S2, Ep. 2 - Sarah Howard - Emerging Voices

What happens when curiosity meets courage, mentorship meets momentum, and academic advising meets a doctoral hood? 🎓✨

In this episode of Emerging Voices, Matt sits down with Dr. Sarah Howard for a wide-ranging, honest, and energizing conversation about saying yes to opportunities before you feel “ready,” carving out space for learning in a packed life, and turning professional curiosity into meaningful impact. Sarah reflects on her doctoral journey, her research on advisor engagement, and the winding path that led her to become a mentor, scholar, presenter, and longtime NACADA changemaker. 

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

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Transcript

Matt Markin  
Well, hello and welcome back to Emerging Voices, an Emerging Leaders Program podcast series. We are continuing season two of this podcast. Matt Markin here. Bri Harvie is out today, but she'll be back on the next episode. As mentioned last time season one, we were interviewing the emerging leaders in the 2024 to 2026 cohort of the Emerging Leaders Program. For this season, we're interviewing the mentors in the program. And as we continue season two, I have the honor of interviewing. Dr. Sarah Howard. Sarah, how are you?

Sarah Howard  
I'm great. Thanks Matt for having me on today.

Matt Markin  
You know, we were kind of chatting a little bit before we started recording that. Last time we officially had a conversation on a podcast, it was on a different one. It's been a few years, and since then, you are now. Dr. Sarah Howard, and I thought it could be great to maybe jump into kind of your doctoral journey as it were, what, what kind of got you started in wanting to pursue a doctoral program, and what were those deciding factors?

Sarah Howard  
Sure, great question. I have always loved learning. If you look at my Gallup Strengths Finder results, relator is my top learner is my second so I am someone who is constantly absorbing information. When I talk to other people, I describe them oftentimes as like my professional curiosities. And so I knew at some point I was likely to end up in a doctoral program. I just didn't know which one or when, and in, I don't know coming out of the pandemic, in about 2021 I started looking more seriously at programs online. I was working part time at the time, and so I wasn't getting any tuition benefits from my institution, and they didn't really have a good program that fit my interests. But I did find a program that was low residency. It was mostly online, asynchronous, and it combined interesting things for me, some things that were sort of in my wheelhouse, and some things that I knew would stretch me a little bit. So I enrolled at Concordia University in Wisconsin, and their leadership in innovation and continuous improvement program, in their EdD program. And so started coursework in January of 2022, and kind of went full speed through the program. I graduated in December of 2024, so kind of right at the tail end of three full years. And it was great. I was in the smallest cohort that they had had enrolled. There were three of us, and yeah, so we got to know each other really well. It also being a small program, got to know the faculty members really well, and just really had an opportunity to explore leadership a little bit more, but also to explore sort of some of the data informed continuous improvement practices, things like six sigma and lean that I think are really applicable in an educational space, but oftentimes are talked about more in the business setting. And so my dissertation topic looked at employee engagement of academic advisors and the factors that contribute to advisors feeling like they are engaged in their work. That was really important to me, because I think the scholarship on advisors as individuals who work in higher education is still relatively small, and the concept of employee engagement or human resource development doesn't often get talked about in educational spaces, and my role, working in training new advisors and helping to provide professional development opportunities, really is focused on developing the humans who are working with our students and so, yeah, it was quite a process. Being in an online program has its perks and challenges, I would say, but I felt like I had supportive folks around me, my family, my co workers and my dissertation advisor got a little bit closer with some folks that I would consider mentors in the field, as they kind of joined in on my committee and just opened up some new avenues of inquiry and curiosities for me. So it was great to walk across the stage a year ago officially, but yeah, I'm glad also to be done.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, I would imagine now, of course, you know, you're with you and a lot of others. You're balancing, you know, personal, life, work, your education, doing the doctoral program. What's your advice to someone that's like, I'm on the fence of. Wanting to join and maybe pursue a doctoral program, but am I going to be able to find the time? Like, how did you find that balance with everything?

