Becoming a Higher Education Leader

“University Registrar” isn’t usually included in the list of dream jobs for children. So how did we all wind up in these higher education leadership roles, and what have we learned along the way? In this episode, Andrew Marx, University Registrar at Clark University talks about his unconventional, yet not altogether uncommon path to the registrar’s office. Andy shares his reflections on becoming a higher education leader and gives advice to those moving through the process.     

Key Takeaways:

• Take the time to reflect and decide what kind of a leader you want to be. Try to do this as you’re moving through your career growth as time for self-reflection is at a premium when you actually get “the job.”
• Being able to communicate your vision and sell the story of your office is an important skill. There’s a way to say “no” that doesn’t shut down future conversations, and emphasizing the reason you’re involved can go a long way to making sure you’re included in future decisions. 
• The registrar’s role looks different at different institutions. And there is often tension between what the community expects of the registrar position or office and what the registrar brings to the table. 

Host:

Doug McKenna, Ph.D.
University Registrar
George Mason University
cmckenn@gmu.edu   

Guests:

Andrew Marx, Ph.D.
University Registrar
Clark University
amarx@clarku.edu  

References and Additional Information:

Core Competencies: Leadership and Management

Transcript

0:00

You are listening to For the Record, a registrar podcast sponsored by ACro. I'm Andy Marks, University registrar at Clark University, and this is becoming a Leader in Higher Education. Hello. Welcome to For the Record. I'm your host, Doug McKenna, university registrar at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Being a registrar is famously one of the careers that elementary students across this yet great nation of ours clamor for whenever posed the question, What do you want to be when you grow up? No, no. 00, I'm, I'm being told no, that's not correct. Hardly anyone anywhere grows up thinking, I'd really like to be a university registrar. So how then did so many of us find our way into this vocation, and what have we learned along the way? We've had a few conversations about people's newness at being the registrar and some exploration of career paths, and I think it's worth continuing to talk about these things because there's so many different stories from all of us. So today I'm pleased to welcome Andy Marks to talk about his career, his transition to the registrar position. Uh, broadly, how he became a leader in higher education and lessons learned along the way. So Andy, welcome to the podcast. Yeah, thank you for having me. You bet. If you would kick us off with an introduction of you, who you are, what you do presently, and maybe a little bit about your current institution. Yeah, so I am at Clark University. I'm the university registrar, and I've been there for almost a year to the day, as we are coming up on the first anniversary. I was in institutional research is where I started my sort of registrarial career, actually. And I thought that was really good training for sort of that uh registrar function. You sort of have to think about data analysis, you have to think about storytelling and how to present to audiences, you have to understand confidentiality and privacy. And I, so I started an institutional research, did that for a few years, and at some point, the director of the department left and I was told to just move over to the registrar's office. And that's how I became a registrar. So when you say everybody dreams of being a registrar, in fact, Yeah, I did not dream of being a registrar. But I think it really appeals to me, sort of my analytical nature, the ability to organize and think about systems as opposed to just thinking about a specific function, because a lot of units really focus in on how do we get from this point to the next point. And I think when you're a registrar, you don't really get the benefit of only thinking about that, like you have to do that, but you also have to sort of understand. Where the systems are talking to each other, where the people within the systems and the people using the systems are talking to each other. And that all of that sort of really appealed to me once I understood what it was. And so that's how I sort of decided after um taking over some of the operational pieces for the registrar's office, uh, because originally when I transitioned over, I stayed with institutional research, and then at some point, that position became available, and I moved into being the operations manager, really deciding that I wanted to stay in it as a career. Right on. So it's not like you put out into the universe, I would like to be at the university registrar. It is like the universe. Came to you and said, we would like you to be the university registrar. Yeah, the, um, vice president at the time, in the nicest way possible, wanted nothing to do with me. And I, I think she was sort of like, who can I put this person underneath to just get them to continue doing the same thing. And I, you know, I don't blame her and registrar and IR have a lot of overlap. So I think it really made sense for that particular moment in time. But no, no, no dreams of registrar. I don't even know that I ever went to the registrar's office when I was an undergraduate. I never went as a graduate student. Um. And that's, by the way, that's how I sort of modeled my management style is like, how can we convince students never to talk to us and never to come to us? And what can, what do our systems need to look like? What do our processes and procedures need to evolve so that they are just never interacting with us at all? Yeah, it's the Homer Simpson meme of just like disappearing into the