Transcript: Dr. Kathleen O’Connor, Volunteering for Higher Education (The Art of Volunteering)

The following is a transcription of The Art of Volunteering Episode 15: Dr. Kathleen O’Connor, Volunteering for Higher Education.

Stormy Bell (00:00): Welcome to The Art of Volunteering today. We’re gonna continue our discussion about community service and volunteering for high school and then today we’re gonna talk about it from the college perspective. My guest today is someone I’ve known for quite some time. She’s Dr. Kathleen O’Connor she’s the former Vice President of Enrollment Management for Lasell University. I’ll let her tell you all the things she’s been involved with, but she understands students and what their experience is in college or university. Dr. O’Connors, would you introduce yourself.

Dr. Kathleen O’Connor (00:40): I will. Please forgive me, I have a four month old puppy at my feet, so that’s my latest journey in life. As Stormy said I’m Kathleen O’Connor, Kate to my friends and I have worked in higher education for over 40 years. I’ve been a Director of Financial Aid. I’ve been a Dean of Students. I have been a Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid. I have been the Chief Student Affairs Officer. I have been the Chief Development Officer. I’ve overseen marketing communications, admissions, graduate admissions, athletics, institutional research, and I’m sure the registrar’s office. I’ve had a wonderful journey with a lot of opportunities and one thing I would say for anyone, whether you’re volunteering or you’re working, somebody gives you an opportunity just say yes. Just say yes.

Stormy Bell (01:41): As I mentioned today, our discussion is about community service and volunteering that prospective students put on their applications. I wanna know what does the college look for when they’re redoing applications and they look at community service, volunteering, anything in that realm? Why is it valued in the admissions process?

Dr. Kathleen O’Connor (02:04): There’s a number of reasons why it’s valued when you’re looking at it. If you’re reading a student’s application for college, what you’re looking at is does the student have 40 things listed and did they really do those 40 things? Were they engaged in those 40 things or were these one offs just so they could fill up that piece of paper? You’re looking for the type of experience the student had and what was the length of that experience? How much commitment did they make to that? Because that’s part of what you’re looking for. It’s not just the service aspect, but what did the student do? How did they engage? How did they commit? What level of responsibility did they accept in that organization? That says a lot about what kind of student they’re going to be when they enroll at your university.

I did a TV program with the Dean of Admissions from Wellesley [College] one year. We’re all looking for students who are going to make our community a better place. So you’re looking for students who demonstrate through their application for admission, the kinds of things that you think will bring energy, bring engagement, bring life, and bring good things to your community. Different things, but good things. It’s about building a community. Going to college, you don’t want just disparate individuals. You wanna build a team. You wanna build a community and somebody who has done service generally has worked on some type of a team. Sometimes a volunteer is a solitary opportunity, but generally working as part of a team is part of a service project. What you find is that students who have done service have taken the opportunity to expose themselves to people that are different from themselves.

Dr. Kathleen O’Connor (03:54): The beauty of service is that you can do it in any area that interests you. I happen to love being outdoors. I did a five mile hike at the [Cape Cod] National Seashore today and we saw whales. You can go out and clear trails. You can go and rescue turtles. You can do wonderful things outdoors. If you’re not somebody who likes to be outdoors, you’re more of an intellectually based book person, you can mentor younger students, you can volunteer in the library. There are all kinds of things you can do that help you express who you are as a person. In expressing that you’re going to learn something you didn’t know. One of the wonderful things you hope people are also gonna learn is humility.

How fortunate am I. I’m working with elderly or I’m working with underserved communities, or I’m helping to build a playground for students with different abilities. I may learn something about myself. I may learn that I am an incredibly fortunate human being to have the ability to do this. That’s an important thing that can be learned through service. It exposes you to things you might not ordinarily see. I mean at Lasell we had students, golly, a group of students took one of our vans and went down and they were fixing roofs in Appalachia. I guarantee you that the young women who were on that van didn’t know a darn thing about how to fix a roof until they got down there and someone showed them how to do it.

