Ep. 5 - Sarah Davis - Emerging Voices

🎙️ Emerging Voices: Sarah Davis – Building Community, Wellness, and Leadership in Advising

From launching a brand-new office right as the world shut down to leading undergraduate, graduate, and athletic advising at Marshall University, Sarah Davis knows what it means to thrive in challenge and change! In this episode, Sarah shares her journey from student to Senior Director of Advising, the creative ways she built community during the pandemic, and how she champions advisor wellness, professional growth, and leadership development.

Whether you’re curious about NACADA’s Emerging Leaders Program, looking for strategies to prevent advisor burnout, or just love an inspiring higher ed origin story (with a few field day games thrown in), you won’t want to miss this conversation.

✨ Tune in for insights, laughs, and a reminder that strong leadership is rooted in connection, compassion, and a little bit of fun!

*Emerging Voices is a spinoff of the Adventures in Advising podcast!

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Transcript

Matt Markin  
Hey, welcome back to another episode of Emerging Voices, an Emerging Leaders Program Series. My name is Matt Markin from Cal State San Bernardino. And as always, we got my friend and colleague joining us, and that is...

Bri Harvie  
Hi friends. I'm Bri Harvie from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology.

Matt Markin  
Hey, Bri and we get to interview someone special today, and that will be Sarah Davis. And Sarah is a higher education administrator with over 15 years of experience advancing student success through strategic academic advising, holistic support and collaborative leadership. She currently serves as a Senior Director of Advising at Marshall University, where she leads undergraduate, graduate and athletic advising efforts across a decentralized campus, promoting consistency, equity and a student first approach. She oversees university wide advising strategy and assessment, leads the academic advising Council, and also supports implementing implementing data informed practices that drive student success. Sarah holds a master's degree in Communication Studies from Marshall University, and is an active member of NACADA as a participant in the Emerging Leaders Program. She is focused on expanding her leadership in the field by contributing to national conversations on advisor development, appreciative advising and student support policy. Her work emphasizes the intersection of compassionate advising, data analytics and community building. In addition to her administrative leadership, Sarah teaches from for Marshalls Honors College, where she facilitates coursework on leadership, ethics and civic engagement. She has presented at regional and national conferences on topics ranging from strategic implementation of advisor theory to advisor professional development, and she continues to advocate for initiatives that support both students and the professionals who guide them. Sarah, thank you for joining us today.

Sarah Davis  
Thank you for having me.

Sarah Davis  
So, a lovely bio that we just read. A lot of work that you're doing, but we were hoping to hear from you, and kind of maybe expanding upon that, kind of giving us your origin story, what's been your journey in higher ed?

Sarah Davis  
Yeah, I'd love to share that. So whenever I came to school here in Marshall, at Marshall, which is in Huntington, West Virginia, I had grown up in a smaller town, poca, and I thought Huntington was so far away, and my mom totally fed into that, and she got us a hotel before orientation or anything. It turns out it's only like 3540 minutes from my house. But to me, it was so big, so I came to school here, and my undergraduate degrees it is in education, and I was working at the mall while I was doing my undergraduate degree, and I started doing some subbing and stuff after I did my student teaching, and it was summertime, so there was no teaching, and I was working at the mall still, And I got a call from the Communication Studies Department, which my undergraduate teaching degree is in oral comm education to teaching public speaking and theater, and I got a call from the department to come and be a TA had not even applied for graduate school. So I was like, Okay, sure. So I turned in my application, and I came to graduate school. And while I was doing my graduate work, I learned that I liked doing things with college students a lot more than middle school and high school students. So that was a big change for me. And I was coaching our forensics team, which is our speech and debate team with my friend, and that position was going to become a permanent position, so I was really wanting to do that. Well, he had loads more experience than me, so it was definitely going to be his position, not mine. But I still wanted it really bad. And my one of my professors and mentors, pulled me aside one day and said, Don't apply for that job. That job. Is for sure, you need to apply for this other job at Marshall, and it was called a Student Resource Specialist. It was a new office on campus. It was called Student Resource Center. So I did, and I got that job, and that was the start of me working in places that were brand new, that hadn't existed on campus before. So the student resource center opened in 2010 that's when I started working here. I was a resource specialist for about three years, which was great, because you have to know everything. You have to know everybody. And it really let me get super familiar and make friends in every office on campus. And then I moved on to another office that was brand new to Marshall that was opening is called into Marshall. It's a public private partnership that hosts international students for pathway programs and ESL. So then I spent the next seven years working in international education, doing enrollment management and admissions and progressions, type of things for our international partnership. And then that ended. Our partnership ended, and I came back to work instead of for the private side for the institution. And this office had never existed. It was after a Nakata consultation, they said, Hey, you guys need a director. You don't have a director to bring everything together. So they created this position. I applied for this position, and that's how that came to be. And I've been in this position since March of 2020 Well, you know what else happened in March of 2020 so I came into the office and started this position, I think, on the 16th, maybe, of March, and on the 18th, we were all sent home. So not only was it a new position, a new office that had never existed at Marshall before, I was trying to build it during covid, when we were all in isolation. So that really let me hearken back to my networking skills for my first job and knowing people and getting connections, and we've had a lot of growth and changes since then, which we can look at, or however you guys want to do it. But yeah, that's my origin story and my career path here at Marshall. Marshall has given me everything I've never worked anywhere else. I've stepped foot on this campus every day since 2003 when I started came here as a student and I love it.