Sarah Howard  
So I think there's a matter of deciding the level of work that you are comfortable with. I remember a conversation early on, so we had a three day residency right at the start of my program, where we all were on campus together, and we had a conversation about like, why is doctoral work even letter graded to begin with, right? It's much more about the competencies that you're gathering and the skills and the knowledge that you're learning. And for most people who are pursuing that level of education, I think there's some inherent motivation, but there's also just the idea that you want to learn more, you want to maybe contribute to the field through scholarship. So I think balancing right, it wasn't important to me to get all straight A's right. That was not something that I was super concerned about. I also knew that I wanted to be available for family things and to be able to go and support my kids in their activities. And so for me, that looked like generally doing reading and homework after the kids were in bed. So like 8:30 to 11 was sort of my prime time. I tend to not really be a morning person. I know Mike Geroux is up at like, 4am oftentimes working on his doctoral stuff. That is not my MO and so after the kids would go to bed, I'd spend a couple hours, you know, reading, doing homework, etc. I also was really lucky that my supervisor was super supportive. And so when it came time to, like, buckle down and really write the just get the thing done, she was amenable to me, you know, taking a day off of work and just kind of blocking my whole calendar to just spend time writing or editing or researching or whatever I needed to do. So I think having those conversations with the people around you who your scholarly interests will impact, I think is important. You know, my house was probably not as clean as it maybe could have been during those couple of years. We all survived. Everybody ate dinner every night, you know, but it wasn't as, I don't know, the grind to, like, get a perfect grade on every single thing really wasn't as motivating to me. It was more about those sort of professional curiosities and and so that's what you just make it work, right?

Matt Markin  
Yeah, exactly. Adapt. Make it work. Is there any anything that surprised you in your research with employee engagement?

Sarah Howard  
So my research study, there's a framework by some researchers who looked at basically the scope of all employee engagement research and found all of the factors that they felt contributed positively towards employee engagement. And there are some factors that I felt like, Hey, these are things that the employer or the institution where an advisor might be employed could provide that might help with employee engagement. So I used what's called the job demands resources model. So I used a sociological theory called social exchange theory, which really is about the interaction between two different parties. So like, I give something to you, you give something back to me in return. And so when we think about what advisors are providing to institutions, right? We are helping retain students. We are helping graduate students. We're helping them get enrolled in classes. We're helping them connect with other resources so that they can be successful. And we are also employees of the institution. So we should expect in return that the institution is providing some stuff back to us, aside from just, you know, compensation and benefits and and a job, right? And so the thing that I found that was really interesting was that it really sort of boiled down to six key areas, at least according to the folks who responded to the survey that I sent out. And what helped people feel engaged was feeling accepted by their peers, being feeling like their feedback was valued at work, that they were able to have proactive communication with their direct supervisor, that they had collaborative work opportunities where they could work with others and their team, that they were getting meaningful and actionable feedback from the direct supervisor. And then the one that I thought was most interesting, partly because this is just again kind of how I operate, is that they were able to learn new skills not directly related to their work. And so those six concepts really contributed positively to advisor. Just feeling like the work that I'm doing is meaningful. I feel like I am bringing my best self to the work, and feeling like they would stay in their in their roles.

Matt Markin  
That's awesome. And I'm just kind of thinking too, like, you know, this research that you've done also like your job at your institution, you were mentioning one of the things is like the advisor training. And I maybe that's a good segue to talk about, like at your institution, what are all your responsibilities that you're doing?

