<![CDATA[CSUSM NewsCenter]]> https://news.csusm.edu/ en-us Thu, 28 Mar 2024 22:56:56 +0100 Mon, 04 Dec 2023 18:34:07 +0100 <![CDATA[CSUSM NewsCenter]]> https://content.presspage.com/clients/150_1093.jpg https://news.csusm.edu/ 144 Appreciating an Untraditional Path to Degree https://news.csusm.edu/appreciating-an-untraditional-path-to-degree/ https://news.csusm.edu/appreciating-an-untraditional-path-to-degree/580846By Ilianna RamirezAs part of "Voices of CSUSM," a new feature in Steps magazine, recent psychological sciences graduate Ilianna Ramirez shares her story of overcoming challenges.

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I’m proud to be of American Indian, Guamanian and Mexican heritage. But I’m not going to lie – being from a multicultural background comes with more than its share of challenges. 

There are many days when you feel like you're never good enough, never enough for the population that you’re around that particular day. 

Some days, I'm not Native enough because I'm not fully Native or because I don't speak my Native language. Other days, I’m not as Mexican as others if I’m not speaking Spanish consistently. Or it could be my lack of a certain tattoo to represent my Pacific Islander heritage. 

I’ve learned over time to switch between those identities – usually without even thinking about it – depending on the circle of people I’m with in that moment. It’s like a light switch that I can turn on and off as needed. 

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Emphasizing one of my identities over the others can also bring about self-doubt and sadness because I’m doing it to be accepted by the person or group I’m with in that moment. 

I’m grateful that my time at Cal State San Marcos has helped me navigate those challenges. 

My journey in higher education been a windy road, from starting at the University of Hawaii-Manoa as a marine biology major to earning three associate degrees at Grossmont College to now finishing my bachelor’s in psychological science this spring at CSUSM. 

It’s certainly not a traditional path, and there were many days that I worried about not living up to some imaginary timeline of how long it was supposed to take me to get my degree.  

Today, I can appreciate an untraditional journey that has taken six years to complete. And I’m especially thankful that this path led me to CSUSM. It’s here that I reconnected with my American Indian heritage while also having the opportunity to fully appreciate and explore my Guamanian and Mexican identities. 

I am a descendant of Navajo Nation, and my clan spans the four corners of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. Most of my family lives in Arizona, including half on the reservation. I spent much of my childhood growing up in Arizona near my Native family. But I lost touch with much of that part of my identity as a teenager when we moved to San Diego. Even though Southern California is home to a significant Native population, it’s always different when you’re coming from a different place and not used to the customs or practices. 

While different tribes have many shared experiences, I'm also cognizant of being a guest here because this is not my traditional homeland. There’s a responsibility to show respect for where you are, respect for the land and knowing that this isn't mine personally or my ancestors’. It's about finding the proper balance. 

That’s something I’ve strived to do at CSUSM. When I came here, I didn’t even know the university offered an American Indian studies major. My first American Indian studies course came when I saw it being offered to fulfill an upper division general education requirement. I was fortunate that my professor, Lara Aase, encouraged me to visit the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center on campus. That led me to meeting Joely Proudfit, the center’s director and the department chair of American Indian studies, and learning about the American Indian Student Alliance (AISA). 

I’ve had the privilege over the past year of serving as president of AISA, which was honored by CSUSM’s Student Leadership & Involvement Center as the Student Organization of the Year for 2021-22. I also joined Associated Students, Inc., as the representative for diversity and inclusion. In this role, I’ve worked to ease racial tensions and create a space where dialogue and conversation can occur.  

It has been rewarding to see so many different organizations, both cultural and religious, come together. We know that we won’t resolve every issue or problem, but acknowledging that we see one another and recognize one another is a step in the right direction. We try to focus on how we can help and uplift each other. 

My multiculturalism has been a tremendous asset in this work. It’s allowed me to be an ally for so many groups on campus. As AISA president, I’ve encouraged members of our organization to embrace and learn about other cultural and religious groups on campus. And doing so doesn’t invalidate our identity, it’s simply making space for others to also be recognized and seen, something that so many groups are fighting for on campus. 