bushes. I think it's like we want to create systems and enable people to do the things that they need to do without without ever knowing that we're there really and I tell my staff that all the time like we're, we should be practically invisible on campus in a lot of ways for for the way that students interact with the systems and and gain access to their own information. And then on the flip side, like I think you've talked about sort of understanding the interconnectedness of some of the functions, and that's where as registrars, we get involved with all sorts of things across campus. But to your point, I never wanted to be a registrar either. I was working for IBM and uh then got laid off from IBM. And needed a job, and so I found a position as a degree audit coordinator in the registrar's office at Notre Dame, and then realized, oh my gosh, this is like this is my jam, it's data, it's a sort of an overlap of all the different functions at the university and there's connections across, and it was really fun and so I've I've stayed in it. So tell me about the first time that you, how did you get into institutional research? Let's start there. Like, what was your career arc in, in that before you sort of had an awareness of the registrar position and those responsibilities? Yeah, this is not glamorous. I needed an excellent. Perfect. That was it. I needed a job. Uh, I had worked as a consultant for some department. At the same institution, and that sort of got me the road towards um being able to talk about what was happening there and being able to, when I interviewed, kind of sound like I knew what I was talking about. Um, but I really didn't understand anything about institutional research. Um, I didn't understand survey data the way that I do now. Um, of course, I went through my doctorate. And so that's sort of where you get, you get. Sort of an elevated understanding of data analysis through that as well. But I really had nothing. But I think what benefited me is I was willing to just dive in and figure it out with some of the training that was provided by the director. And some of it was just like, you know, we, we didn't Google back then, but whatever the resources, whatever books are on the shelf that said, here's how you do survey research, and here's how You do, um, all these other pieces, that's what we were using, you know, here's what FERPA is you back in the old days, which wasn't that long ago, the FERPA was just this thick book of page after page of sort of how to what it is and how to apply it. And that's what I was using to sort of understand what institutional research was and probably registrar too, though I had better mentorship once I was in the registrar's office. Yeah, let's talk about that transition a little bit. Along the way, what were some of the things that you gleaned from either your IR experience or the mentorship that you received when you landed in the registrar's position? That you thought to yourself, oh, that's really useful. I'm, I'm gonna, that should stick with me, or uh contrastingly, are there, were there things that you were like, I'm never doing that, that's crazy. Yeah, uh, the one that comes to mind most obviously is learning how to talk to people. And I think, you know, if you ask me, and you may be planning to ask me, you know, what, what advice would I give? I would say, let me tell you something, you need to figure out how to talk to people and how to tell a story and really how to meet them where they're at. And I, I kind of have come to this point where I hate that phrase, like, it's a little overused now, particularly in higher ed contexts. To say we're gonna try to meet students where they're at, we're gonna, you know, try to connect, you know, because they're, they're talking about, well, we're, we're not going to send you an email, we're going to send you a text message, because text message is where you are. But of course, that it's just, it's not a mindset that, that I think really helps. But Um, that is indeed what I'm going to give people advice is to say, learn how to talk to people where they're at, which means, let's see, what does it mean? It means that you have to understand that not everybody comes with the same context when they're taking information in. They don't. Necessarily know what's happening at the institution at that high level that maybe the leadership is looking at. If they are leadership, they may not know the day to day stuff that's happening in any sort of detail that allows them to step in and run your day to day operations. So when you're trying to meet people where they're at, that is sort of what It is, right? It's like, OK, what is the context that you are bringing? What are you trying to problem are you trying to solve? Uh, how can I communicate with you in a way that is going to resonate, and you're going to actually listen to me. And those are all skills that you kind of have to develop somewhere along the way. Because if you, if you don't, you can still do your job. But people are, you know, registrars are invisible, right? Registrars offices are these, these, they're not even like Oz behind the curtain, right? They're the, they're the office behind Oz behind the curtain. And it's, and it's like, well, how do you get heard when you're that far away? And I think that's true in a lot, in a lot, a lot of organizations and higher ed, where there's just this, this layer of invisibility where, where you are expected to do all these things and understand everything that's happening at the institution. And yet, you have to fight to be heard. And one of the ways that you do that is learning how to communicate that information to the right people in the right way. Yeah, I, I think that's a really interesting insight about, you know, we talk on this podcast, particularly it's a registrar focused podcast about how important the