Sarah Howard  
Sure thing. So I work in an office where we kind of centrally support all of the professional advisors across all of our campus locations. So Ohio State has six different campuses. We have regional campuses that sort of focus on our open access, kind of meeting that land grant mission of serving the state of Ohio. And then we have sort of our flagship institution on the Columbus campus. But students are able to kind of transition in between those. And so we're really just supporting all students, all advisors, who are supporting all of our students. I run an asynchronous, online kind of set of learning modules that we add all of our new hires to. They also are kind of simultaneously getting onboarded in their department or their college. And so we're just sort of providing sort of this higher level focusing a little bit more on the NACADA core competencies and core values, kind of making some of the required like FERPA trainings a little bit more applicable to advisors specifically, and then introducing them to the technology tools that we have and to some initial kind of Campus resources that are common referrals for our students. I also provide then sort of a synchronous online training opportunity about quarterly at this point, in terms of the calendar year, based on kind of when we're seeing new advisors being hired, where we'll go a little bit more in depth into some of the technology tools that we use, and just giving folks an opportunity to get to know some other advisors at a really big institution where everything is kind of siloed by college, there aren't always those opportunities for the collaborative work. And so using the onboarding and training as an opportunity to develop those relationships is also pretty important. I'm also starting to kind of co develop our assessment plan for advising. So we've done some revision of our student learning outcomes and advisor outcomes, and are starting to work with our data folks to come up with some assessment plans. I'll be attending the assessment Institute from NACADA in February, so to kind of kick start that a little bit further down the road, but yeah, and we also just answer a lot of like policy and procedural kinds of questions. So we don't advise students directly, necessarily, but we are sort of the place where a lot of those questions get elevated if there are issues. So it's great because I get to support my peers, but I also get to contribute, kind of in these higher level conversations and engage in some more statewide initiatives around awarding of associates degrees to students who have stopped out of the institution, who are eligible, and that sort of thing. So it's a little it's a mixed bag for sure.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, but I can kind of see how a lot of that, your have those transferable skills and a lot of your interest also kind of tie into a lot of what you do in NACADA as well. One of those being you're part of, like the the etutorials, right?

Sarah Howard  
That's right, I've had an opportunity to be a content creator and kind of developer of a couple of the etutorials, as well as serve as a facilitator for some others that I, I guess at this point, most of them that I have developed, but so one of the topics has been the introduction to academic advising. I worked on that with Jessica Staten from Indiana University. And for us, it was really important that we sort of just provide an opportunity to, like, set the stage, understand a little bit more about what are those relational skills that are necessary? We felt like the informational pieces are so specific to institutions, but we really wanted to focus on, like, what skills are you bringing? How can they be applied in an advising setting, what are some of the conceptual ways that you can understand your past experiences and what you bring to the field? So that one has been really popular since it started. I then worked with Lauren Thomas from Virginia Tech University to develop the advising in an online format. I'm not sure if that's the exact title, but something along those lines, again, partly in response to sort of the post pandemic reality that a lot of advisors are advising in a hybrid style. They might be physically on campus and providing opportunities for students to just zoom in, or they might be working. Working remotely and having remote appointments, and I still have students who stop by their office in person, so it's kind of a mixed bag. And so we wanted, again, to kind of think about what are the ways that we're communicating those expectations to students, and how can advisors kind of improve their own skills so that their interactions are less transactional, but also that they're still meeting the requirements, or, excuse me, the expectations of their students.

Matt Markin  
Very cool. Do you remember when, like, how you got involved in NACADA? 