Bri Harvie  
That's awesome. And I, I love the idea of that, like long term career in one place. I don't think that's as common anymore. And so it's, it's nice to see it. It It must be a great place if you've been there for, I mean, student time included 2022, years. Now that's crazy.

Sarah Davis  
That's crazy. Marshall say that it's, you know, to what is it? You know, twos not big enough to be everywhere, but small enough that everybody still matters, that we're the Marshall family, that you're one of the herd, so you get a bigger school feel, but you're still at a smaller school. We are a big school. In our state. There's only one school bigger than us, but yes, it's a good place. It's a family, for sure.

Bri Harvie  
That's great. That's so great. I'd love to hear more about how it went starting a new office during the pandemic. I mean, I know that must have been bananas, but starting on March 16, and then the world fell apart two days later, and you talked a bit about your networking skills and things like that. But what did you find was really effective in trying to build a new office, a new team, and everything, virtually. What worked really well.

Sarah Davis  
That was a challenge, which I, you know, I'm bored if there's not a challenge. So that's it was okay. But it was interesting, because there was a lot of, I think trepidation surrounding the creation of this new position, there had been a lot of back and forth before I came into this position, between other people higher up than me, of what are we going to do? Is it going to be centralized? Are we going to have a First Year Advising? And in the end, we kept everything the same, but we post did this position, and all of the lead advisors in all of our colleges now have a dual reporting line to me and to their college. So that was the indecision that was all decided before I came to be so there was a little bit of trepidation there. What will happen whenever we have this new position, who is my real boss? Will I be made to change everything? Will someone be a, you know, micromanaging things I've done by myself for years, and so I was very aware of that before I came in, and then to cut out the face to face connection that you can get, you know, how you can read someone's. Body language and just feel the vibes are good or bad. I didn't have that because it was all online. So what did I do? I did every everything was online. It had to be we did online call. I did a lot of calling. I would block an hour every month or every two weeks or so with all of my new reports across all the colleges, and a lot of it, you know, they call them now, listening tours. I didn't know that phrase then, but that's really what I think I was doing, is, what do you like? What do you not don't like, what do you want to see? What's your personal goals? How does this work for you? What if you you know, what do you want to see changing? And I was just really collecting information and then another thing that I did was I formed our advising council. We did not have one of those prior to that, and that consists of a lead advisor from every college. It's either their program manager or their, like, student services director. And then a couple of our, like auxiliary advisors, like from our athletics and from our Honors College that aren't specific to the colleges. So we formed an advising Ccouncil. And actually, athletics and honors weren't in there that early, but they came later after that's part of the whole story. But they came later. So we would meet once a month for a prolonged amount of time, sometimes two hours or so, and it was just all virtual. The first, very first thing that I did was create a vision and mission. And I didn't create it. I maybe gave a framework. But really, we worked together, and it's about nine or 10 of us, so that's a lot of a lot of I want this. I want this. I think that. But that was really good to a unifying tool for us. And then we started creating other documents, advising syllabus, advising yearly checkpoints that were student facing. So I think after about, I don't know, 910, maybe first year of knowing that this was going to be we work together process, I think, like the thing that some of that trepidation subsided, but we're still virtual for quite a while, quite a while, and then once we came back to campus, we were all isolated. We weren't allowed to have in person meetings. So we're still doing a lot of stuff virtual then.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, a lot of challenges. And it's almost also too that you find yourselves in these positions where you're building everything from scratch. Personally, I would not thrive well in doing that. So more power to you for for being part of that and liking those challenges. So from your bio, let me get let me understand this. So you lead undergraduate, graduate and athletic advising, correct, yeah, how like so where I work, and I would imagine a lot of other institutions, those are typically three different departments where I work. Those are under different divisions, different priorities, different leadership. How do you navigate all that?

