Global Perspectives, giving AULA graduate students the inside track in the Fulbright competition.

I promote national and international opportunities among graduate and undergraduate students, alumni, staff, and faculty at Loyola Marymount University. I direct campus activities that are the focal point in the external and internal networks that inform and support my institution's best strategies for success. The first fellowship advisor at LMU, I have connected the academic and creative aspects of scholarship competitiveness with the strengths our candidates demonstrate as participants in the entire mission of the university, that is, to recognize and develop the distinct advantage LMU’s commitment to social justice gives us.

I managed a merit scholarship program with an endowment that grew from $5 million to just over $48 million in the three years that I was its associate director. Along with the new support, I thought it was imperative to create a new, more academically and intellectually challenging context for the program. It seemed to me that this context was already present in the institution as isolated units, a great program here, and inspiring professor there. I gave myself the mission of forging broad,strategic partnerships for our fellowship and our students to put the possibilities of the university at our disposal. I worked with everyone from the editors of UGA's acclaimed literary magazine to the director of the African Studies Institute. To be honest, $48 million wins a program plenty of friends, however, the best part of the fellowship wasn't the money, it was the exhilarating array of opportunity and the sense of connection we were able to create together. Among the innovations I introduced into the Fellowship was the post-freshman summer travel study project. I am happy to say that during my tenure as its chief student affairs administrator, the fellowship traveled the world, from Tanzania to Cuba, increased its enrollment of out-of-state students, strengthened the academic and intellectual potential of each fellow, and took a step closer to making UGA a viable choice for the South's best students.

As the original coordinator of the University Honors Program (UHP) at the University of California, Riverside. As the first person on the ground as the program began, I was responsible for creating and implementing every facet of the program, from setting up the offices and the physical plant, to organizing curriculum and designing a recruiting plan. As a recruiter for the program, I worked with our admissions office, early outreach programs, and recruiters to build the program from 70 to over 500 students; I was also the main architect of the agreement which allows transfer students to join the UHP and receive credit for the honors work in community college. I gained invaluable, practical skills that helped me to envision, from a new administrator’s (and a new student’s!) perspective the vagaries and triumphs of crucial systems that drive financial aid, admissions, the registrar or the residence halls. With my promotion to Associate Director, I expanded the program to fit the scope of a grant I co-wrote to the Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement in Post Secondary Education (FIPSE) which successfully extended to opportunities of the university and the honors program to incoming freshmen from under-served populations and drew faculty, graduate students and honors students together in a collaborative and challenging academic project, the summer UHP. Our second grant from the Ford Foundation allowed us to add an international component to the program from scholarships for honors students on the UC Education Abroad Program and to a community-based lecture series on international and multi-cultural issues.