One of the biggest opportunities we have is to continue fostering an environment where all groups have space to grow and be recognized. 

It’s something that’s a big part of where I am at now, too, as a person. I’ve learned through my higher education journey the importance of communicating your thoughts because, ultimately, we’re all trying to advocate for ourselves. And that’s an important lesson for everyone, because if you don't advocate for yourself, no one else is going to do it for you.  

Self-advocacy is a skill that takes practice, to be sure. But once learned, it allows you to better express your concerns, helps people hear you in a non-adversarial way and makes them more inclined to listen. And that's what will bring about that change that we all want to see. 

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

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Mon, 17 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/cb9555a9-35d9-4a4c-9923-bd4996677626/500_iliannaramirez-al-20.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/cb9555a9-35d9-4a4c-9923-bd4996677626/iliannaramirez-al-20.jpg?10000
Alumna Paves Way as Palomar's First Latina President https://news.csusm.edu/alumna-paves-way-as-palomars-first-latina-president/ https://news.csusm.edu/alumna-paves-way-as-palomars-first-latina-president/573667By Bri PhillipsIt’s been more than three decades, but Mary Gonzales still remembers the Friday meetings with Star Rivera-Lacey at an IHOP in Oceanside. 

Gonzales referred to these regular meetups as her “counseling sessions” because Rivera-Lacey always shared sound advice. The two friends would chat over a cup of coffee and, if they were lucky and had enough money, share a piece of pie. 

When Gonzales was struggling, Rivera-Lacey would ask, “On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being world poverty, where does this problem fall?”  

Gonzales would typically respond with a low number on the scale, but the exercise helped her see her problems from a different perspective.  

“It taught me to stop sweating the small stuff,” said Gonzales, who is now retired from the San Diego County Office of Education. “That was one of her biggest powers, because now I share it with my own kids and I've shared it with other students. And I've heard people give it back and tell me the same thing. She always had that optimism of looking ahead.” 

That optimism continues to this day as Rivera-Lacey has grown from poverty in childhood to earning a Ph.D. and today serving as the first Latina superintendent/president of Palomar College. It was that ability to remain optimistic during challenging times that helped her become the first in her family to graduate from college when she received a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies at Cal State San Marcos. 

It seems Rivera-Lacey’s parents knew she had a bright future from the moment they named her. 

"My mom really wanted me to have aspirations and picked the highest thing in the sky,” Rivera-Lacey said. “That's why she named me Star.” 

Money was always tight for Rivera-Lacey as a child growing up in Oceanside. Her parents immigrated from El Salvador before she was born, and they always stressed the importance of a college degree to allow her to have a promising career and future. 

With her parents’ encouragement, Rivera-Lacey cultivated a passion for learning from a young age. She saw how they worked to improve their English by taking ESL classes at Palomar. Sometimes they even took Rivera-Lacey with them. Little could they have imagined that, almost four decades later, she would return to lead that very college. 

But Rivera-Lacey’s path to becoming a higher education professional wasn’t an easy one.  

Just as she was about to graduate from El Camino High School, she learned she was one class short. Her counselor recommended taking a physical education class at MiraCosta College to get the extra credits she needed to graduate on time. 

Rivera-Lacey signed up for a hip-hop dance course, but getting to class was always a challenge. She was constantly searching for a ride or scavenging for gas money to make it to MiraCosta.  

But once there, Rivera-Lacey was introduced to Extended Opportunity Programs and Services, or EOPS, which provides access to financial assistance and support services for low-income students. The program counselors reassured Rivera-Lacey that she could have a future pursuing a college education after she graduated from high school.  

Rivera-Lacey gathered a strong support system at MiraCosta. When she wasn’t sure how to navigate the complex college system, the counselors helped her every step of the way. She also had the endless encouragement of her parents. And when she met Gonzales, they formed a quick bond because they understood each other's struggles as first-generation college students. 

“I had a family, and she was single. But for some reason, when we met, we clicked really well,” Gonzales said. “We were both struggling financially. She had a car that she named Herman, and I had a truck. Sometimes Herman worked, and sometimes my truck worked. But my car had a hole at the bottom, and Star was always afraid that she would fall through when it was my turn to drive.” 