Sarah Davis  
Yeah, it's a lot, but it's, it's it's manageable, because I have great colleagues, and a lot of it is collaborative work. The graduate and the athletic advising just came under my wing in the last year prior to that, my sole focus was undergraduate advising, but I was asking for more, because I want to to extend the things that we're doing with undergrad to our graduates. And it was cut off from from us doing that, from us working together. So that was a great move, because now things that I'm providing to the undergraduate, I can extend to graduate, which is mostly faculty. You know, they're not most of my undergraduate staff is staff. That's their full time job. We have about 35 undergraduate level staff advisors, and we do still have a lot of faculty advisors too, but there are staff in every college. Now, there was when I started, but there are now, and so that's their full time job, and I want to extend some of the trainings and perks and community and communication and collaborative aspects up to graduate so my graduate partner is the provost over Graduate Studies, and he and I started a professional learning community for graduate advisors last year, and it's been great. It is just a once a month hub where we come and talk about a hot topic, and it's a lot of it is very foundational, because those are faculty members, those are not staff trained advisors. So we're talking basic advising skills. We're talking Did you know all these campus resources still exist, but it's so great, because that might seem like old news if you're an undergraduate advisor, because you get that in your own boarding, and you get to know those things, but they've never talked about that. So some of the things I'm going to offer them in the fall are some Mental Health First Aid training. The questions are, what do I do if somebody has a trauma in my office? Because the graduate students still have food insecurity, still have low as a family member, and they're still bringing that to their advisor, but those advisors don't have the same training opportunities that our undergraduate do, so we're sitting there and again, if I wouldn't be able to do it without my partner, and he's great, he said, he said, You know, it's just me and you. So we're going to be realistic about what we can do and when we can accomplish it. So our goals for the fall are to roll out a graduate level advising syllabus and a graduate advising handbook, and we've never had those before, so that's really our goals for there, and to duplicate some of the stuff we're doing, as far as, like unifying documents, just making things more consistent. And then for athletic they did exist differently. They did not report to our academic affairs, but we wanted to make some moves there. When we shifted that to Academic Affairs, they came under me, and that's been really exciting and cool, because that's not an area that I had a lot of familiarity with. Also great collaborative partnerships there with the Director of Academic Services and a couple other folks there that really make stepping into that easy, because we work together well, and we can build off of each other and set goals for their program. And it also helped me bring the athletic advisors into the fold of our undergraduate advisors, so those people aren't strangers, so you know who you're talking to, so you could have more collaborative partnerships when it comes to what is progress towards degree, what is this? How do I do this? So you know them, and it's they are part of our community. They're not an outlier.