registrar position is, and we are, but there is a real tension there between like what we think we bring to the role and the expectations that the community may have of us and or our office, and you've talked about this a little bit or written about it and Understanding what that mismatch is, how do you mean or how do you overcome those differences or the tension that's created by the difference between your own sense of how important the role is versus the community's sense or or community's set of expectations of the registrar's office. Sure, I think first you really have to understand what kind of registrar you want to be, and understand that offices are really different. And when you look at, for instance, like acro list serves, and you see these people asking questions that some of them will seem very basic to you, or at least very routine, and they have no experience with it, that's sort of your glibber that we are all set up very, very differently. We all have different staff sizes. We also have different um expectations put upon us from leadership. So some of us are more operation oriented, some of us are more um systems people, some of us are more strategic roles. And then you also have these, this version of the registrars, which is sort of my version where you kind of have to do all of it. And so are you conceptualizing it as three different jobs? Is there a way that you can find that harmony between the different roles that you have? So the very first step is, as you progress and through the registrar track, whether it's a traditional one, which also mine was not a traditional track, right, I just sort of got dumped into it. Or, or you just find yourself heading in that direction, and you know, you're going to stay and registrar, decide what kind of manager you want to be, decide what kind of registrar you want to be, and decide how you want people to be able to perceive you. And the other thing that's really important tied to that is to understand that we, you know, we have a reputation for being the house of no, you come in and you're like, nope, we're just not doing that. And how strictly you want to convey that message can go a long way towards whether people are going to invite you back into those conversations later on. So, you're asking me, I would tell you, Take a deep breath and say instead of house of no, can we be the house of let me look into that for you, or house of maybe, we'll see how it goes, right? The house of I see where you're coming from, and could we do it this way kind of a thing. Yeah, and, and because there's a nice way to say no, there's a nice way to say anything that whether it's negative or not. But that is not going to make you friends. They want their problem solved. And the registrar is a problem solver, right? Our job, broadly speaking, is to make everybody else's job easier. And if you're constantly saying no, you are shutting off some of those avenues towards, you know, solving problems for people, but you're also potentially running into the problem of, they're not even going to ask you the questions when they have questions to ask. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about some of the challenges that you faced as you transitioned in. Tell me about that transition. Tell me about like your experience coming into the office and what was sort of that discernment process for you about what kind of leader you wanted to be. How did you gain some of the skills that you needed to be that registrar? Yeah. The, uh, so the last two positions that I held, which were both registrar, one was university registrar, one was registrar for the Fletcher School at Tufts, so it was a graduate school of about 500 or 600 students at a time. Um, both of those, I walked into situations where the staff were feeling a lot of pressure to perform under really difficult circumstances. So at Fletcher School, I started during COVID, and the building was completely shut down. And they had made all these decisions really quickly, that affected staff that became like these permanent models for how they were going to operate, and the staff were not prepared for it. My own team. Had not been fully trained on all the registrar functions, and there was no permanent registrar at that time. So they really had nobody to turn to. They had no mentorship, no training whatsoever for an extended period, and they had been sent home. So for one of the things that blew my mind was, as I said, there, I walked into the office, building's empty. It's my first week and I just asked for permission to be on campus. And I said, where's our printer? And they had sent it home with one of my team members. And I was like, OK, well, now let's, let's take a deep breath. Let's bring the printer back and figure out how we can operate that doesn't require you to take the entire office and transplant it into your bedroom, right? Like, but that is essentially what they had done. And I don't blame either leadership or my team for making those decisions. I mean, that time period was really traumatizing for everybody. And you had to sort of make these decisions that made sense at the time. But by the time that I came into the registrar's office, I said, OK, this decision no longer makes sense. Let's rethink this. First off, we're doing testing on campus every day. You come, you get tested before you show up to the office. We're still the only people in the building for the next 6 months after that. And just started thinking about like, what, what does this even mean that that they're attempting to act as if everything is normal. Things are not normal, and they've been really disrupted, and you still need to do all the things that you have to do for your team to keep them functioning. You still have to do performance reviews, which is crazy in the time of COVID, right? You still have to try to get the professional