Hello SAAL Blog readers! Here is the next installment of our conversation series getting to know the leaders that make up this wonderful group of Student Affairs Assessment Leaders and learning from their personal stories. I joined the SAAL blog team after starting a new director role and, being new, I reached out to others who have been doing this work for a while. Given SAALs mission and vision center, in part, on the creation of a thriving community, I thought I would share with you a bit of what I learn from these conversations as well as some information about the humans in these roles, the faces behind the listserv emails so to speak.
Each conversation has been an hour long, so I’m not going to share all of what we talked about. I’ll share a bit about who these individuals are, some of their thoughts and advice, and hopefully give you some new ideas to ponder in your own work, with my own take-aways following the recap of our conversation.
Megan Bell (she, her, hers)
Executive Director, University-Student Union
California State University, Los Angeles
In her current role: began late April 2024
(Previously served as Special Assistant to the Vice President of Student Affairs California State University, Northridge leading assessment for the division)
Also serves as: Student Affairs Assessment Leaders Vice President for Community Development & Engagement; Previous Co-Instructor for the Student Affairs Assessment Leaders Open Course
Tell me about your journey into student affairs assessment. How did you get here?
I've always just kind of had an interest in it but didn't really have any formal training. So, in other roles I was trying to do what I thought, you know, was some good assessment work without any support, just trying to improve my departments.
Then we had an accreditation visit at a prior campus, and I don't know why, but I was asked to kind of help write some of the arguments that pertain to the co-curricular. Being asked to comment on that I think that took our campus leadership by surprise, because in the past our accreditation was focused mostly on the academic side so they were scrambling at the last minute. And then some of the feedback we got was we needed to do a better job on the co-curricular side of assessment so then I was asked to start this. I was like, okay, if I'm gonna do this, I need some help. Eventually through some of my dissertation work, I got connected with Renee, the SAAL president, and she told me about SAAL. There was a SAAL meetup at one of the conferences and I was able to connect with some of the board and some of the people there and just got really into it. I thought they were really smart people, doing really cool things. Hardly anyone started out as student affairs assessment, but just ended up, for a variety of reasons, being really into it. So, I started that work but it was on the side. And then we relocated because of my husband's job three years ago. I was kind of figuring out what I wanted to do, and I was just, honestly a little burned out. I was an interim Assistant Vice President at the time and COVID kind of did me in. Now I had this new opportunity to, like, really think about, what do I want to do? I had a little bit of space, which I had never had before in my life, to reflect, and I thought, you know, I do really love this assessment work, and the hardest part about it is never feeling I had enough time for it.
This role came open at CSUN, and it was the first full time assessment role here. So I like the idea of still being in student affairs, but getting to create a whole new initiative. Along the way, I was elected to the SAAL board and got to teach the open course with Joe. So for the past two and a half years, I've been all in. Some things changed in my husband’s role and I was missing some of the aspects of the roles I held before I started full-time assessment, so I’m transitioning back to student union work soon.
What advice do you have for me as a new director or someone new to this field?
I would say and I think you’ll hear this from a lot of the SAAL folks that even though we are talking about data, numbers, stories, is that the way I get my work done is building relationships. That is what I spend a lot of time doing. Showing up one on one, sitting down with people, hearing their hopes and dreams and challenges for their areas. Without that, like, I can have the most beautiful assessment plan, I can have a wonderful report of disaggregated data, but if they're kind of like not connected to it or don't trust me, it's just not going to work. People will ask “how do I shift the culture of assessment for this full division?” I kind of joke, like, one cup of coffee at a time. I do a lot of coffee. Sometimes we're talking about assessment, but sometimes I'm just listening. I have a unique role. I see the whole division. I get to work very closely with our senior leaders in the division but I'm not their supervisor. I've tried to create a space where they tell me what they are struggling with and then think about how do we turn that into something that we can actually work on and get them really excited? You have to care about what they care about. And that's sort of the benefit of my weird path, is that I have this breadth of working in a lot of different areas, so I try to use that and leverage that. I see myself as, like, this connector of people and projects and ideas. But nothing works without relationship and trust. I would say probably half my time has been building relationships. In my role teaching with the open course, I see this come up a lot too. We hit this point in a few modules in and some folks like are like, “I'm giving them all these tools, all this stuff and no one cares.” Well, what have you done to sort of like build that connection, make them want to respond to you, you know, make it fun? Not taking ourselves too seriously, I think, also goes a really long way into getting on board.
