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VOICEOVER: This is Alumni Aloud, a podcast by Graduate Center students for Graduate Center students. In each episode, we talk with a GC graduate about their career path, the ins and outs of their current position, and the career advice they have for students. This series is sponsored by the Graduate Center’s Office of Career Planning & Professional Development.

JOHN POPHAM, HOST: I’m John Popham, a DMA candidate in music at the CUNY Graduate Center and a fellow in the Office of Career Planning and Professional Development. This week’s guest is Andrea Efthimiou who earned her PhD in English from the Graduate Center and is currently the Director of Academic Planning and First-Year Programs and the Writing Center Director at Hofstra University. In this episode we speak about navigating her new position as the director of Academic Planning and First-Year Programs, the power of listening and revision and the importance of “shitty first drafts.”

POPHAM: Andrea, thanks so much for joining us on Alumni Aloud.

ANDREA EFTHYMIOU, GUEST: Thank you for having me, John.

POPHAM: I wanted to start by giving the listeners an overview of your work at Hofstra University.

EFTHYMIOU: So, right now I am a newly appointed director of Academic Planning and First-Year Programs. I can talk about that in a little bit, but I’ve only been in that role for a few months, so it’s very new. I’m still in the midst of a learning curve there.

Before stepping into this role of Director of Academic Planning and First-Year Programs, which is in the Dean’s Office in our College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, I was a faculty member in Writing Studies and Rhetoric. I’m an Associate Professor there, and I direct the Writing Center. So, my Writing Center directorship is now being shared by a colleague of mine, so we’re doing that together. But yeah, those are my titles, and I can say more about whatever role you want me to start with first.

POPHAM: Well, congratulations on the new position.

EFTHYMIOU: Thank you, thank you. I think there should be a question mark at the end of that congratulations. It’s a lot of work. It’s just.. I knew it was going to be a lot of work, but again, I feel like a novice and that’s a fun space to sort of sit in. It could be hard sometimes…

POPHAM: Yeah, that’s an exciting moment! As I was preparing for this, I was seeing all your titles and I was like, “how does she have time to do this interview?”

EFTHYMIOU: That’s actually one of the things I’m thinking about in this job that next year probably has to look a little bit different, because I kind of have too many titles I think. Well, that’s yet to be seen. I can talk about what I know now.

POPHAM: Well, it might be helpful for listeners just to hear about what a typical work week – if a typical work week exists – what that might look like for you.

EFTHYMIOU: Part of answering that question is to say that I’m not teaching anymore formally actually. Every year that I’ve been in my faculty role here at Hofstra, even with part of that course release going to Writing Center work, I have been teaching every semester. That is a little bit of a loss this semester. This is the first time I’m working at a university, at this university (at Hofstra), and not being in a classroom teaching students, so that’s something I miss.
At the same time, in my Writing Center role – I’ll talk a little bit about this week in particular, or the past couple of weeks. Because I’m still directing the Writing Center, co-directing at least, I have a lot of contact with the peer tutors there; I have a lot of contact with the student employees that I supervise, both undergraduate and graduate. And for example, the Associate Director of the Writing Center and I, and some other colleagues, have been meeting this week to talk about our next staff meeting where we’re going to do some tutor education with the Center for Academic Excellence, which is the content area tutoring at our university, so we are always talking about our work with students. We do get to work directly with students in their roles as peer tutors and talk to them and listen to them about what it is to work with their peers, as they help other students in writing in the university. So that is so wonderful, and I had the opportunity to take four undergraduate tutors to a conference in Omaha last month, which was fantastic. It reminded me of all the love that I have for working with undergraduate students and facilitating undergraduate research, but it was really exhausting to do that in the midst of like a full-time administrative job. So that was a lot.

POPHAM: Right, I can imagine.

EFTHYMIOU: In my roles in Academic planning and First-Year Programs, that’s really a scheduling role and helping to facilitate travel and experiences for faculty teaching in our first-year writing clusters and seminars. So, I’ll talk about the scheduling first, because I’ve had to rewire my whole brain to do this work.