Bri Harvie  
Yeah, that's, I love the idea of having everybody, kind of with the same bucket of knowledge at the end of it, and I think reporting structures really helps with that. Our institution actually just went through something quite similar, where we moved all of the academic advisors under one area. And it's it's been a wild ride, and I know from my own experience, some of the biggest challenges we had weren't even so much with trading, but with the change management and well, we've always done it this way, or this has not been our role in the past, and getting them on board with now, you need to do this training so that this is your role. How are you finding that the buy in piece from people who have been doing what they would consider their advising role previously and successfully, and now, because of a reporting change, their role looks very different. Are you finding there's hesitation? How are you getting How are you getting the folks actually doing the work on board with the new role?

Sarah Davis  
I think there maybe was hesitation in the beginning, but I think once they got used to my leadership style, I think the buy in was there, and I think I can say a lot of that is because I like to do like grassroots programming, grass roots training, they're making their own I am here to help them. I'm very much a servant leader. What do they need? What do you want? What do you need done, and then I'm more of their advocate. Oh, this group is missing this. I'm going to go advocate for you and see if I can get that. And I think whenever they got used to the dynamic of the position, how I saw it as a help, as that type of a lead, and not more of a top down, I want this now there are times when I have to say, we're doing this, and I know some of you didn't want that, but in the end, this is what we're doing, and I'm not everyone's favorite person that day, and that's okay, but most of the time I can say, hey, what do you guys want to do? These are the options, and then they can choose which one they want, and I can make that happen. And I think once they got used to me doing that, I think the buy in was there. So I like to find out what my staff wants, what they're good at, what their personal goals are, and then help them realize that and help those things come to fruition. I think once they got used to that, the buy in was much easier.

Matt Markin  
And, you know, you've implemented a lot of targeted advisor training programs, you know, you have, you know, I would say a large staff now, having both graduate and athletics in there with you, in today's age now with advisors. What do you feel or maybe like from your director mindset, training mindset? What are some skills or mindsets that you think are most crucial for advisors to develop today?

Sarah Davis  
Sure, I think, you know, I think I've been in higher ed long enough to see the evolution of our students minds. Yes, and that the ones we're dealing with now, especially coming out of the pandemic, are not just wanting to be given directions, but they're wanting to go through the process alongside of you and need encouragement as they're doing it. Like, yes, you're doing that right? Yes, click on that. Yes, click on that, so that it's not just enough to tell someone. So I think one of the things that's very important is appreciative mindset. It doesn't have to be your only advising theory or practice that you use, but as an umbrella, I think that works really well with today's population of students that they need, the positive encouragement that they need, the disarming, the getting to know the relationship aspect. And a couple years ago, we had a speaker come to one of our events that said, you know, students and people used to go to multiple resources to get everything that they need. They would get this from church, they would get this from their family, they'd get this from their teacher, they get this from their community organization. But students aren't like that now, they find one and they get everything from one. So now I think the other important skill is that you know all of those networks that you need to tap, because your students not networking that way, but you are their network, so that you know how the best way to get the housing problem resolved? And you don't have to know housing because that's not your role, but you have to know how to connect them to that and that your role is holistic. So if they're having a problem with getting into counseling services, they're not going to meet your academic goals. So you have to know how to do that networking piece for them, because you're their network. So then you have to go and find that. So I think those two things are probably the most top two skills I would say advisors need today.

Bri Harvie  
I 100% agree. I feel like we're seeing a lot of that. I've been Canada too, where students just want to have kind of their one go to person. And I, I say to my team a lot, you need to be an expert on 10% of every job, because you have to know, like you said, you have to know how to get them to counseling, to housing, to financial aid, to all of these people. You can't just send them into the abyss anymore. You have to actually make that connection. And what I'm seeing on my team at least, is there's a lot more than emotional labor with it as well. And there's it can be exhausting. It can be really hard to be that person for all students, and I would love to hear how you support advisor wellness and resiliency and community building when there's that such a high responsibility role that's so crucial for the students?