Car troubles weren’t the only obstacle. Rivera-Lacey was juggling her academic pursuits while working full-time to make ends meet. Sometimes that meant a second job. But Rivera-Lacey remembers the relief she felt when EOPS helped ease the expenses of her classes, including a grant to help pay for books. 

While trying to balance work and school, Rivera-Lacey needed five years to obtain enough credits to transfer to a four-year university. But MiraCosta’s EOPS counselors never wavered in their support. If she needed to take a semester off to focus on work, they would welcome her back every time with open arms.  

“There was no judgment,” Rivera-Lacey said. “They offered me complete acceptance, which made all the difference in the world. I never had to feel embarrassed, and that's so special.” 

Rivera-Lacey continued to receive that type of support when she transferred to CSUSM. She was also grateful to land an on-campus job. After working in retail throughout her time at MiraCosta and constantly battling to get the work schedule she needed to attend classes, it was a relief to be working on a college campus. 

“I have had a million careers,” Rivera-Lacey said. “But one of the best things that happened when I was at CSUSM is that I worked in a department that used to be called Student Affirmative Action and Outreach.”  

This job was nothing like the ones Rivera-Lacey had before. She would visit students from local elementary and high schools and get them excited about a future in higher education.  

Elementary school kids also visited CSUSM. Rivera-Lacey remembers the paper cutouts of graduation caps for kids to try on and fake checks to take to the bookstore to simulate the financial aid process. 

“CSUSM was so forward-thinking by doing that kind of community outreach,” Rivera-Lacey said. “I'm not surprised at all to see the success that Cal State has now. They've been investing in the community for so many years.” 

While Rivera-Lacey was helping other students get enthused about the possibility of attending college, she came to a realization as she watched people from similar backgrounds succeed in their jobs at CSUSM – she needed to continue her higher education journey and pursue a career in the field. 

Rivera-Lacey worked alongside her friend Sabrina Sanders in the Student Affirmative Action and Outreach program. Sanders, who received a bachelor’s and master’s from CSUSM, also decided to pursue a career in higher ed because she and Rivera-Lacey saw themselves in the students they were serving and the impact of reaching underserved communities.  

“The co-curricular experience as student assistants prepared and inspired us to our careers in higher education,” said Sanders, who also earned a doctorate from Alliant International University and is now the director of the Toro Reengagement Program at California State University Dominguez Hills. “As a first-generation Latina, Rivera-Lacey had an impact on the elementary, high school and community college students that was powerful. Her college journey, experiences and representation continue to inspire and exemplify the values and opportunities that education provides and her parents instilled in her. Promoting access, equity and student success is more than a job for President Rivera-Lacey – it’s a calling.” 

When Rivera-Lacey received her bachelor’s in liberal studies in 1995, it was a life-changing moment for her parents to watch the first person in their family graduate from college.  

“I think when you experience poverty and with every semester that I got under my belt, it was like one step closer to freedom,” Rivera-Lacey said.  

Rivera-Lacey saw how her financial situation started to improve after earning her bachelor’s, but there were still challenges. When she was pursuing a master’s in counseling at San Diego State University, Rivera-Lacey remembers driving to take her final knowing she wouldn’t have enough gas to get home nor the money to fill her tank.  

“I remember clearly walking on the freeway,” she said. “I do not recommend that anybody get on the freeway, but one of my friends came and rescued me. And to this day, it is one of the stories that we laugh about, right? 

“There are going to be obstacles in the way, doors that close, but there's always a window that's open. If you just put one foot forward, the road will rise to meet. There are so many people who are in education that love what they do and believe in students. You'll find the help.” 

Rivera-Lacey never let any of the obstacles she faced get in the way of her end goal. She received her master's in counseling at SDSU in 1997 and eventually returned to school to get her Ph.D. in education from Claremont Graduate University in 2016.  

Rivera-Lacey knew she wanted to center her career around what she loved: student success. And she stayed with her passion for higher education for 17 years, which led her to become the superintendent/president of Palomar College in 2021.  

