What’s kept me at the University and what I really enjoy about the University is because it’s always changing.  The University has grown in size, it has you know from, once again when I started in PersonneI, I knew almost everybody on campus.  Now I go to so many events and not know a lot of people there just because the University is so large.  So there’s that part and because I do believe in lifelong learning, this is the place to be for that.  There’s always opportunities to learn things such as, even in our staff meetings we try, at least once or twice a year, to bring in a faculty member into our staff meetings so they can talk about their research just to put the connection back to our staff on the … what’s truly happening within the institution, and where else do you get those kinds of opportunities?

I mean, I think our size is definitely an advantage.  I mean it’s ... this might sound funny but we’re very nimble when you talk about universities which things still take time to change here but when you compare against other institutions.  That is one of the advantages of working at the University as well is that not only do we have our internal community, there is a networking community amongst all post-secondary in Canada so we interact a lot with other institutions.  And when I see what we’ve been able to accomplish as an institution and how we can bring about change is an advantage over the larger, some of the larger institutions where they do not ... it takes a lot longer and is more bureaucratic in trying to make change.  As well, they don’t have the same interactions so there’s interactions with other departments.  They don’t know the people in the other departments whereas we have the advantage that although it's grown so we don’t know as much about the other departments as we used to, you still have those connections and we can still come together and work together as a team to ... a senior administration team to work together to resolve problems.  Whereas in large institutions, I think that would be a lot more difficult.

And, I think we also have the advantage of that we have a close connection with the Lethbridge community which, I am not sure, once again, that in those other institutions, whether you would have that.  We definitely have that here, and that is definitely top of mind that our roots come from community bases, so that is ingrained, and that is important as we move forward that we maintain that relationship.

(Interviewed by Diane McKenzie)