I’m working with department chairs from across the college of Liberal Arts and Sciences on their schedules, on their class schedules. So, I get emails every day about, “can we add this independent study?” “We need two more sections of ceramics.” “We need to cut the fees for our students in music. We need to increase the fees for our students in drama.” “Private instruction costs this much.” “We’re not traveling that much.” So fees are changing that are associated with courses and courses that I don’t know that much about. I know that our biology colleagues and chemistry colleagues have real space constraints in their area, and I didn’t know this before because I’m helping them schedule their courses and their labs predominantly for first-year students, for those massive introductory sections. And I just wasn’t aware of any of these constraints and concerns before, or if I was aware of them before, as a faculty member, it was really in the abstract.

So, a lot of my time now is spent sitting with department chairs or multiple department chairs listening to their concerns and the strains that they have as they’re putting together their schedules and helping them figure that out and doing that in a way that is always mindful of university budgets, which does not come naturally to me. As a faculty member, I complained a lot about not having the budget that I wanted to do things, and now I hear those complaints, but also hear instructions as to why the budgets are directed, or guidelines as to why the budgets are the way they are and how to spread resources across the university?

POPHAM: That’s really interesting, seeing another side of it, and I’m sure there’s a lot of hard decisions to be made there.

EFTHYMIOU: Yes, but I think we’re in a good moment in our university in particular. Good in that we’ve had record high incoming class this year and so that was a challenge in terms of space and needing to add sections for students that were coming in the university. So those challenges are real. But also, that meant we don’t have the financial constraints. I didn’t have to cut anybody’s classes moving into the next academic year. I didn’t have to tell Writing Studies, for example, you can’t teach X number of sections. I got to say, add the sections you need because we think we’re OK.

POPHAM: That’s great, that’s great. I’m curious, in your new position, what skills you feel are most important and are they skills that you relied on in previous positions, or do you feel like you’re having to develop a new skill set?

EFTHYMIOU: Yes, and. Yes to both of those. One of the skills that has definitely carried over… and I think I cultivated it as a grad student in the English department at the Graduate Center. I’m thinking of one class in particular that really worked intentionally on active listening and engaged listening. That was actually Mark McBeth’s “Clear Lines of Communication” class in the English department back in the early 2000s – 2010, somewhere around there, that I really got to practice what it meant to be a listener. And I used that very much as a Writing Center director, listening to my staff’s concerns, listening to faculty who would come in and need support with writing instruction in their classes, and as a first-year writing instructor, being able to listen to students and respond responsibly and productively and give feedback that is the right kind of feedback – feedback that would allow a student to move forward rather than shut them down. So those listening skills I’ve really had to lean into in this new job.

POPHAM: I love that! As a musician, obviously I have a particular type of listening that I do a lot. But you know, recently I’ve recognized other types of listening that you need to cultivate in different spaces and with different jobs, and how important that is, and how often we don’t really listen to one another, and the problems that arise because of that.

EFTHYMIOU: I love that you connected it to your expertise too, because I think we’ve theorized this in writing studies and composition, maybe in music as well. Revision is sort of another idea that I’ve really had to embrace in a different way in this job. I came into a space that’s totally new to me and had to learn sort of what processes were in place and also be ready to revise those processes and it kind of feels like going into a big unknown. Like how do we revise scheduling practices when I don’t even know those scheduling practices yet?

That openness to revision, that openness to problem solving and also the fact that we’re going to try something, and it might not work, or it might be really rough at first. We might make some mistakes. And I’m fortunate to work with people that are like, “this isn’t going to be perfect. Just try it out and whatever doesn’t work this time we’ll go back and fix it.” Because in some of these situations with scheduling, people’s pay is at stake, right? Like faculty, I’m thinking constantly about like, alright, what’s the student experience? How are we delivering undergraduate education to our students? But on the other side of that, how are we compensating faculty? And it happens that if a faculty member leaves in the middle of a semester for whatever reason, another faculty member has to come in and take that class, and if I don’t enter the code correctly, someone’s not going to get paid correctly, and that is terrifying. But I also know that if I make a mistake, we can go back and fix it and correct it, and everything will be OK eventually. But it feels so high stakes when you know that someone’s paycheck is going to be affected by these decisions that we’re making.