Just as when she was a child, Rivera-Lacey still has the same passion for continuing to grow and learn – and she’s in a position to inspire others to do the same as she works to build on Palomar’s success.  

Rivera-Lacey knows firsthand the struggles that so many students face, and she serves as a shining example to those who may never have seen a Latina college president.  

“I'm very, very surprised at people's reaction,” Rivera-Lacey said. “I remember during commencement, a student wanted to hug me because they’ve never seen a Latina president. And another student thanked me because their parents were able to understand the ‘Superintendent/President’s Welcome’ because we did it both in English and Spanish, which shows that representation does matter. 

“I tell people all the time, ‘I might be the first Latina Palomar superintendent/president, but I won't be the last.’ ” 

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

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A Different Kind of Coach https://news.csusm.edu/a-different-kind-of-coach/ https://news.csusm.edu/a-different-kind-of-coach/525377By Eric BreierJoshua Foronda knows all too well the struggles that many freshmen face as they adjust to college.

Foronda failed multiple classes during his first year at Cal State San Marcos, landing on academic probation with a 0.6 grade-point average during the spring of his freshman year and contemplating dropping out of school.

But Foronda is nothing if not resilient, and his GPA climbed to 3.3 by the time he graduated in 2018 with degrees in criminology and justice studies and sociology.

Today, Foronda uses his experiences as an undergraduate to help a new generation of CSUSM first-year students in his role as a student success coach for the burgeoning Office of Success Coaching.

“Students feel like it’s the end of the world when their grades are not on point,” Foronda said. “But I tell students that every setback leads to a bigger comeback.”

The Office of Success Coaching is transforming the way CSUSM serves first-year students, providing personalized support services to ensure that newly admitted students thrive. Launched during the pandemic, the program already has garnered national attention for its innovative approach, with CSUSM receiving the 2021 American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) Excellence and Innovation Award for Student Success.

AASCU, which includes nearly 400 state-supported colleges and universities throughout the country, honored the Office of Success Coaching for its outstanding results and potential to influence and serve as a model for other institutions.

“There's so much pressure and students are trying to be so many things to so many people,” said Valita Jones, the office’s founding director. 
“The Office of Success Coaching gives them a pathway.”

The concept and framework for what would become the Office of Success Coaching was in place before the pandemic, with Jones – then serving as CSUSM’s director for recruitment and outreach – using grant funds to acclimate first-year students to college life. But the onset of COVID-19 accelerated plans and helped shape the program.

Jones met with CSUSM President Ellen Neufeldt in the early days of the pandemic to share details about the onboarding program she was overseeing. And Neufeldt took the opportunity to tell Jones about the success coaching program at Old Dominion University, where Neufeldt served as vice president for Student Engagement and Enrollment Services before coming to CSUSM in 2019. Neufeldt wanted to bring a similar program to CSUSM and saw opportunity in the work that had already been started.

As the Office of Success Coaching was formally launched, one of the first moves was bringing Jay Franklin, the director of recruitment and customer relationship management administrator for Extended Learning, aboard as the program’s associate director – and it didn’t take much convincing to get him to join the effort.

“It was a dream,” Franklin said. “I said, ‘This is a job? You're going to pay me to do something that I have always dreamed about doing?’ I don't even call it a job. This is a purpose.

“We’re not just there academically for students; it's personal relationship-building. And the end goal of any degree at Cal State San Marcos is not just the degree, it’s to help them understand how to network and connect.”

With some departments and programs unable to provide normal offerings early in the pandemic, nearly two dozen employees – including staff from athletics, campus recreation and events, among others – were redeployed to help launch the Office of Success Coaching. Sherri Watson, the executive director for Old Dominion’s Career Development Services and Coaching, was brought on as a consultant to train CSUSM’s success coaches and prepare them to work with students.

 

While some of the original student success coaches have returned to their former roles, the remaining team (which now includes graduate interns) works in a similar manner to a life coach. They start at the beginning of the student life cycle and aim to solidify a structured pathway for students to reach their end goal, which is to both earn their degree and pivot into a career. That includes helping students set goals, reminding them about important deadlines, and having general conversations about aspirations.