Sarah Davis  
Yeah, I love that question and advisor, burnout is always a hot topic at every conference, at every webinar and everything, and that's because that's the reality we're facing. You know, you are connecting with the students, and you do have to put in a lot of emotional work whenever you're here. So work life balance is something that I always encourage my teams. I mean, you can leave the horse to water, but you can't even drink it. So some of them, yes, bought into it right away. And they're like, Yes, ma'am, I'm not checking my email this evening, whatever, but some don't, and that's their choice. So, you know, we promote it, but we have had several different learning sessions, training sessions, part of our retreats, etc, that work geared to advisor wellness, so making sure you do have a work life balance, knowing that just because a student is thinking it's an emergency, it's not really an emergency. You don't have to answer your emails at night. You can leave your computer at home whenever you go on vacation. And that's, you know, the tip of the iceberg. The other things that we do to encourage wellness is we try to make work fun. I mean, you're here, so much of your life is work. You should be having a good time while you're there. So we have a couple of events every semester that are not training. They are just fun, and they are to bring people together. It has boosted our collaborative work astronomically. People didn't know each other, and we're decentralized, and we do have a smaller campus, but people still were mostly working in their own building. So we have a couple. We have at least two, sometimes more. We call them our community building or advisor well being events every semester. And they might be someone like, get together and make a playlist of music for something, or we will bring little pumpkins around fall, and people will paint the pumpkins, or we've done one where you make an oil blend, or we've done just potlucks, and they're, they're usually bring your own lunch during lunch hour, because I don't want to take away from their already busy day, but they can just bring their lunch over, and we have a shared space, and we have a good time, and that is really important for to me, that they have that wellness time together, and then every year, we just got done with our fourth one. Last week, we have a day long advising retreat, and there are a few learning points during the day, but most of the day is collaborative fun, and it's not all force participation. Sometimes you just want to be observer. That's fine, but it's mostly just about coming together and promoting wellness and being together and a community spirit. And a lot of times, whenever we go to conferences and present about these things that we're doing, the question that we get the most is, how do you get people to come to those How do you get people to come to your events that you're hosting? And the answer is, we like each other. You know, we've we've made those friendships. We've given time. People want to see each other. People want to come and have that lunch once a month with their friend that works in another building, we had a field day last month, not like potato sack races, more like croquet, but that was just a fun time to be together. And it's kind of nostalgic, because you usually end your school year as a child with a field day out in the field, playing games, and so we did that. We ended our school year with a field day. So I think the wellness also comes from being able to enjoy each other, and the confidence to know that you can rely on someone if you're sending your student over there. So our sessions like that are not just for staff advisors. We also invite advisors from other departments, student support services, our college program for students with autism spectrum disorder, any of our faculty advisors. So people come from other offices too. So you also get those relationships, and that is wellness for you for that day, but that's also confidence and networking for you later, whenever someone comes up that you need to reach out to someone.

Matt Markin  
I love that, yeah, because it's almost like a lot of times we get stuck in our office because, like, we just got to get the work done. We got to see our students answer these emails. I was just at a retirement party just yesterday, and some of the people that were on campus that I came to, I'm like, I haven't seen you in three years, and you're just one building over. But it's also even like these wellness activities and the networking, even like the person next that you work next to you. You may know them as the person that is an advisor, works in your office, but then you go to these events, and then it's like, oh, I didn't know you also liked baseball, or you're a sci fi nerd like me, or whatever it might be. So you have all these great things going on. But I want to ask you, because sometimes it's like, do as I say, not as I do. What do you do for your wellness?

Sarah Davis  
For my personal wellness? Yes, well, I've got four kids at home, two of my own, two of my partners and my boyfriends, and so our wellness is really whatever our kids want to do. I do like walking. I like sewing. I like to sew stuff. I like baking. So I like, you know, hobbies at home, but mostly whenever our kids want. They're 912, 14 and 15, so they're in all the things. So we just go wherever they go.

Matt Markin  
It's something new every day. 

Bri Harvie  
That's awesome. And I I love hearing that, like, we just like to hang out with each other, and we care of ourselves and each other all at the same time. And I think that's such, such an important part of our role. Like you said, like, it is very much a never ending buzzword at conferences of, how do you avoid advisor burnout? And it's, it was a very real, real thing, um, and that secondary trauma piece that goes with it too. Yeah, it's wild. We could do a whole podcast just about advisors and burnout and secondary trauma shifting a little bit to NACADA specifically tell us a bit how you got involved in the professional development side of your role.