development except everything's been moved online and some of that's effective and some of it really wasn't well developed at the time and you still have to do the work and get the students their diplomas and get the students their transcripts and process transfer credit. That was really intense. Now I have to say I went in very, very confident that I could figure out how to do it. But I also had to do my own job. And I think that's where then when I moved to Clark, not COVID now. So we are, I wouldn't say we're post-COVID, but we are ignoring COVID at this point. And, but we have other challenges, right, that are going on in the here and now that are creating pressure. There's, there's constriction in the workforce, there's fewer students that are enrolling in, in colleges. And there's the competition's heating up no matter where you are, and you're seeing schools close and all this stuff is happening and people are worried about their jobs. And what really struck me about meeting my team is that they were really concerned about not being able to perform at their best. And I said, hold on a second. Why should you perform at your best? Like, this is not a normal time period either. No, it's not what was happening 4 years or 5 years ago, 6 years ago, which by the way, it was only 6 years ago, right? Like when all of that started. But now you're facing all these new pressures, and maybe it's OK to say, I don't need to perform at this level every single day. I can do it once a week, whatever it is. Uh, and I needed to give them permission to think about priorities in a different way. So I, I mean, look, the leader is the one setting the priorities for the office anyway, right? So without leadership, And without a registrar in place, it's really difficult for just an average staff member to come in and say, OK, we're going to sort all these into a priority list, and we're just going to take the ones at the top, and we're going to stop when they get here, because the rest of them can wait. That is what your registrar or your leader is supposed to do. But they need a permission to sort of hear that and take a break and take care of themselves and take vacations and take time off. And I was, I was like, no, that's first. And then come back when you feel like you can, you're capable of working at your best and then work at your best, and the, the work will take care of itself in the meantime. Yeah, I think that's so important to focus on personal care. I do find I've worked at 5 different institutions now in registrar's offices in each of them, and I have found that registrar's office staff are some of the most dedicated. And maybe, you know, self-flagellating employees where they're just willing to take on more and more because they believe in the, in what we're doing in the mission and um they recognize how important the things that they're doing are, but at the same time, you can't do anything if you're completely burned out or if you are, you know, beyond. And so I love that focus on like, hey y'all, take it down a notch, like, yes, we have a job to do. Yes, it's important, the work that we do is important, the service we provide to the institution is important, but it's not more important than your personal health, wellness, and safety. And so, like trying to find that balance is an interesting thing and trying to convey that as a leader to your team, and get them to believe it and to buy into it is often sometimes a challenge as well. And not just your team, but your own leader. ship right? Because part of what you're describing goes back to this earlier, this expectation alignment between what they think a registrar's office does. Right. My perspective, and this comes mostly from experience and talking with, you know, colleagues, is That there are basically 3 categories, right? There's the expectations on paper that they think a registrar's office is supposed to do, which often has that strategic level thinking and systems level and integrations and all these, these buzzwords. Then the bucket of what they actually think a registrar's office does so that when you start, it's not always. exactly aligned with what was in the job description. And you get there and you're like, OK, but wait a second, you hired me to do this thing. But in fact, that's not what this job is. And then I think those are the expectation. The third bucket is sort of the expectations you put upon yourself. And I, one of the difficult things is to recognize that those three things can be very, very different within an institution, because leadership doesn't, They may understand what a registrar's office does, but they don't necessarily think that's what their registrar's office does. And that's a really big distinction because you have a job that you also are being evaluated on, and you also want to get those salary bumps when they're available, and you want to be considered for promotion. And if they're evaluating you on criteria that first off, wasn't on paper and also wasn't really communicated, so you're just kind of inferring, I guess, what you're expected to be doing, that can be really difficult. Yeah, how do you overcome some of that? How do you build that understanding or the common ground there with the people who are at your institution? Yeah, I, well, I think you have to force yourself into those conversations. And so when you know you haven't been included in a particular topic or curriculum development, uh, turns into curriculum implementation. If you're not there at the early stages, then you're not doing what a registrar's job is to do, which is go in early and just help steer the direction of that curriculum in a way that's consistent with your regulations. So I think it is making sure that they understand that you want to be there. And be part of those conversations early on, even if it doesn't end up being an optimal situation, I