Sarah Howard  
How I got involved in NACADA? Sure. So I was in graduate school at Bowling Green State University, and I had an assistantship in our office for undecided students. And about my third week in the job, my supervisor was like, Hey, we paid for the registration for another staff member to go to the NACADA conference in Indianapolis, and they're unable to go. Do you want to take their place? And I said, Okay, so I carpooled with two of my colleagues, another grad student, and then a full time staff member, and we went to Indianapolis. And so here I was at this annual conference in fall of 2006 and I was so overwhelmed. I had no idea, right? I was, you know, a couple of months into my graduate program, and I just I loved the energy, I loved the things that I was learning. I was able to kind of connect to what I was hearing in some of these sessions, to the work that I was doing, or that I was starting to learn how to do in my graduate assistantship. And so from there, I did not go my second year in grad school, but then once I became kind of a work, a full time working professional, it was important to me to kind of reconnect with that, with the association. And so I read conference proposals in 2009 I think, and then in 2000 and like that fall, my supervisor was like, Hey, I have this idea for a research study. Would you be interested in participating with me? And I was like, Sure, I've never done this before. She was a PhD in molecular genetics. And I was like, I'm sure I have a lot to learn about this, but this sounds interesting. And her goal was that we would submit it for presentation at icata. And so we did. It was accepted. And so then it was like, oh, okay, now I'm going to my first annual conference where I'm a presenter. So I copresented with one of my coworkers on we looked at, kind of the patterns of student major declaration. So we were seeing an uptick in the number of students who were interested in pursuing multiple majors. And we did some research, and kind of found some patterns and some common pairings, and sort of hypothesized Why might we be seeing these patterns. So it was interesting, but, you know, not work that I've really revisited since 2010 but at that conference, I actually I joined Twitter in spring of 2009 and in the early days of Twitter, there was starting to be some connection of people who worked in higher education. So the essay chat, Student Affairs chat kind of became a hashtag. And partway through that 2009 year, I started connecting with some other academic advisors. And at the time, we were using like academic advising as the whole hashtag, which, when you only had 140 characters, was a lot. And so we kind of as a group, kind of came to a consensus how we were going to shorten that. And I started developing this community with other advisors across the country, many of whom were involved in NACADA. And so in 2010 at the conference in Orlando, we had our very first tweet up, where we got together in person in a hotel lobby. And at that point, Laura Pasquini was the chair of the advising, or the technology advising community, and she was like, Hey, do you want to be on the steering committee for this? So from then, it was just like, I was hooked. I was in I've given a presentation. I had met these people. I had been invited to be part of the steering committee, and I don't know the rest, as they say, is history. I've not gotten out, and have just continued to find other ways to engage in the association and contribute back to the growth of other advisors for the past 15 years at this point.

Matt Markin  
But I feel like, you know, you had you not done the whole Twitter thing, like, what would any of this still have come about? You know, it's always that, that what there's kind of going for it and doing it and trying something.

Sarah Howard  
That whole digital network, for me, was so critical. I. I am not someone who really enjoys small talk. I don't know very many people who really do. But for me, being able to go to a conference and feel like I already had established relationships with individuals because of, you know, 140 character bursts throughout the digital space that made such a difference for me, and I think it also gave me a space to kind of develop my voice as a professional that I don't know. In some ways I feel like kind of the grandma of the advising podcast because we had a long standing community chat on Twitter every Tuesday around lunchtime for at least eight years, maybe close to 10. And it just it was an opportunity to kind of explore various topics, to get to know people, to bring in new professionals I'm seeing now, as I'm answering a lot of these questions, there's been a lot of mentoring like in my background, so my connection to ELP in that way, definitely makes a lot of sense. But that digital space, even though I have deactivated and deleted my Twitter account for various other reasons, I think it really gave an opportunity to continue those conversations beyond just the in person gatherings that Nakata facilitated. I also kind of think that's part of why I never got super involved in my region, because I felt like I have these connections all over the country with all these other amazing professionals who I was communicating with really regularly, and so that just made the whole Association feel so much smaller and much more meaningful to me. 

Matt Markin  
But as far as like in person goes, I feel like anytime I've seen you at a conference, you're always presenting on something. Do you know, like, how many times you've actually presented at various conferences?

Sarah Howard  
I think, let's see, I probably have over 25 conference presentations. And like, Go big or go home, right? Generally, I present you like, two or three times at a conference. And so yeah, and they've been on all different types of topics, everything from quick like tech tips, so how to manage your email as an advisor, who gets probably a ton of emails and using LinkedIn as a major exploration tool, to creating a competency model for advising leadership with David Spight and Mike Geroux. And again, I'm just one of those kinds of people who is curious about things, and I like to bring folks together. So I'm actually talking with David and Mike at the moment about we had a previous conversation about the ways in which our coaching our kids sports, has influenced the ways that we kind of work with other people in our professional lives. So we're thinking about putting that together as a proposal for Oklahoma City. But I think when you have an idea, it is great to share it, whether that is in written form, whether that's a presentation. And so I've had the opportunity, and I've had, thankfully, the institution support, to be able to go to all these conferences. But I really enjoy that. I like presenting. And yeah, so I've got got a whole bunch on my resume.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, no, I like how creative those topics are. And Breen and I were talking about this the other day, about, like, if you have an idea, yeah, throw all your ideas against the wall and see what sticks and run with it. And even if you think it might be a niche topic, there's probably plenty of people at a conference that will find that that topic interesting and go to it.