Those conversations proved invaluable for Priscilla Al-Rayes, a criminology and justice studies student. Foronda was assigned as her success coach, and his persistent emails eventually prompted Al-Rayes to make an appointment. Their discussions covered everything from academics to time management to life skills. When Al-Rayes asked Foronda for his thoughts about joining CSUSM’s Orientation Team, which assists with campus tours and orientation sessions for new students, Foronda was able to share his own experiences as an O-Team member and even helped prep Al-Rayes for the interview.

“No one knows what college is going to be like until you’re actually in college,” Al-Rayes said. “Your success coach is here to push you through that and get you to where you need to go.

“I’m someone who needs that personal experience to understand something, and having a coach who has that personal experience to share is probably the best thing about the Office of Success Coaching. He’s already been through it all and I’m just starting, so I know almost exactly what to expect by talking to him. That really has eased my anxiety when applying to things and going to events and things like that.”

Foronda takes pride in sharing with his students how he practices what he preaches. When he encourages students like Al-Rayes to build connections with professors and staff, he also tells them how the relationships he developed as a CSUSM student led to recommendations from people like Annie Macias, executive director of Associated Students, Inc., and Floyd Lai, director of the Cross-Cultural Center. Now Foronda proudly calls them colleagues.

It’s not difficult for Foronda to relate to the students he mentors. Sure, he’s only a few years removed from receiving his bachelor’s, but he too was navigating school, work and family during the pandemic like so many of them. In May 2021, he received his master’s in counseling from San Diego State.

“When I graduated, I sent all my students a video and said, ‘Hey, this is going to be you in a few years.’ I wanted to let them know that if I can do it during the pandemic, I know they can, too.

“One thing I’ve learned: It takes a village to raise a child, but it takes a university to graduate a student.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

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Difficult Times Give Way to Bright Future https://news.csusm.edu/difficult-times-give-way-to-bright-future/ https://news.csusm.edu/difficult-times-give-way-to-bright-future/523076By Bri PhillipsAs part of "Voices of CSUSM," a new feature in Steps magazine, communication student Bri Phillips shares her story of overcoming challenges as a first-generation college student.

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From the time I was born until I was 7 years old, I grew up in what seemed like an average middle-class household. My parents and I lived comfortably with few financial concerns. 

But that all changed when I was in second grade and a car accident altered the trajectory of our lives. Today, almost 14 years after that accident, I still feel the reverberations as I navigate the challenges of being a low-income student while working toward becoming the first person in my family to earn a college degree. 

The day of our car accident was supposed to be a special day. My sister, Ashley, was just a couple of months old, and we were venturing beyond routine errands for the first time since she was born to go apple picking about an hour away from our Temecula home. 

Despite doing my best not to fall asleep during the drive, I woke up to our vehicle flipping over after being struck, I later learned, by a hit-and-run driver. Our car flipped multiple times on the freeway, and Ashley’s car seat buckle came undone. My first instinct was to try to hold her car seat down. Ashley escaped with minor scratches while my mom and I just had some bruises. 

My dad wasn’t as lucky. He broke his neck and was in a coma for several days. I remember him lying in a hospital bed, not knowing if he would survive. 

My dad was our sole financial provider, and he was unable to work during the lengthy recovery process. The mounting medical bills and expenses eventually forced my parents to file for bankruptcy. 

The accident also took an emotional toll. My parents separated not long afterward. Though it has been over a decade since they split, they continue to live under the same roof leading separate lives because of our financial circumstances. 

We didn’t have money for after-school or extracurricular activities, nor many opportunities to explore interests or passions. And college was never a topic of discussion. No one in my family has ever finished college, and my parents were largely indifferent, leaving me to determine my own path. 

As a high school senior, I had difficulty envisioning my future. I watched my peers embrace their excitement about getting accepted into prestigious universities while I was still figuring out the application process. I was unfamiliar with financial aid and how it could help pay for college. It seemed like my classmates had their lives figured out while I was struggling just to complete my FAFSA, the federal form used to determine financial aid eligibility. 