Sarah Davis  
Sure my supervisor, was a nacotta advocate from when I started the student resource center. So I was advising only undecided students whenever I was there, but also seeing others as a secondary advisor, not listed, just open door you come in for check in and she encouraged us to look at different NACADA options and things like that. She made us all members, and it was a staff of four or five, and we went to our first NACADA conference. And we I went to my first NACADA conference in 2010 or 10, I would say. And I think it must have been in one of the Carolinas, because it was a NASCAR theme, and we did something about our unit, because it was a new office, and it was kind of a trend to make Student Resource Centers one stop shops in that time. So we did a presentation, and we won best presentation at the conference. It was a regional one, so we got to go back, I think next year, or something like that. I was pregnant, so they went, but it was a really positive experience. So having that positive experience right there on the very first one kind of locked me in. And now when I went to work with international I was more I was doing acro things, A, A, C, R, A, O, with admissions and registrar work, and some NAFSA for international students and student services side. But when I came back to this, I joined back to NACADA. Actually took a online courses like a refresher, because I had not been, and it's real advising adjacent, I would say, but more enrollment management prior to coming back to this. So I wanted to go, you know, review the theories and everything, see what was trending. So I took one of the NACADA courses then. And then we were not all NACADA members on our campus, because you can't use state funds to buy memberships in our state in West Virginia. So you couldn't use your normal Marshall budget to be a NACADA member. You had to get, like, special permission, and your college might have a research court fund or something like that that they could use to sponsor you. But most of our advisors were not Nakata members, unless their boss was like, hey, there's some merit in this, and we're going to find the money for it. So I worked with our academic affairs team, our assistant provost and our provost, and said, Would you guys pay for us and find that? And they did. So now every advising staff member is an acada member and has ability to join the communities. And we have lots of folks that go to conferences and present. I'm a strong encourager on that. We probably had eight or nine presentations in the last year at regional and national, and I've got two young professional ladies who were accepted to go to Las Vegas, who just got their email yesterday that they're going to be sponsored by the technology community. So they're very excited. I'm very proud of it. So yeah, we like to do a little meet up after the conferences to kind of go over what we learned and what we can share with each other, and then I like to also promote that attendance and presenting by having a meeting prior to the proposals being due. Well probably like eight weeks before proposals are due, where anybody who's interested can come together, and we all can come together and say, This is my idea. Does anybody want to join me? And then they have time to kind of brainstorm together as a group. What are the different ideas who would like to be with? Who? And that's been really encouraging and productive, because we've had a lot of cross college collaboration to do those presentations, instead of just within their unit, and also the question about professional development, right? So I also do for professional development trainings on campus every year, internal to Marshall, because not everybody still can go. Our funding is all still college based, and not all colleges give advisors money. And not everybody likes to travel. You know, not everybody's like, Yes, I'm going to drive eight hours. Because if you're a West Virginia person, you're driving we we're not flyers, we're drivers. So yes, I'm willing to drive 10 hours, or I'm not. So not everybody wants to or has the ability to do that. So we also have four training and development sessions during the fall, two in the spring that are open to all faculty and staff advisors that are Marshall specific, but we've had some guest speakers from our higher education policy commission and a couple other offices too. So we have internal professional development, and I'm a big promoter of NACADA professional development as well.

Matt Markin  
Wow, oh no, I like that you do kind of like before and after, like, especially like before the proposals are due. Because, yeah, I've talked to people over there like I'm interested, but I'm scared to submit a proposal, except I don't want to present by myself. Often it's like, you don't have to you could have a panel, you could present with other individuals, people you collaborated with. But I also like the at the end, when it's like, once a conference is done, what did we learn? What ideas are there? Because I'm just saying, like, how many ideas do people get when they're at a conference that just kind of get lost in the shuffle, or kind of get moved to the side when they get back and there's no reporting back. And here's what I learned, maybe we can take this idea and do something with it. And I guess, like, kind of going into that, like, you know, you've done a lot with within the cotta, attending conferences, presenting you, promote it to a lot of your staff, a lot of individuals at your campus. What got you interested in wanting to apply for the Emerging Leaders Program?