Sarah Howard  
I mean, one of the presentations that I gave at an annual conference, was how to write a conference proposal. You would think that's a really like base level kind of topic, but I had a ton of people who came, and they were all really interested and engaged. Gave them an opportunity to kind of peel back the layers behind like that can be such a barrier. If you feel like, oh my gosh, I don't even have a good idea to start with, how could I take some random idea that I have, or my experience that I have, or this outside perspective that I've brought to my work in higher education, and how can I present that to my peers? And the reality is, you can, right like we are better professionals when we have that diverse perspective, when we can consider ways that theories from outside of advising, influence the work that we do as advisors, when we have people with different backgrounds who didn't all just come through a higher ed grad program and straight into the world of work, right? Like, we're all better exploring those ideas together, but you have to submit something first, right? Like you have to put that in writing. You have to articulate your ideas. I mean, honestly, I still kind of resurrect that presentation. I'm doing it for our campus and a month just to encourage more folks to think about, how can you partner at your own institution with people who are doing similar work, or how might you find collaborators across institutions to get maybe different perspectives on the topic that you want to present about, but that's how we continue to get better as a profession, and is to share those ideas and to put them out there in the world.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, and also, kind of to share those ideas also in the form of scholarly writing. And I know that's something else that you've had an interest in, and you've you've published in as well. And this kind of ties in with Emerging Leaders Program. Because I remember at the Emerging Leaders like the new orientation session that we had to attend at the 2024 annual conference in Pittsburgh, is there was a time where we got as mentors, got to walk around to the other emerging leaders and kind of see what their interests are. And quite a few of them had an interest in wanting to write, and I know a lot of them gravitated to you, to be like, hey, what tips do you have? Do you remember those conversations and kind of the advice that that you gave some of the emerging leaders?

Sarah Howard  
So I, I think there's a couple of pieces here. I fell into the writing side of things in NACADA, kind of on purpose, but also kind of on accident. I remember attending, I don't know, probably like, 2011 a session that Marsha Miller did at an annual conference about writing for NACADA. And at the time, I was like, This is great. I'm really interested. I have nothing to contribute, right? Feeling, but I was an English major. I enjoy writing. I also enjoy I worked in our undergrad writing center, so I enjoy helping people develop their ideas as well. So at some point, after attending Marsha's session, I completed a form online that said I would be interested in reviewing manuscripts for any upcoming NACADA publications. And I don't know, maybe a year or so later, I got an email inviting me to review the manuscript for Peter Hagen's narrative advising book, which, like Peter Hagen, is a big name, if you look at the literature of advising like he's one of those people who has a lot of stuff out there. And so I read the manuscript, I provided my feedback, and I remember getting an email from Marsha, and she said, this feedback is so valuable. She's like, Would you be willing to review the next iteration of the manuscript after he's made all these edits? It was like, Okay, sure. And so from there, I was invited to join the publications advisory board. And again, like sort of felt like an imposter. Why am I in the space with all of these really big names, people whose articles I've read or whose book chapters I've referenced, but I realized I had something that I could add to that space, and so I then partnered with John solder, who has been a very close thought partner with me. Over the past, I don't know. Eight to 10 years, we've done a lot of presentations together, and there was an opportunity to write a chapter for the advising, training and development book on technology, which is sort of a space that I've found myself, not because I'm an expert in it, but because I'm curious. I'm a relatively early adopter, but I also can see the value in having good tech tools that support the relational pieces of advising. So we co authored this chapter, along with Melissa Irvine, who's now at the University of Tennessee, and wow, writing a book chapter is a lot. It's a great process. It is hard. You get feedback that you're like, I don't know what to do with this feedback, but at the end, like, my name is in a book with words that I wrote, right? That's super cool. I have, I don't know, I feel like I jumped from like zero to 100 rather, I think sometimes people feel like, Oh, well, I should start small. I should, you know, write a blog post or maybe an academic advising Today article. But there's nothing that says that you have to go from point A to point B, like you could just jump in and contribute to a book. Um. That is just something that can happen. So since that first book chapter was published, I am co authoring another book chapter, also with John, and have had a scholarly paper manuscript that I co wrote with some folks that also we turned into an article, so that's been published, and I'm working on revisions to a manuscript based on my dissertation research to hopefully submit somewhere for publication at some point. So I again kind of going back to what I was saying about putting your ideas out in the world. I think presenting is a great avenue for people who don't feel comfortable writing right away. But at some point, I sort of felt like I need to document some of these ideas, this knowledge, these things that I've shared orally in like in person, one time events. I i need to get this written down in some way. And I think that's really kind of been what pushed me to start writing those book chapters. I also now really love serving as a reviewer for The editorial review board for the NACADA Review, again, going back to my like undergrad Writing Center days, the ability to help take something and provide feedback to make it even better. Is just really something that I enjoy. It also gives me the opportunity to kind of see what's coming and to be kind of, in some ways, like helping to push the profession forward a little bit more through this very behind the scenes process that nobody knows if you've reviewed their piece or not, because it's blind peer review, but I love it. It's really fun.

