May 6, 2025
What does a “day in the life” look like for you at work?
I spend my work day communicating with professors, students, department staff, directors, and colleagues in the Scheduling and Registrar offices. Depending on the season, my day can primarily be spent in enrollment management, course development and curriculum planning, or classroom scheduling. I enjoy that my work is a mix of detail-oriented work, and larger scope project planning.
How have your experiences—registrar at the Wright Institute, work in non-profits, and curriculum planner for the Integrative Biology department—shaped and influenced your work in your current role?
At the Wright Institute, which is a small independent graduate school, I wore many hats and was the front line for many inquiries and issues. This meant that I needed to fill many responsibilities that were outside the scope of my official duties, and this expansion of my skillset gave me the confidence to ask questions, seek mentorship, effectively make decisions, and assuredly communicate with higher administration.
My work as a curriculum planner in Integrative Biology (IB) was my first role at UC Berkeley, and I am grateful for the opportunity I was provided to join the campus staff and to learn from experienced colleagues in IB. I gained experience in all the platforms and various systems (and acronyms!) used across campus. I learned the fundamentals of curriculum planning, which allowed me to step into my expanded new role in the Interdisciplinary Social Science Programs (ISSP) and Geography. The experience allowed me to handle the increased workload and provide my expertise to programs who had never had a designated curriculum planner before.
As someone who is also an accomplished writer, how do you balance your creative pursuits with your role at UC Berkeley?
The creative pursuits happen outside of work and domestic responsibilities, so it’s a balance of finding the energy and composure to concentrate on writing after all else has been accomplished. Writing happens in these slivers of time, so it’s about capturing a pause, a moment, snippets, and somehow stringing those together into longer works.
Your poetry has been widely recognized and published. How does your writing practice inform the way you approach your professional life?
Both poetry and my work at Berkeley require commitment and attention to detail. They both require treating everyone with respect, no matter who they are, and trying to find solutions to problems, whether that problem is finding a larger classroom or getting a student into a class, or finding a better way to craft the opening of a poem, or helping to make book design decisions. Poetry is made of little individual parts, and you’ve got to have an eagle eye that allows one to see both the granular and the global.
What do you find most rewarding about your position as the curriculum planner for both the Geography department and the Interdisciplinary Social Science Programs?
By helping classes run as smoothly as possible so instructors can focus on teaching and students can focus on learning, I support the educational mission of UC Berkeley. I enjoy helping people and making processes as seamless and efficient as possible. If I do my job well, no one will really notice I’ve done anything.
I also appreciate the communicative and conceptual aspects of my position, which allow me to collaborate with many different departments and colleagues across campus, and to consider issues from different perspectives to determine the best course of action.
What are you currently learning and/or would like to learn?
Outside of work, I am learning how to care for an almost 3-year-old while also reserving enough energy for other pursuits (it’s a challenge!). I’d like to develop practices to live more in the moment to help to slow the feeling that the years are zipping by at light speed. I’d also like to learn to be a better gardener (everything in my garden right now thrives on neglect!), and a handier person who can do odd jobs around the house.
What else can you share with us about you or your work?
I feel grateful to be part of the UC Berkeley community, and to be supporting the daily functioning of such a prestigious institution. I feel proud to be working in public education at a time when more critical thinking is vitally necessary. As an individual, the micro and macro skills I am developing in my role will be useful throughout my career, and I am glad to be growing my skillset in L&S.
On a personal level, I am finishing up a new poetry manuscript, and hope it will be published in the next few years. It will be my first full-length book since having a child, so it’s definitely a milestone to celebrate.
Where can we find your written work?
Sundial (Nion Editions, 2021), Little Hill (City Lights, 2020), I Love It Though (Nightboat Books, 2017), and Here Come the Warm Jets (City Lights, 2013), as well as over ten chapbooks. Winner of the Poetry Center Book Award, and twice a finalist for the California Book Award, her writing has appeared in many venues, including Critical Quarterly, Feminist Formations, Harper’s, and Poetry Magazine.