POPHAM: You mentioned the importance of having a team around you that makes you comfortable to make mistakes, it makes me think about things that prevent me — or a lot of students in their writing – is this fear of it being bad, or you know this fear of making mistakes and having people around you that support you just jumping in and producing something, and you can always go back and fix it later.

EFTHYMIOU: That was also cultivated for me at the Grad Center, too, in the English department, and I know the area group still exists. The composition rhetoric area group in English that I came into as a student in that departmen got me through grad school. Like that group, my cohort of fellow students back at the Grad Center, they were the ones that, you know, I developed my initial conference presentation or conference proposals with, and they were the ones where we were parallel writing our chapters of our dissertation in coffee shops around the city with. Working with others and sharing ideas and reading each other’s work. That started for me at the Grad Center in the English department, so kudos to them for that, and I hope that area group is still doing that with students. I know they still exist, so I’m confident good stuff is still happening.

POPHAM: Yeah, absolutely. It leads me to another question I had about the work at the Writing Center. First of all, it’s a really beautiful model. It sounds like such a rippling impact on the student body. But I was curious about what your overarching vision with that work is, the principles that guide you, and what you hope for these student writers that are coming through the Writing Center.

EFTHYMIOU: Thanks for that question and the lead-up to that question too. I view the Writing Center as a research space. That is sometimes a little different than how administrators and faculty around the institute view it because I think Writing Centers, they’re viewed as a space of student support. And that’s absolutely true. Students can come and get support on their writing at the Writing Center. So you’re going to hear a little bit about my research agenda in this answer too. There’s a lot of great work on all the best practices and peer tutoring and collaborative learning, and I relied on that very much in staff education, but my interests are really in expanding that view of what a Writing Center is. A lot of my publications are around the value of getting peer tutors to, well, first defining the work outside of the tutoring session, right? So, I try to name the kinds of work that peer tutors do outside of their session. So that’s not only about, indeed, our spaces are about supporting student writers, but they’re also about cultivating and mentoring these young professionals, peer tutors, and I think part of doing that is recognizing that our peer tutors go into classes and interact with faculty. They have to educate faculty and students about what it is that we do and how we work with students and in our center, peer tutors go to conferences and submit manuscripts for publications pretty regularly.

So, like I said, I brought four undergraduate students who are peer tutors to the National Conference and Peer tutoring and Writing this last month in Omaha. I happen to be the Treasurer of that organization, so I need to be really transparent about my commitment to… I think it’s a great organization. I chaired their conference back in 2017 here at Hofstra, so I’m pretty committed to them and taking students to that conference every year whether it’s virtual or in person. But we have other great organizations in our field too, like the International Writing Centers Association, and there are a bunch of regional writing center organizations as well, like the Northeast Writing Center organization and the Mid-Atlantic. Hofstra is kind of uniquely positioned to go to both. We can go to New England, and we can go to like Delaware. We can go to the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast. So, I really find the experiences of taking tutors to conferences as impactful because an undergraduate students’ education doesn’t necessarily involve that experience, right?

They have their kind of major requirements and graduation requirements and general education that they get through, and I think cultivating opportunities for undergraduate research, conference experiences, and even like undergraduate research days on campuses are really great. Cultivating these experiences that are related to their work, but are also pre-professional in a way, where they get to make networks inside of a field, where they get to talk to other people at other institutions about shared work, and see how they’re doing things differently and similarly to colleagues in the field, it’s just transformative.