Sarah Davis  
I saw it online and thought it looked interesting. I wanted to see what the I think the inside of nacotter was like, and work with people who knew how you can make those connections, and how you can be an encourager. And it's kind of like what I said, the advisor is the networker for the students. I wanted to be the networker for my staff. So I wanted to get you know what are how do you do this? What is this? How can I connect with these people? And also wanted to learn for myself. I always want to learn what's new, what's happening, what? How can I improve these practices, but I want to be able to take the things that I'm learning here and send it down the line. And since I joined ELP, I have two staff members that are leading or part of steering committees now, so it's trickling down.

Bri Harvie  
That's awesome, and I love it when it leads to involvement from your team as well. And it's like we were saying earlier, but like, do as I do, not just as I say, but do as I do. And I'm involved. You can be involved. And we've, we've kind of asked everybody this question as we've been going through this series, but we're like, nine or 10 months into the first year of of this ELP class, what is next? What are you looking at for the next year? And a bit out of the program, are there goals that you're particularly excited about, or things that you're still working on that you'd like to share with us?

Sarah Davis  
Yeah, my goals that I formed at the beginning are still probably the same. I want to become a have higher mastery of athletic advising and graduate advising, because those are newer to me, but the one that I would really like to pursue before my two years are over is writing something. You know, we've talked about in several of our ELP meetings. If you've presented it, you've wrote it, and I have presented some similar materials several times as it's grown and developed here for us, my presentations about it have grown, so I think that could be interesting, and that someone that I'm going to keep working on over the next year.

Matt Markin  
Now you might have someone that listens to this and they're like, I'm very interested in maybe doing the Emerging Leaders Program. I don't know if you remember from the application, but I mean, there was a few questions, but very open ended questions, what was your can you remember, like, what your process was? Kind of answering those questions to submit that application?

Sarah Davis  
I think that my I don't remember it specifically, but I do remember that I wrote about being Appalachian and the need for Appalachian leaders and connecting with this area of West Virginia. And you know, we are the only state that's all mountains. We are completely Appalachia here, and that it's all first gen students, but it's also, it's just different opportunities I think exist for our students, and it's a different kind of an old school, still family mindset. A lot of people don't leave, like I never left 40 minutes down the road, but I read a lot about that. I think that I just wrote, I was honest. You know, I want to pursue this. This is why I think that, you know, I want to be a strong female Appalachian leader, and I want to take your knowledge and pass it on. And I'm not strong in everything, but I have a lot of staff members that have strengths that complement mine, and I could pass down what I hoped to get from the program to them. And then that's that was it that I was in and the first meeting, I was very nervous whenever we met in person in Pennsylvania, yes, but it was great. It was very chill. It was very easy. And I would say. To anybody who's looking at it that just go for it, because why not? You're going to get something out of it, something big, something small, and that it is totally worth it. You should do it.

Bri Harvie  
That's awesome. And I love the encouragement for others too. If you had to give a piece of advice to somebody, what would you what would you encourage people to think about when they're applying or include in their application?

Sarah Davis  
I don't know something. I guess you know what? What do you always find yourself interested in? What is your passion? Write about that so that the reviewers maybe can see something interesting and unique about you that would make you a standout candidate. I don't know if anybody else wrote they want to be an Appalachian leader, but there's but I think that's probably what I wrote that was trying to be unique. So I think about what you care about, what you find yourself going to at conferences, what you find yourself reading about, what area you want to grow in and write about that.

Matt Markin  
Well, great advice, and this is a nice, wonderful conversation. Learned a lot about you, and lot of tips that I think listeners can gain from this, not just about applying to ELP, but maybe they might hit you up about, hey, our school is going through a similar process of having graduate undergraduate athletics with us. Or, hey, we might want to have some tips from about professional development and leadership. So Sarah, thank you so much for being with us today.

Sarah Davis  
Great. Thank you. It's great to be here.