Dr. Kathleen O’Connor (05:43): The good thing is no one fell off that roof, but it is an opportunity for you to learn something new. We actually had one of the college carpenters come and give a workshop on how to use a hammer. Boy, if you become a homeowner, that’s a good thing to have learned. You learn different skills in what you’re doing. I walk in the woods a lot and you’ll see Eagle Scout projects. The Boy Scouts have all these Eagle Scout projects where they build bridges across marches and things like that. Someone had to learn that. So as a person looking at an application for admission, I’m looking to see how much responsibility did this person take? How did they choose to express their own talents? What might they have learned through that volunteer or service opportunity? Those are the kinds of things I’m looking for.

Did they take a leadership role that they don’t necessarily have to? We’re not all born in that role, but where were there opportunities for them to do that? I would say, I’m not reading applications now, but hopefully we’ve come through two years of a pandemic. I think some of the students who are going to be applying to colleges now would benefit from volunteer workforce service because it’s gonna help socialize them. They’ve been doing this kind of work for a couple of years now, how do I begin to relate back to people? I know as a former student, my own volunteer work and my own student work in college helped me a great deal when it came time for me to actually go into quote the real world and work. What had I already learned? What had I learned about chain of command? What had I learned about management? What had I learned in that space? If these students have not had the opportunity, then volunteerism or service is a huge opportunity right now for them to get out and start to look at the world. The world’s a very different place than it was two years ago so I think it becomes even more important now.

Stormy Bell (07:51): Oh, that’s awesome. Just in my life, the volunteering that I did and how it affects me now, especially my passion for volunteering, it’s kind of built over the years as to why I see it being so important and why I’ve encouraged my sons to do volunteering even when they didn’t think that they needed to but they did. If you’re not volunteering but just involved in campus activities, do you get the same type of experience or do you think volunteering is a little bit more beneficial?

Dr. Kathleen O’Connor (08:38): It’s different. I’m gonna come back to that question in a minute. When you said even when your boys didn’t think they needed to. I taught a course when we created the honors program at college and the first year course for first year students was on community. Recognizing that you are a member of a community. Different communities and for students, you might be a member of your class, which is a community. You might be members of your floor in a residence hall, which is a community. You might be members of a particular major, which is a community you’re part of a family, which is a community. If you look at community, it’s a social contract. You have a responsibility to put into that community, because at some point you’re going to ask for something back from that community.

You need to understand that being a community member and different vectors of it. You’ll be a part of a community of multiple communities. In our heads, we may not think we need to, but as a member of a community, we have a responsibility to engage in that community and so it becomes an interesting space. I always look at it as a social contract. That’s just an aside, but you asked about clubs and organizations and activities as opposed to service or volunteering. It’s different. My niece when she was looking at colleges, she’s a lacrosse player, and she said I wanna go to a school where the students don’t look like me. She said, because I will be part of a team. I will already have a built in group of people that I have friends so I need to widen that. I wanna be able to meet people who differ from me. Whether they differ from me ideologically from a religious perspective, intellectually, whatever it is, it enriches you to meet other people.

Dr. Kathleen O’Connor (10:48): When you’re part of not all, but when you’re part of a team or a club, generally you’re with like people. If that makes sense. If you’re part of a glee club, then you’re with a group of people who like to sing, probably if it’s a high school activity that probably all your classmates. The exposure there would be if your glee club went out and sang at a home for the elderly or something like that. Clubs and organizations are wonderful don’t get me wrong. They build dripping skills as well. You learn organization, you learn responsibility. You can take on leadership roles. They’re terrific. We look for those on an application, too. Service is different. It exposes you to a group that is not like you, which of these is not like the other you, you meet a different group of people and hopefully you learn from them. Does that answer you?

Stormy Bell (11:49): That does answer me very much so.Now I’m gonna give you an opportunity to love on Lasell since you spent most of your career there and why students should value the lessons learned through volunteering. Why they should value them?