POPHAM: That sounds like an incredible opportunity that they get sort of fast tracked into, you know, what could be a professional career for them as well.

EFTHYMIOU: Yeah, and there’s been some work, and I’ve done a little bit of it, but I’m building on a history of this work. There’s been some work around understanding how peer tutors or people who were undergraduate tutors have transferred those experiences into their professional lives, whether they have become teachers or doctors or lawyers or something else, right? Or just into how that experience of being an undergraduate tutor has transferred into their personal lives and relationships as well. So there’s a history of interest in what is the value of being a tutor.

POPHAM: Yeah, that’s fascinating. Speaking of that, the kind of the mentorship that can come out of that, I was reading among the many awards you’ve received for your work at Hofstra, you were named the 2022 Mentor of the Year, congratulations. I know for those of us who have navigated higher education, the importance of a good mentor, you know, is so crucial when we have a question about our future or are going through an academic crisis. And I would just love to hear your approach to mentorship, and the considerations you have when assuming a mentor role with a student.

EFTHYMIOU: That’s something I think about all the time, particularly as I’m moving into this administrative space and wondering, “Is that going to be another loss that I have to experience at some point and not having as much contact with students?”

So that’s just something I’m aware of, and I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Happily, right now I have been able to maintain some of those roles as research mentors, student mentors. But you asked me what my approach is to mentorship, and part of my answer involves identifying the privilege I have as a full-time faculty member, and a full-time faculty member who has course release.

We just take my current administrative role out of it (when I was just directing the Writing Center), faculty here at Hofstra teach on a 3:3 load, so three courses. Full-time faculty teach three courses every semester, nine credits each semester, and I had a nine-credit course release, so in effect half of my teaching load was shifted to allow me to do Writing Center work. That is very, very important.

Having the institution recognize that their faculty, in order to do the work of mentorship, in order to do the work of building anything – for me it was mentoring research through Writing Center work, but that was a priority that Hofstra identified.

I know not all universities that have these kinds of split administrative roles structure it that way. Some universities say, “OK, you’re writing program administrator and you’re a full-time faculty member and you have a three-credit release time,” which I think is pretty exploitative. Other universities give even more credit release time actually.
So I do think though, for what I was doing, Hofstra was very fair and allowed me to build a program or build a life, like a work life, where I was able to have the time and space to say, “OK, there is this opportunity,” whether it was a publication call or a conference call to sort of present it to all of my colleagues, undergraduate, graduate, and the part time faculty that we hired to work in the Writing Center. I was able to have the time to say, “Here’s this experience. I’m willing to work with you if you’re interested.” I don’t force anybody to go to conferences or to write in response to calls for papers, but the way my job was structured, I had the time to both present opportunities to my Writing Center colleagues and scaffold support should anybody want to take me up on my offer.

POPHAM: That’s so great and thank you for naming time as such a central component because often we have really great intentions, but if the institution where we’re working doesn’t allow us to act on those intentions…

EFTHYMOIU: And if I do end up staying on this administrative path, and it takes me away from students more and more, hopefully I could work on how to change those structures in the university. So maybe junior faculty or not even junior faculty, also people at the associate or full level that want to do this work who would have the time and compensation… and part time faculty too…I can’t imagine how part time faculty, how if an adjunct wants to mentor an undergraduate student – having done this as a full-time faculty member now for these years – like how do you do that as a part-time person? I don’t think it’s sustainable. If I end up staying on this administrative path where I’m moving further away from students, I hope I can change some of the structures that would allow folks in the classrooms or in spaces like Writing Centers to be able to sustain some of the experiences with students in a way that makes sense for everybody’s life.

POPHAM: Right, right. When you reflect on your own academic journey and early career were there mentors that had a big impact on your trajectory? Do you find yourself modeling your life after those people?