Matt Markin  
Just kind of like you're saying Wendy Troxel will talk a lot about sometimes if you're presenting, if you record your presentation and transcribe it, that could be your literal first draft to start with, what's your thoughts on that?

Sarah Howard  
I wholeheartedly agree, and I've repeated that to a number of folks who are hesitant to start writing. My one of my Emerging Leader leaders, Kate Earnhardt, who was featured in season one, she has a goal of writing, and she's given a presentation a couple of times, and I told her before she presented for annual I said, you should record this. You should record your practice, and then you have a draft. Because for her, again, it was that roadblock. I'm not good with words. I have a hard time expressing myself in written format. And I'm like, Yeah, but you know what you're talking about, and you've given this presentation multiple times. Just record it, have it transcribed, and then start from there right at least. Then you're not at the very start feeling like you're stuck. That's a process that I've used a couple of times. When I was writing my dissertation, there would be some things that I just would like talk out loud, like, what is the idea that I'm trying to convey? And then once I had somewhere to start, it's sometimes easier to respond or to provide feedback or to edit your own words. But yeah, I wholeheartedly agree with that process.

Matt Markin  
Now you're mentioning Kate. I think it's gonna be a good transition and talk about being a mentor in the Emerging Leaders Program. Aside from Kate, you also have someone else that's also in what they call your pod?

Sarah Howard  
Yeah, so Imani Hill, who's a Winston Salem State University, is my second pod pod squad person. This is my second go around being a mentor, and I don't know, I really enjoy it. I like the pod format because it gives me an opportunity to get to know more emerging leaders, number one. But also we can bounce ideas off of each other. Our pod has sort of fallen into a pattern of like, individual meetings every once in a while, and then group meetings every once in a while. So it gives a chance for me to get to know each of them individually, but also to let them get to know each other, talk about goals and progress individually, but also together, and kind of figure out what supports we can help one another with. So it's been a great experience the second time through. ELP, yeah, good folks, yeah.

Matt Markin  
And so this is your second time around through this. What makes you keep wanting to come back and will there be a third time?