Dr. Kathleen O’Connor (12:11): Well, I think they should value them because it, they, it adds dimensions to your life. I’m very fortunate that when I was at Lael, in some of my early years, there was a woman named Kerry Heffernan who became Dr. Kerry Heffernan and Kerry started a program called Women in Public Service. She thought that was very important. She’s the one who took that first group of students down to Appalachia. She had buses and bands running into the city to mentor kids, to teach math in inner city schools to younger children. We got a call, Carrie came into my office and said I need one of the vans and I said, sure, what are we doing? The reindeer over at this preserve have gotten loose and we have to go round up the reindeer. I was like, okay, you’ll go round up reindeer.

You could do things in your wildest dreams. You wouldn’t think you were gonna be doing. I think that that’s a huge opportunity. I am a product of a small school. I worked with three different small schools. I look at schools like Lasell as opportunities to expose you to those kinds of things. To exactly what we were just talking about to meet people that you wouldn’t ordinarily meet who give you those opportunities. I think that a school like Lasell has a huge opportunity to foster students and to help them find what’s interesting to them. It’s not just about, you know, do this. It’s what do you want to do and then how can I help you do that?

Dr. Kathleen O’Connor (14:05): How can I get the obstacles out of the way for you to engage in something? A student could come in and say I’m interested in doing some service, I just don’t know what. That’s where we were talking earlier about. Well what’s a personal interest of yours? You know, you love dogs, okay, there’s a shelter. Maybe they need dog walkers and shelters generally don’t have a lot of money. I love being in the woods. Okay, well, they need somebody who’s gonna manicure the trail so that we can do that. I love my grandparents. I love working with older people. Well you know what, there’s a senior center down the road where they might need people. As we age the eyes start to go, they might need people to read for them or those kinds of things.

There’s huge opportunities and I think a place like Lasell and some of the other smallest schools I worked at, there’s an intimacy, if you will, where you get to build a relationship with the members of the faculty and staff who will be mentors for you. Who will help you discover yourself. They’re not gonna do it for you. They’re just gonna try and send you on the right path. I believe if you look at Lasell, one of the things that was important to us was service, is service. We committed a significant portion of our university budget to funding the Center for Service and making sure that our students had access to those opportunities because not all education happens in the classroom. There’s a tremendous amount that occurs outside the classroom. A place like Lasell tries to foster that in students.

Stormy Bell (15:50): I have a question for you. I want you to know your blooper.

Dr. Kathleen O’Connor (15:55): My blooper?

Stormy Bell (15:58): Yeah! Tell me of a blooper and then what you learned from it.

Dr. Kathleen O’Connor (16:00): I thought about that. I don’t know if it qualifies for a blooper, but it’s very difficult to manage volunteers. It’s, you know, the old proverbial herding cats. There are folks who come into it with, I wanna make a difference. I really wanna do this, and they don’t know what they need to do. They may not have the skillset. You can teach people certain things, but they may not have the right skillset for what it is they’re choosing to do. It’s very hard to fire a volunteer. 

Stormy Bell (16:42): That’s true.

Dr. Kathleen O’Connor (16:44): Well it is. As we started this conversation, we were talking about, what do we look for on the college application? I said is it a one off or did the student engage in this process? You can have people who are like, oh, yes, I volunteered to do that and you’re like, okay, I need you Tuesday and Thursday at three o’clock. Tuesday comes and it’s quarter to four. Oh, well, I had something come up. Well you have to take this seriously. Thursday comes and it’s quarter past four. How do you fire somebody you’re not paying? It’s not easy. Perhaps this isn’t what interests you as much as you think it is. Perhaps we should find something that is more interesting to you. So it’s not really a blooper, but I think back over my career, and I won’t tell you who I fired, but there’s a fine art to firing someone and having them think that they quit and that this was a really good thing for them.

Stormy Bell (17:55): Thank you for that. That’s a lesson learned. Well I wanna thank you and I’m thankful that I get to call you Kate. Thank you today for coming on The Art of Volunteering. I just wanna encourage our listeners to get involved. Volunteering is about community. I’ve learned that through several of the interviews that I’ve been having over the course of this year, and you get so much more out of it than what you put into it. Alright thank you and we’ll see you next time! 

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