It has always been an unspoken rule in my family never to talk about money or finances because it always ends in a heated argument. I had to scavenge through my parents’ taxes to try to fill out the FAFSA on my own. When I finally built up the courage to ask my dad for help, it was hard for him to understand the significance of the application. He didn’t want to share personal financial information and didn’t grasp that completing the FAFSA was what would make attending college financially feasible. 

Filling out the FAFSA is still an emotional process every year, and one that I have to explain to my dad each time. But our financial status means that I qualify for a Pell Grant, which helps me pay for college. Learning that I was eligible for a Pell Grant was such a relief. Not only does it mean I can avoid potentially crippling loans, but it helps my parents focus on their needs without worrying about college expenses. 

After high school, I enrolled at Palomar College and joined TRIO SSS, an organization that advises low-income and first-generation students to encourage academic success. It was inspiring to be surrounded by successful students who come from similar backgrounds. I was excited to learn about the help TRIO SSS provides for first-generation college students like myself, and it showed me that I could achieve my goals regardless of my background. 

I was grateful to continue being part of TRIO SSS after completing my associate degree in communication at Palomar and transferring to Cal State San Marcos last fall. 

At CSUSM, I have received overwhelming support, which has helped me further my education and figure out my career path. The university emphasizes hands-on learning, and I have had the opportunity to work as a writer in the University Communications office where I’m gaining valuable skills and guidance as I look toward a career in communications after I graduate in May 2023. 

CSUSM has opened the door for me to feel more confident about my future. I am building a strong portfolio for future employers, and the positive work environment in University Communications has encouraged career exploration and connections to set me up for success. 

During my first semester at CSUSM last fall, I juggled two jobs to ease the financial burden on my family while trying to balance a full course load. It wasn’t easy, but I’m proud of achieving straight A’s in my first semester at the university, and having a strong support system at CSUSM was an important part of making that happen. 

After completing my bachelor’s degree, I’m looking forward to finding a job that allows me to use the written communication skills that I am developing through my work in University Communications. 

I still dread filling out the FAFSA, and it’s an ongoing challenge to navigate the complexities of the higher education system. But I know that all of the difficulties will be worth it. Not only because I’ll be the first in my family to earn a college degree, but also because I’ll be able to help my sister forge an easier path to college and financial independence. I strive each day to set a positive example for Ashley. I encourage her to explore her passions now so she will have more direction than I did when she heads to college in four years. 

The car accident that my family survived 14 years ago changed many aspects of my life, but I’m able to look to the future with optimism. I’ve learned valuable lessons about determination and perseverance, lessons that have helped me develop a strong motivation to redirect my path. 

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

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Fighting Injustices in Food System Through Farming https://news.csusm.edu/fighting-injustices-in-food-system-through-farming/ https://news.csusm.edu/fighting-injustices-in-food-system-through-farming/525380By Eric BreierGreg Reese loved the outdoors as a kid growing up in Orange County. It didn’t matter if it was the beach, camping or the river. And when he wasn’t enjoying nature, he was busy playing soccer, including two seasons for Cal State San Marcos after transferring from Orange Coast College in 2007.

But it’s safe to say Reese never once imagined that all those hours spent outdoors would lead to what has become his passion.

“I remember there was one farm still in my neighborhood growing up that had cows and little sheep and chickens,” Reese said, “but I never thought I was going to be farming growing up. It just kind of happened after I was 30.”

Today, Reese is a regenerative farmer working to fight injustices in the food system by growing healthy produce for people who otherwise might not have access.

Reese is a co-founder of Encinitas-based nonprofit Sea + Soil, which aims to “reconnect and regenerate ecosystems and community.” Among the programs under the Sea + Soil umbrella is 1000 Tiny Farms, which Reese pioneered to help explore how small patches of land could have a positive social, environmental and economic impact.

“We focus a lot on the nutrient density and nutritional value of the produce,” Reese said. “If we can grow food without a need for heavy chemical inputs, then the soil will be better, therefore the plants are better, therefore the humans are better. It's kind of like a slogan that many people have probably heard before – food as medicine.”

Reese’s interest in healthy food began while he was working at Stone Brewing in Escondido. He ate a salad there that proved life-changing.