Sarah Howard  
I don't know. We'll see. I don't I'll take a little hiatus. I think I've got some other things in the hopper that I'm looking at, taking, picking up. So the first I actually applied to be a Emerging Leader in ELP, and was told that I already was too involved. And so I was like, I don't know. To do with this. But, you know, I continued in the places where I was involved. I became the Chair of an advising community back in 2015 and then decided, You know what, I maybe do, know a fair amount about the association and about how to get people connected and ways that they could kind of contribute their thoughts and ideas to the profession, and so I applied as a as a mentor for the 2018 class. I felt a little imposter ish at the time, because it was like, Okay, three years ago, I applied as a leader and was told I had too much experience. I don't know that that much has really changed, but now apparently I have enough experience to be a mentor. Sure. Why not? But what I realized through that first go around as a mentor was it's really about the relationship, right? Like you get to know someone else, you can champion them when they are needing a little bit of a boost. You can commiserate with them, and they get feedback that's really hard. You can make connections with folks that are in your own network to help them continue to advance on their goals. And so it just sort of made sense, based on the role that I have at my institution and training and providing professional development opportunities for a bunch of people at my institution. I'm like, I can do this too for other other folks, and get them a little bit more involved in Nakata as an association. And that's really what, what brought me back, the idea of being a mentor in the first kind of revised version of ELP, was a little nerve wracking at first, because it was like, Okay, what's really going on? How's this pod thing going to work? But overall, I you know, it really is about the relationship. It is easy in a lot of regards, to just be a listening ear, to be a supportive thought partner, and to, I don't know, make the best of those connections that I have within the association to help advance the ideas and goals of these other folks who maybe aren't as connected quite yet.

Matt Markin  
But I think your experience is a great example, because I think sometimes people have this misconception about the Emerging Leaders Program that you have to be, you had to have been an emerging leader to also then later on, be a mentor. And it's like, no, you don't have to go that route. Nope. And any advice that you have for someone that is wanting to maybe apply as a mentor, because, I think also sometimes, too, is people see that to your commitment, they're like, oh gosh, I don't know if that's going to be able to work out. And granted, for some it may not. But you know you were mentioning with those on your pod squad that originally, well, that you've kind of gone from some group meetings some individual meetings. But do you feel that for you that's taking a lot out of your time, or it's still been able to balance out well with everything else you have going on. 

Sarah Howard  
I think it's been a pretty good balance. We have been meeting kind of as a whole group, maybe every three or four months with everybody in emerging leaders. We've been and then I've been kind of having either these individual meetings or small pod meetings maybe once a month, so it's about an hour, I mean, and then there's some communication back and forth. Every once in a while, you know, I'll get a text from Imani or Kate be like, Hey, this is going on. Or do you have any ideas about how you can do this? Or in the WhatsApp group chat that we have for all the emerging leaders, you know, we'll get a notification every once in a while, like, Hey, can somebody help with this, that or the other? And so I might schedule an additional touch base with somebody else who's not in my pod, but I see this also informing the work that I do, because most of the emerging leaders are at least earlier in their career than I am this way, and so it's also helpful for me to get to know what sorts of issues they're seeing, what's happening on other campuses, student issues, because I don't have that many students that I interface with on a regular basis. And so those conversations, even if they are kind of in the context of an emerging leaders connection, they also are informing my day to day job in ways that I don't know that I would have pinpointed right at the beginning. But there's always opportunity for learning. There's always opportunity for reflection, personal reflection. Why am I still doing this work? Why am I in the field? Is this still the right thing for me to be doing? How do I want to contribute to Nakata? How do I want to contribute to my work? Work at my own institution, and I feel like being a mentor kind of provides the space for some of that to happen as well.

Matt Markin  
Now, of everything that you've done within the cut all the contributions leadership positions, has there been a something that you've done in the cod or leadership position you've been in that has been whether it's been the most fun or most challenging, the most something?

Sarah Howard  
I think the thing that I've done in NACADA, that I would say I'm probably the most proud of, is bringing to realization the tech labs that happened at the annual conferences when I was on the steering committee for the technology advising community, we had started these conversations about, like, Wouldn't it be great if there were opportunities with the conference to just get together and, like, share practical tips for technology tools that advisors could attend and they could just take those back and use them immediately. So we kind of tumbled this idea around. And when I became chair, I was like, Alright, we're going to do this. I don't know how, but we're going to make this happen. And so 2017 I think, was the first time that we offered those tech labs. They were sort of like a conference adjacent. We started out in a lobby space. We had a screen and a projector and some standing room right. That was our first setup, but we had folks volunteering their time to be a presenter for a short 25 minute, very skills based practical technology application presentation. And the feedback was great. The presenters had a good time. I had a good time being in that space the whole time. And the folks who attended found the information to be really helpful. So we did it again in 2018 and we did it again in 2019 in some ways, I think that set the stage for some of the other sort of, I don't know, like alternative schedule kind of things that have emerged at the conference post pandemic, like the scholarly paper sessions and the wellness sessions and things like that, and the tech labs have fallen off, and That's fine, right? I think there's a lot of tutorials that folks can find online to get that information in real time when they need it. But to go from this idea to, like, actually making this happen and having, you know, several 100 people at the conference attend these tech lab sessions over the course of a couple of days, like, that's awesome, right? I didn't think back in 2006 when I attended my first annual conference that I would be someone kind of helping to coordinate an event like that within the larger event. So of all the things that I've been involved in, that's probably the one that I put my gold star on. But you know, sometimes you do something for a little bit, and then it's time to move on to something different. And so it's okay that those have not carried on, but I'm glad that I was able to make them happen.