think because of different governance at different institutions, you're always going to face a little bit of of lack of optimal results, right? It's also about reminding them what you are doing. And this is that idea, you know, you are, you have defined yourself to yourself as a manager, as a, as a registrar, this is the kind of registrar I want to be, and then you have to go out and sell it. And you have to remind them that no, this is actually what I do for you. And I do phrase it that way. I always start conversations and end conversations by saying, what, what problem are you trying to solve? And how can I help you get closer to a solution? I don't think now with my years of experience in registrar, I don't honestly think that people hear it that way, uh, but they, they can sort of. Get a little bit closer to believing it, if you say it enough times. I definitely have been in the room where I've sort of said, no, no, no, I'm here to help you. You tell me what you need. And then you don't get any response at all, or people just think you're, you're not really being intentional. You're just kind of saying something to get out of the room. But that's, that's not true for me. Yeah, and that's a challenge, because sometimes when you open that door, it It creates like, huh, can I do that? or, you know, challenges for other systems or other places in the office, but I like to lead conversations that way as well, like I, I remind people the registrar's office is a service office. We provide service to faculty, staff, other student service offices, students, especially alums. And that service looks different in across all of those different spectrums, and so the ways that we show up in those spaces and and the service that we provide is gonna look different for for those kinds of things, but To your point, I always go in and try to make the case that like, I'm here to help you. My office is here to assist through this process, and a lot of times when faculty have an idea, they have really good ideas. They just don't have the sense of like what, what do our systems support. How do we get from where we are today to the implementation of the idea? And if you can be there to say, well, we can't necessarily go that way, but we could do this, people are, in my experience, have been generally open to those kinds of guidance and steering. Uh, and course correction, and there are some hard lines where we won't do something because of accreditation or standards or federal laws or, you know, for us under the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia, they have a bunch of things. And that's, that's not uncommon states do that, but I find that when you are in those conversations and open to the discussion and open to the sharing of like what, what are you trying to do, what are we capable of doing, I find that those are much more positively received, and they get everybody further down the line than if you just come in and be like, hey, we're not doing that. Yeah, because I think you also have to think about change management and, you know, sort of how do you bring people along when you're trying to do, when you're trying to implement these big changes, either changes to the curriculum or changes to the scheduling. And it's, it's a process that if you If you stop and think about what it is, the problem you're trying to solve, and how you are going to communicate those changes, you also have to sort of ease people into it because change is scary. People don't always want to have to learn something new. They are afraid that change is going to affect either their job or whether their job even exists. Particularly, I think faculty do feel that way, because sure, some of them have tenure and have that security level, but you have a lot of faculty in the mix that um are coming on board and trying to integrate, and then they're just trying to make sense of the landscape. Of the entire, you know, the entire process of how do I, how do I teach this class, and how do I do what I need to do? And there's all these system things and there's all these nuances to this procedure. And then you come in, you're like, well, we're going to throw that out and do something new. And they're like, no, no, no, I don't want to invest that much time in this process. And so they, I think it's really helpful for the registrar's office to, to think about, like, how do we make this easier on everybody? And then how and then pitch it? How do we pitch it? Yeah, yeah, that goes back, I think, to your sort of central point about you got to learn how to communicate with people and to craft that story and be able to sell the vision that you are developing or that you've embodied. I'm gonna shift gears for a second and ask you a silly question, and that is, how important to you are spelling and consistent formatting? Uh, I'm a maniac about it. Yeah, but let me tell you, tell me more. In my first registrar titled associate registrar job, I was the one producing the catalog, and I had already had some background in um design, so. It was really about. spelling and grammar and clarity, and does this make sense? Is it actually what you're trying to say? And, but I would have to do that every year, right? Because that's a, that's an annual process. And so I think I really started ingraining in fixing those errors as soon as you find them. I have sort of let it go a little bit in my current role, because there's so much that just was neglected through a couple of years of transition. And I, and again, like, Ain't nobody to blame for this, right? It's just kind of the way it rolled out. But then you step in into the role and you're like, oh, this is very, very messy. Then there's spelling errors, and there's weird inconsistencies from one major to the next, so that it makes it really hard to understand the information that you're looking at. So 100%, you must