“I never felt so good after eating a salad,” he said. “It was noticeably energizing. And they sourced from a local farm in Escondido at the time. It was just so fresh. When I played soccer at Cal State San Marcos, I noticed that when I was eating fresher vegetables, I just felt good and I had more energy. Before that it was mostly meat and carbs. When I started incorporating fresh veggies, it was a game-changer.”

Contributing to the greater good is part of Reese’s DNA, and he spent time working in solar energy and water reclamation before focusing his efforts on farming. He worked with the Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, which helps “build a global community conscious of ecological farming and sustainability practices.”

While some may be surprised to learn that Reese earned his degree in business administration with an emphasis in marketing, he says his CSUSM education plays a role in his work every day, from manufacturing to distribution to marketing. In fact, Reese hopes to partner with his alma mater on many aspects of farming. He has thriving farms in Cardiff and Valley Center that can always use volunteers to assist with the physical aspects, but he said there also is a need for expertise with the scientific aspects of farming, including soil testing, identifying biological organisms in the soil, plant tissue analysis, and more.

“I think it’s important to know where your food comes from,” Reese said. “Don’t be fooled by labeling. There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors, and it helps to know where your food comes from.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

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Bridging the Gap: Alumni Introduce Platform to Transform Research https://news.csusm.edu/bridging-the-gap-alumni-introduce-platform-to-transform-research/ https://news.csusm.edu/bridging-the-gap-alumni-introduce-platform-to-transform-research/525378By Trisha RatledgeRoberto Cano and Edgar Salazar are about to launch a business that has the potential to transform scientific research in Mexico with one simple goal: making it more affordable.

Cano and Salazar are developing a Tijuana-based company, SinerLab, that will introduce an innovative online sharing platform for reagents, equipment and services to address the deficit of laboratory resources faced by many scientists in Mexico. This creative solution will both reduce costs and increase availability of the critical supplies needed for research and development.

“José and I talk about how we develop science in the United States and how there is a huge gap in research and development in Mexico,” Salazar said. “There are good institutions in Mexico, but they are lacking in technology.”

Cano and Salazar each launched their careers in Mexico after earning their undergraduate degrees — Cano in medicinal and pharmaceutical chemistry and Salazar in agricultural mechanical engineering. Their paths didn’t cross until after both had moved to the United States and enrolled in the Master of Biotechnology: A Professional Science Master’s Degree (MBt) at Cal State San Marcos.

For his capstone project, Cano was working on a nonprofit business plan to match San Diego biotech companies that could donate used equipment with researchers in Mexico who need access to equipment. Realizing ultimately that this plan was not viable — import/export procedures alone were prohibitive — he quickly pivoted to a for-profit model based in Mexico with a shared online network of resources that scientists could either offer or access.

“The purpose is to connect researchers within Mexico to help them make better use of the resources that are already in the country,” Cano said. “That will facilitate research and make it less expensive.”

Cano’s capstone presentation caught the attention of many in the room.

“José is committed to doing the right thing and serving people in need,” said Betsy Read, a founder of the MBt program and CSUSM professor of biological sciences. “One of his committee members, the CEO of a large organization in San Diego, was so impressed with what José was proposing that he asked if José was planning to move it forward.”

That’s where Salazar came in. José recruited Salazar, who was in the cohort just behind him, and Salazar developed the new business plan for the online sharing company as his capstone project. The model, SinerLab, is going into pilot testing by the two graduates, who are now business partners. Both also hold full-time jobs — Salazar as a process development engineer for Illumina and Cano as a stem cell researcher for Fate Therapeutics.

To move their business idea from page to lab, Cano and Salazar are working with The Founder Institute, a Silicon Valley startup accelerator that helps entrepreneurs through the early phases of their business creation.

“José and Edgar are driven to help bring more science capability to Mexico and developing countries to improve the health and welfare of the people there,” said Al Kern, an MBt program founder and adviser for the SinerLab project.

“When I talked to Edgar about working on the project as part of the master’s program, I told him I didn’t want it to stop there,” Cano said. “I think this is a really good idea and I want to make it real because I think we can make science more affordable and help a lot of researchers get faster results.” 