Those relationships are so important when we talk about the reason these roles exist. When I interviewed, this was a new position. They never had a full time person before. I told them, I do have a PhD but I am not a data analyst. My role is not to sit and crank out a bunch of reports from SPSS. I'm here to shift a culture. When I started some areas were doing a ton of collecting data. But, what are you doing that for? And I heard “well, because we have to do it.” Okay... What do you care about? Like, what's going on in this department? Tell me what's up. What are you working on? What are you trying to advance? What are you excited about? Okay, let's connect the assessment work you're doing and your goals to that. And they're like, “oh, we can do that?” Why do we think these are separate? But these roles are also so challenging… you get through to some of those folks that have held on for a long time. But sometimes all we can do is advise. Right? Sometimes the director would be open to changing it up, but was a fearful of what the AVP might think. I've had to be very gentle with the way that I sort of challenge that, their paradigm. All of that to say, this is a hard job because a lot of times you're alone.
I felt so much connection with Megan during this aspect of our interview. I am struggling with a lot of the same cultural aspects over fear of doing something new, letting data go, doing something creative instead of the same survey that’s been administered for the past few decades. I’ve been struggling with how to think about managing my time – where do I focus given limited bandwidth to make the biggest impact? People were so excited for my position to come online, but this work is hard and even just doing one in-depth project takes up a lot of time. When you have over 20 directors in your division, you can’t give them equal attention. I asked Megan how she balanced this tension in her own role:
I tried to put things in place that could be helpful to everyone. Like a lot of simplifying. I did figure out who my allies were where I could build momentum. I don't have a lot of active resistors, I have to say, just the people you could tell just weren't as into it. Some mentor along the way was like, let go of the people that aren't on board. Sometimes we put so much energy into them. That was helpful because I have harmony in my top strengths, so I want them to be with me and feel good about it.
What’s the biggest issue/change you are watching in the field right now?
I think the connection and intentionality around equity minded assessment is really hard, but really amazing. It's challenging work. To me, assessment work and equity work have to be married. They're not separate initiatives. We don't have equity work over here and assessment over here. It's a very big priority in California because the nature of our campuses in the Cal state system and some direction from the system level to address some of the gaps we're seeing in graduation and persistence. In California it's front and center. We're all in, we're going for it. And then we have our other states who can't talk about it. And this wide continuum of perspectives and what's going on on our campuses for DEI. So I really don't know where that's going to head, but I really feel for our colleagues. I know last summer when I was talking to people from Texas and Florida and one woman was saying, “I've built this thing for the last 15 or so years, and I feel like it's all being undone. All the work that I've put into, you know, equity minded assessment and division is just, it's just being rolled back.” I know people are getting creative and trying to support each other through it, but, man, it's hard enough to advance this work as it is and then to have that sort of environment, it’s hard.
What do you do in your spare time?
Well, I'm an uber to my teenage daughter. It's my part time job. Uber driver and Doordash food delivery person. I love to read. I'm in a couple, two different book clubs. One is at this little bookstore– woman owned bookstore— by my house in my neighborhood, which is super fun. I also love going to the beach and I go as much as I can. And I love eating out - all our extra income goes towards trying new restaurants in LA. And I don't get to do this as often as I want, but I love to travel. We don't have a big trip planned right now, but a river cruise through Spain and Portugal is my dream. I don't know how to make that happen yet though.
I’m so sad that our little sub-field is losing Megan (what a gem of a human!), but I’m also happy when the student affairs assessment tendrils spiral into other functional areas. The perspective Megan brought to her work allowed her to focus on goals and culture change in a more natural way having previously served in other leadership roles. Most of us seem to move up and into the Director of Assessment role, and for Megan this wasn’t the case. Hearing how someone with prior leadership experience saw and approached her role was validating. I bet this perspective also means that her focus on culture and goal setting means that what she accomplished is likely to be “legacy work” in setting the stage for what CSUN will be able to move forward in the next few years. It’s hard work to change culture and minds, and Megan seems to have developed a natural approach to coaching and supporting others in something they may not feel totally comfortable in. Once again, these conversations highlight the importance of talking, communicating, getting coffee, and building relationships as a means to encourage that work.
This series is meant to highlight and lift-up those who are working in assessment full-time on a campus with at least some of their time dedicated to student affairs or co-curricular assessment. Know someone you’d like to learn from featured in the series? Leave their name in a comment and I’ll do my best to connect with them!
This blog post was written by Sophie Tullier, blog team writer and Director of Assessment, Data Analytics, & Research at the University of Delaware.