accelerating future. With partners like Jobs For the Future (JFF), the Community Foundation of Herkimer and Oneida Counties, and many others, we’re able to identify promising practices and rally the resources to launch minimal viable products (MVPs) and begin iterating our prototypes.

Securing the Financial Future of the Institution

State and local funding combined with student tuition have long been the primary revenue base of community college funding. Grant funding is mostly temporary and is not sustainable, so something more is needed. The MVCC Foundation created a separate Limited Liability Corporation (LLC), Tea Leaf Ventures, to support three social enterprises. If a social enterprise is a commercial venture that supports social good, why not make the College the social good? Tea Leaf Aircraft Exchange, Tea Leaf Manufacturing, and Tea Leaf Touring and Consulting are all in their infancy but hold great promise for new and sustainable revenue for MVCC.

Embracing Disruptive Platforms

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are disrupting the way in which people access content and learn. Coursera enrolls 73 million and edX enrolls 32 million individuals around the world. We are prototyping how to create non-credit to credit-bearing pathways for students to complete this content and apply it to their credit programs. Our computer science faculty created a pathway from the Coursera platform for the Google IT certification curriculum. In addition, we’ve also used the edX platform to deliver a non-credit leadership certification to students in our YouthBuild program at our Educational Outreach Center. As content delivery is changing, so is the transcripting of learning. MVCC recently launched the digital credentialing platform Credly to allow students to post their micro-credential certifications on their personal social media accounts like LinkedIn.

Anticipating Accelerating Technology

Technology is accelerating an incredible rate. Robotics, augmented and virtual reality, and behavioral “nudging” are all technologies of promise to increase student engagement and success. Robots have been the thing of science-fiction but they are increasingly becoming more prevalent in society. While some robots are available at substantial costs, MVCC faculty are working with the Cyberhawks student club to program Misty the Robot, which was purchased with a $2,500 donation. Misty will be available on the Rome Campus in the near future to interact with students.

Our YouthBuild program is implementing immersive learning technology through SkillMill Training through Interplay. We also implemented Persistence Plus this past Fall to connect with students through texting powered by intentional messages of engagement supported by artificial intelligence that is having a positive impact on student retention.

Muting the Impact of the Wealth Gap

Although College-Community-Connection (C3) is an important component in our current holistic student supports, it’s actually a “small bet” early prototype of what may very well scale to be a fundamental component in our future operations if the current national trends of a widening wealth gap between the “haves and have nots” and the growing complexity and stress of daily life continue. Ensuring that our students’ basic needs are met and that they can rely on the College to help make sense of all the learning options that will help them secure a good job or career will become more important over the next decade. C3 has all the makings of what will be needed if these trends continue.

COVID-19 has compromised our students’ ability to build the relationships they need to secure a great job and pursue the career of their choice. Our Career Services department is working with a cohort of about 125 students on a special LinkedIn project that will allow us to test a few things and gradually scale up the ways in which we get our students on the platform to expand their professional networks and build social capital for themselves.

Guided Pathways as Prelude

Guided Pathways is a comprehensive framework to increase equity and student success. Given the magnitude and scale of changes called for in the framework, it’s hard to imagine Guided Pathways would be a small bet. But if the trends of a growing wealth gap, decreasing support of public education requiring new business models, accelerating technology reshaping the student experience, and increased stress and complexity in society, the Guided Pathways framework is a prelude to the types of changes that will be needed 10 and 20 years into the future.

All of these small bets are in motion. Some are more developed than others, but all of them combined signal that MVCC is focused on how the present connects to the future. Making small bets like these positions us to learn with emerging and promising approaches to serving our students better and keeping the College strong and well-positioned in what will likely continue to be a very uncertain future.

If you have any questions or comments about this post, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.