Matt Markin  
Well, this last question I have for you kind of connects to the last part that you were talking about, about kind of things that that surprised you. And when you look back at your younger you entering the advising world, is there anything that that you think would surprise your younger you about who you are now, and everything that you've done, what you've become?

Sarah Howard  
So my first professional advising job, I had a caseload over 700 students, and our calendars would open for appointment scheduling the first day of classes, and usually by mid October, we were booked for the entire rest of the semester. And that's even accounting for switching at one point from 30 minute appointments to 20 minute appointments to accommodate those registration conversations. It was like survival, right? I mean, I didn't know it at the time, because I've gone from a part time grad assistant role in an advising office for undecided students case loads were naturally smaller anyway, to now being an advisor for over 700 students. And I didn't know any better, so I just thought, this just must be, how full time advising is like whatever. So there wasn't a ton of extra space in my work week, or in my mind to consider, how am I going to get involved in the cotta? How am I going to contribute scholarly writing to the field, and so my role now is far less student contact. I don't have a caseload, and it actually affords me the time to think more strategically, both for my campus and the advisors that I am working directly with but also to think about these more conceptual ideas, to think about scholarly inquiry. And I don't think I would have ever thought that in my first role, there just wasn't really that thought space to consider, like no you could actually add in your own ideas, and you don't have to necessarily have a calendar that's booked with 21 student appointments during peak registration in a day, right? So that, I think, is the biggest shift, like it is important for our field, for anybody, even if you do have a caseload of 700 that you as a person, kind of have an opportunity to reflect, to think about the ways that you're doing your job and what would help make you better at that, to explore the challenges that your students are facing and ways that you might contribute systemically to your institution solving some of those challenges. That is, I think the benefit of advisors, right? We are connected directly to students, but we have this innate understanding of the institutional system and structures that students just aren't going to figure out necessarily, but so it sort of puts the onus on us to think about ways that we can contribute to making the student experience better. I think as our technology tools become easier to help support students in their scheduling and long term planning and all of that, our role as advisors is really, truly that relational component that students have someone they can talk to, that students can be asked deep and reflective questions and have a space to explore those with somebody that they feel comfortable with, and also that advisors can hear challenges that are coming up from the students and advocate upwards to make those changes. I didn't feel like I had that space when I first started out, and I think that's been the biggest thing that I've seen shift in me is just the interest in doing that sort of advocacy and connection work. But really, when you boil it down, that is the core of what advising is. It is not registration and scheduling, even though that takes up probably 75 to 90% of most of the advising conversations that folks are having.

Matt Markin  
Well, we have reached time, and I've loved this interview. And I think from this, what I kind of gathered is like, if you had to look back, it's almost like, hang in there. Things will get better. There will be those opportunities. And one of the things that I admire about you is like, as much as there's certain opportunities that are there, sometimes you have to create your own opportunities, and I think you've been able to show that, and hopefully those in your pod can see that too. And again, you've done so much within NACADA, whether it's the presenting, the publishing e tutorials, the technology portion of it, you've been able to dabble in so many areas, which I think is fantastic. And like you're saying, like, if you have those interests, go for it. Sarah Howard, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.

Sarah Howard  
Thanks so much, Matt. This has been really fun.