be that person, and the attention to detail. I don't know that it's everybody's skill set. And I don't even it's definitely not. Yeah, I don't even know how you develop it, to be honest, I'm, It part of my personality to really um edit and re-edit. I think I'm a better writer, because I'm a better editor, not because I can write the first time, but then I can sort of shape it into the story I want to tell. So I don't, I don't have any advice for anybody that wants to learn how to be a proofreader, but you probably could take a class or something somewhere, right? Yeah, awesome. This is sort of a, that was an on-ramp to what skills and competencies have you found most helpful for you in your higher education leadership career and how did you develop them? Yeah, so definitely get some data analysis experience, even if you don't have, it doesn't have to be, I know statistics, math is not really where I, I live, but, um, get some sort of experience understanding how to look at data. And reproduce that and and discuss it with other people. I, I actually assume by the time you become a leadership role that you have some basic technical competencies. So maybe I don't need to say, get some technical competencies before you step into the registrar's role. And, and honestly, I think my advice would be to be curious and, and take that. I know it sounds really. ac ch ar ine but I think curiosity is so important for a registrar's mindset to, I, I tell everybody we don't have to guess, like we are a regulatory body within the within the institution. We can actually go look at the answer. And also we are the data steward. We can actually go. Some data and find out the answer. But it's amazing how people just want to either rely on memory or instinct, or throw that all out the door. Find the answer, find the proof that the answer is whatever it is, you know, what, what are you supporting that, that um analysis on? And don't, don't try to guess. So be curious, if you don't understand, if you're moving into an institution where it's a different student record system, I'm now on my 4th system. Oh big time. Yeah, well, system agnostic, that's how I describe myself these days. Yeah. But they're all just table structures in the end. Workday might be the one that's sort of a little bit different and how you have to think about it. But PeopleSoft Banner, they're, they're just tables. You just need to find the right table and you need to pull data from that table. And so when I say be curious, it's like, OK, we have this question in front of us, can we actually pull this number and go in and pull that number? Or how do I know where this table is? Well, if you don't know because it's a new system, be curious enough to go find out the answer, right? And learn it for yourself and don't rely on your staff's expertise, because inevitably, They are going to be experts on these processes and these procedures, and that will make you a better advocate for the registrar's office overall. That's fantastic. You've talked a little bit about, or you've mentioned the process of deciding what kind of registrar you want to be or what kind of leader you wanna be. And I wanna ask you to unpack that a little bit. What does that process actually look like? How do you engage in that sense of discovery? Yeah, so, uh, first, part of the reason I said to think about it before you take the job is because once you take the job, self reflection is time is, it's pretty limited. Yes, and I don't think that we always stop and think about how little time we have to think about who we are as a professional. You may find pockets of time or you may actually get some benefit out of performance evaluation. I, I, I'm not going to try to oversell that thought. But, but really, you just don't have a lot of time. So you do need to think about, you do need to carve out time. To figure out who you want to be as a leader. The other thing that I really just have to say before I even start to answer the question is, I think mentorship in the registrar's office is really lacking. So I think there's an avenue for finding mentorships, finding mentors through ACR. If you have access to all of the ACR tools, for instance, are you able to go to the annual meeting? Is there a budget for it? And I also think that there's people that just don't know how to use acro, right? So their institution may be a member, but then they don't know what to do with the fact that they have a membership, and they're not the registrar, right? And so is the registrar encouraging them to use those tools and saying, sure, take this training course or trade, connect with these people. And I just think that a lot of people don't know how to use it. So there is an avenue there, but I think it's limited in first.-- The way that it can be used-- 100% that that could be bolstered in, I would say 80 to 90% of registrar's offices across all of the acro membership institutions. Yeah, and so what do you do? You're reliant on your boss, and you're reliant on your boss, one, knowing how to mentor people, relying on your boss to care enough to give you a roadmap that you can use to become your own mentor, but also your own leader. And understand leadership style. And if you don't have that, then you're relying on piecing together your experiences to basically become a template for how you want to operate within your professional world. All of that is really haphazard, right? Like if you're really relying on the dominoes to line up in the right way, so that they knock each other over instead of just falling down, right? So I, I actually don't know that there's a lot of really good answers. I think you have to connect with people and you may have to connect with a lot of people in order to find the people who can speak to where you're at, right? I do think there's some value to spending some time on the list serves if you