EFTHYMIOU: Yes, I chuckle a little bit because unfortunately I think I had a lot of really bad mentors in the beginning. My initial graduate life was really hard, and I’m a first-generation college student, so I should say college was hard, undergrad was hard, starting grad school was hard. I was in grad school for a really long time before I finally was like, “oh, this is what I’m doing here.” You know, undergrad took me 5 years. Grad school took me an amount of time I don’t want to mention. I would, no actually, I shouldn’t… Let’s normalize it. From beginning to end I was probably in graduate school for 15 years.

I left one program and went to another program, so again, I am just going to sing the praises of the English department at the Grad Center, because they were a department that was a model of good mentorship. So I had some not really great models before that of people creating barriers to opportunities for funding, creating barriers to kind of asking questions even, and to sort of say I don’t understand what’s going on here. I need help. So my initial experiences as a grad student did not involve a lot of positive models of mentorship. With that said, though, that changed.
And being in the English department, and in particular my experience there was with the Composition Rhetoric area group and the faculty there, my mentorship at the Grad Center from the folks on my dissertation committee, Jessica Yood was my advisor, Sandra Pearl and Mark MacBeth were readers of my dissertation who offered very, very generous feedback.
Jessica and Mark are just models of people that are ready to sit with you, and talk with you, and read your work, and read shitty first drafts (and this is a term we get from Anne Lamott), but we really embraced it in my grad program, and it took me a lot of years to find people who were like, “yeah, write those shitty drafts and I’m gonna sit there with you.”
So I’ve really taken that ethos of “let’s get messy with our thinking and our process” — into my work and the Writing Center into my work as an academic, I think into my work as an administrator. And I had some great mentors outside of the Grad Center too. My outside reader of my dissertation, and someone who’s been really formative to my life was Lauren Fitzgerald at Yeshiva University. And I worked at Yeshiva University during my last 8 years of grad school – because I can say last eight years of grad school. Those were the years that I was really making progress. The years before that were harder, but the eight years that I worked at Yeshiva, Lauren was a really, really important mentor to me too for the same reasons that I just said: somebody that’s willing to listen to read messy drafts and to think through messy thinking and also to give feedback on that messiness, knowing that it’s not done, right? Like being able to give feedback to a person when we know they’re really in their process and our expectations are not perfection. I think that’s one of the keys to good mentorship, and I’ve learned that from the people that were good mentors to me.

POPHAM: That can be so liberating, you know, to be comfortable with showing that process to another person. And being comfortable with those shitty first drafts, which I have a lot of… We always like to end these interviews with an opportunity if you have any advice for current grad students, maybe grad students that are considering careers in writing education or working in writing centers, or just the General Graduate Center student.

EFTHYMIOU: I don’t know if grad students now, I don’t know if the student coming to the Grad Center today was thinking like I was back in 2000, but I was very much thinking about how I need to do this to have the life of an academic, and I think what I thought that meant was only involving teaching and only involving writing and by writing I’m thinking about like cultivating my own little research space and cultivating my own little classroom space, and what I’ve realized is that my graduate education positioned me for so much more than that. And because I did make a career in Higher Ed, and I know not every grad student does,and the more I’ve learned about those who graduated from the Grad Center and have gone on to work in nonprofits or in industry, I kind of wish I knew that so much more in the beginning too like there’s so many more opportunities than I thought. I’m thinking about being open to possibilities maybe beyond what you initially sort of come in with.
If a student is really committed to academic life, that is great and be open to exploring that, and of course, if that is your path pursue it, but be open to what else could be there too, either in nonprofits or industry, or in Higher Ed, because I think there is a lot that university administration can offer. I think there’s a lot that needs to be fixed or revised in university administration, and we need people who are committed to students and are committed to learning to do that work. I would advise being open to multiple possibilities and also, “shitty first drafts” are probably the most freeing thing once you embrace that. So find mentors and writing groups that welcome the “shitty first drafts.”

POPHAM: Andrea, thanks so much for joining us on Alumni Aloud.

EFTHYMIOU: Thanks John, it’s been great talking to you. Thank you so much for having me.