In the face of change
By Pat Blakeslee

Captions
Christine Frederick ’98W (Mas) chats with East High 12th grader, Raymond Ezell, about his academic plans.

Doctoral student Paul Collins (center), with his colleague Bonnie Whitney and Assistant Professor Mike Wischnowski, delivered a poster session at the 2003 American Evaluation Association annual conference in Washington, D.C.

Settling on a career that will last a lifetime is fast becoming the exception rather than the rule. Corporate takeovers, the fast pace of technology, and shifting family circumstances have created a climate that demands greater flexibility from American workers.

Consider, for example, Joe Carmichiel ’02W (Mas) who quit his job as a successful financial consultant to get certified to teach high school English. “It was a very difficult decision,” Carmichiel recalls. “I was doing well, getting raises and promotions, taking on more and more responsibility.” The problem was that Carmichiel never felt like he fit into the corporate culture.

Because he already had an undergraduate degree in English and communications, teaching English seemed like a “natural fit.” Carmichiel, who officially launched his new career at Canandaigua Academy in the fall of 2002, considers shaping young lives much more important than increasing profit margins. Though it doesn’t pay nearly as well, he looks forward to the rewards that don’t show up on spreadsheets. “I’m about to be responsible for 120 or so young lives,” he explains. “Lives are made or lost in adolescence. As a teacher, you’re in a position to motivate your students to make something of themselves.” He considers this a good return on his investment.
Like Carmichiel, Christine Frederick ’98W (Mas), recognized fairly early in her career as an accounting professional that the job wasn’t a good fit. She gave it six years before considering other options. “My mother was a teacher, so I started looking into certification requirements,” she says. Frederick attended Warner part time for three years while working full time. Now, as a counselor at East High School, she spends most of her day interacting with students and colleagues instead of spending it in front of the computer—a change that suits her. “I enjoy working with students, sharing their triumphs and comforting them through their sorrows,” she says.

Sidetracked by marriage and a lucrative job, Paul Collins returned to education after a seven-year detour into materials management. Focusing on ethics in special education, Collins is close to completing his master’s in philosophy and expects to complete his doctorate in education in another two to three years. He plans to teach at the college level.

“It was very exciting working in business, making million-dollar purchases for a growing company, but I had reached the pinnacle of success there,” he says. Seeing that the Dutch-owned company he worked for didn’t promote Americans to top management, he decided to pursue a master’s in education with a focus on special education at another local college. (Collins had worked as a first-grade teacher in a private school in Brooklyn until marriage brought him back to the Rochester area.) “I was drawn to Warner by the prospect of working with Randy Curren,” he says, a preeminent scholar whose interests coincided with his own.

Collins’ office mate Marjorie Shaw arrived in a similar place at Warner by a very different route. Now a Ph.D candidate, she thought she’d be comfortably established in a small law practice by now—just like her dad. That plan was derailed by a summer job in a large law firm after her second year at Cornell Law, which convinced her that life in a big firm was not for her but left her at odds about what to do next. To buy time, she took an interim position as judicial administrator for Cornell. As it happens, this decision started her on the course that led to Warner. “It gave me a broad-based exposure to higher education,” she says. “I also discovered that I really enjoyed working in an academic environment.”

When this job was nearing an end, she let her contacts know that she’d consider another position at Cornell. This prompted a call from the vice president of information technology, who recruited her as a policy advisor. “He saw that with the advent of the Web, legal and ethical issues surrounding online use were going to explode,” Shaw says. Together they forged Cornell’s Computer Policy and Law program, which took them all over the country to help other institutions think through the legal and ethical issues associated with online use.

Marriage in 1998 made Rochester home base and factored family considerations into Shaw’s career equation. As step-mom to a toddler, she soon found the commute plus business travel hard to reconcile with family life. “Although I loved my job, I felt strongly that family needed to be a priority.” After two years of trying to do it all, she decided to consider other options. “Reflecting back on the opportunities I’d had to touch people’s lives while at Cornell, I realized that teaching had been the most rewarding,” she felt. “My interest in ethics drove the decision to attend Warner.” Where else could she find a faculty whose research interests coincide so well with her own? Warner boasts a philosopher who specializes in education policy and ethics (Randall Curren), an expert on legal issues in education (Tyll Van Geel), and a historian who’s studying the case method system at law schools (Bruce Kimball). “It’s just a perfect match.”

Michael Scrivens, a part-time Ph.D. candidate and full-time marketing vice president, considers his studies at Warner a natural extension of his work life. “It makes me a better business person and helps me help my clients,” he explains. “In today’s business climate, it’s important to stay open and keep learning, especially with the pace that technology is moving.” Scrivens plans to do his dissertation in the area of applied ethics, focusing on ways to educate future managers and CEOs to make sure they act ethically in their corporate dealings. He sees himself retiring from marketing in five or six years to teach at the college level.

His experience teaching marketing and business courses at Bryant and Stratton and Monroe Community College inspired this goal. “I really like teaching and find that my students appreciate the practical experience I bring to the process,” he says. He also considers it a great way to stay current, which is important in his field.

Tobias Ekeze faced some difficult choices when his program at Johnson & Johnson was eliminated in 1998. The successful biochemist was a rising star in the field of clinical diagnostics, with seven U.S. patents to his credit. Getting another job was not an issue. In fact, he’d had offers from companies in California and North Carolina. The problem was that he and his wife were reluctant to relocate. “It was a rough time,” the Nigeria native recalls. “There were no other companies in the area doing the same kind of work.” After considering his options, Ekeze decided to use the respite provided by a year of severance pay to get certified to teach middle-school science. “The good news for me was that I was able to get certified in a year because I already had my master’s in biology,” he says. And finding a job in the Rochester city schools was not a problem. The bad news was that he and his wife had to “reengineer their life” to manage on a teacher’s salary. For three years—until his youngest reached school age—Ekeze worked a second job as a sales associate at Sears to enable his wife to stay home with the children. Sometimes he didn’t see his kids for two or three days.

uring that time, he says he learned that “all that shines is not gold.” Despite the difficult transition, Ekeze doesn’t regret his decision. Although he very much enjoyed life as a biochemist, he says “teaching is 10 thousand times more fulfilling. This job is about being a role model for the kids who are going to be tomorrow’s leaders,” he explains. Now instead of working a second job, Ekeze spends his nights and weekends working on a Ph.D. in educational administration. “Being an administrator will give me leverage to help fill in the gap between school and home,” he says. “I want to be in a position to have a say in the future direction of education.”

These graduate students, whose stories are just a few of many similar narratives, were drawn to Warner by the prospect of forging a new direction in their lives. For some, the journey marked a major departure from the life that came before. For others, it was a logical progression. Either way, it signals a willingness to invest in the promise of education and offer their skills and vision to advancing the cause.