have access to Acro and just see what people are, are energized about, because at least it gives you a A way to sort of think about what is happening in the registrarial world, even if you're not tied into the regulatory news that's coming out of the either the state or the federal government. And the other thing I would probably advise you to do is start cultivating a localized network of, it could be registrars, it could be if you're not at the registrared level, but let's say you're uh assistant registrar could be at a level of meeting with other assistant registrars. And the reason I say localized is because I think sometimes the detachment from, from acro or from, or your boss, even, you need to have people nearby. If you don't have those sources of, and mentorship may be too strong a word in that case, but relationships, right? If you don't have those relationships, That you need them, you need them close by, you need to be able to just text a question, you need to be able to just send a short email and know that it's going to be answered. And the only way you're going to achieve that really is by staying local. Do you have schools in your consortium where you. And meet up with other registrar team members. Do you have schools nearby that maybe you don't have any relationship with, but you can just call them up and try to establish some kind of connection where then you can ask those questions. Not only will it give you somebody who uh is, is going to get to know you personally, but it also gives you somebody who's sort of operating in the same context you're in. State context matters an awful lot these days. So much, so much right now. And if you go outside the state, you're still going to make those great connections and you're going to meet awesome people who are doing really good work. But you have to do a little bit of translation too, as you start to triage problems and and use those people those resources. I had a fun question while you're talking, and, but I'm gonna shift because we're because of time. What is your favorite thing about being a registrar? Don't spit them out all at once. Yeah. Yeah, so I really uh am a systems person and. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about what that means, but I tell people all the time, I'm a systems person. I like things to work, and I like things to be efficient, and I like things to be quick. And I really think the registrar's role is really good for sort of finding those ways that things can work together, whether those pieces are the actual programs that you're using. Whether it's the procedures or the people that have to talk to each other, and bringing all of that together and saying, here, let me show you how this can work better. And that does bring me a lot of satisfaction, and it's something that the role is really custom designed for, right? And so for me, like being a being the systems person, I like to see the system actually working the way it's supposed to, and I like to see students benefiting from it. One of the things that can become a little bit of a trap is. You have to, you have to sort of recognize when you're being pushed to serve the faculty a little bit more than the students. A lot of registrars offices, including, you know, the ones at the schools that I went to that I've already claimed that I didn't, I didn't go, but. They were boxes, right? They were, they were these, and maybe they were glass boxes, but they were boxes and like you weren't invited in unless you had a specific reason to be there. And that's how they were designed. And part of the reason they were designed that way is because they were really large state schools. And so, but. But as a result, their idea of interacting with students, there was nothing about care, compassion, wraparound services. They weren't worried about you connecting to other offices. They didn't care if you understood what was going on with your financial aid, because it wasn't part of their mandate to do that. And I've never been that person that feels like I can just sort of wall myself off from the rest of the institution. So, I sort of take the approach that the registrar's office is a way to break down those silos, really dive into what is happening in other offices. I really like to know what's happening at the, the sort of the institutional level, and what's happening in the day to day level in other offices and how we can work together. And, and so I get a lot of meaningful satisfaction in my job out of being able to improve those relationships among the different offices, among the students, with students, with faculty, and, and focus on a lot rather than just a really narrow piece. I love that so much about the registrar position, and I thank you for coming on today and sharing your thoughts. I, I really appreciate this perspective. This has been a super fun conversation. I appreciate you being here. I appreciate you having me. Thanks very much to Andy Marks for sharing his thoughts and perspectives. I love getting to be part of conversations like this. Lots of good advice for people about building a network, seeking out mentorship, using the available acro resources, and spending some time in self-reflection. I love it. If you are enjoying the podcast, please subscribe via your podcast provider of choice, and please do share a link with your colleagues who might be interested. I will continue to encourage you to be vigilant. To get involved politically, to contact your representatives in Congress, but also in your state, make your voice heard on issues that are important to you. All politics is local. Be where you are, bloom where you're planted, and make some good trouble. Thanks very much for listening. Drink plenty of water, stretch your legs, put down your phone for longer stretches of time. Until next time, I'm Doctor Doug McKenna, and this is For the Record.