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

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Keeping Lessons From Late Father Close to Her Heart https://news.csusm.edu/keeping-lessons-from-late-father-close-to-her-heart/ https://news.csusm.edu/keeping-lessons-from-late-father-close-to-her-heart/525379By Eric BreierIt’s easy to understand Cal State San Marcos softball coach Stef Ewing’s excitement about having Gianna Lombardi on the team.

Lombardi adeptly switches positions without skipping a beat, able to start at catcher in the opening game of a doubleheader before moving to shortstop for the finale. She was one of the team’s top hitters as a freshman during the abbreviated 2020 season, and picked right up as a key contributor in 2022 after the 2021 season was canceled due to the pandemic. And she has arm strength that led one of the university’s baseball coaches to wonder aloud during a scrimmage if Lombardi can pitch – and he didn’t mean for the softball team.

“Most females do not throw a ball overhand like she does,” Ewing said. “If you come to a softball game and you watch everyone play catch and then you watch Gianna pick up a ball and throw it, you don't even need any sports knowledge to know it’s a whole different level.”

For the record, Ewing made it clear to the baseball coaches that Lombardi wasn’t going anywhere. But Lombardi’s value to the team goes beyond her considerable athletic ability.

“You get in a room with her, and she just fills it in a positive way,” Ewing said. “She’s funny and charismatic. When new people come in and they're around our softball program and they see that she can be who she is, they know they can be who they are.”

Lombardi’s infectious personality and approach to life harken to her father, Phil. The pandemic has taken a toll in so many ways, but none more difficult for Lombardi than losing her father in May 2021 to complications from glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. Most people diagnosed with glioblastoma die of the disease within 12-18 months. Phil’s death came only seven months after his diagnosis.

But the lessons Lombardi learned from her father continue to resonate.

“He taught me to be proud of myself, but also to be humble,” Lombardi said. “But I think the biggest thing he ever taught me was he would always say, ‘Don’t fear failure.’ Especially in a game like softball, you fail more than you succeed when you’re hitting. I just always kept that with me.”

It was something Phil knew firsthand from his days as a major league baseball player. A third-round draft pick of the New York Yankees in 1981, Phil made his major league debut with them five years later and spent parts of three seasons in the big leagues (including one with the New York Mets) before nagging injuries led to an early retirement before the 1990 season.

Phil coached Lombardi’s older sisters, Lauren and Julia, in softball, and both went on to play for Long Beach State. Lombardi flirted for a short time with the idea of trying something different than her sisters, but quickly realized it was more fun playing softball and benefiting from the experience and knowledge of her father and sisters.

Lombardi never had a chance to see her father play professional baseball – she was born more than a decade after he retired – but knew about his career growing up, even if she didn’t always realize when he was pulling her leg.

“I didn’t really know much about the game when I was younger, and he would joke, ‘I used to play with Jackie Robinson.’ And I thought he was serious,” Lombardi said of her father’s reference to the iconic Hall of Famer who broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947 – four decades before Phil made his major league debut.

“But he didn’t bring up his career around other people. He was really humble about things.”

Playing catcher was a natural choice for Lombardi. After all, it was Phil’s primary position during his career. And while nepotism may be an issue on some youth softball teams, having her father as a coach didn’t come with any special favors for Lombardi. Phil even insisted on Lombardi calling him “Coach Phil” instead of dad when they were anywhere near the softball field to avoid any thoughts of favoritism.

Of course, with Lombardi’s work ethic and ability, it didn’t matter if it was her dad or a complete stranger coaching – she was going to be in the lineup. Lombardi thrived at West Ranch High School in Valencia and on travel ball teams. One of her frequent adversaries was Zoe Ballen, who played at Thousand Oaks High School about 40 miles away and was also a foe in travel ball. They are teammates at CSUSM now, but Ballen still remembers being in awe of Lombardi’s boundless energy and the difficulties she presented opponents.

“When I came to CSUSM, I was kind of nervous to get to know her,” said Ballen, a pitcher who frequently throws to Lombardi behind the plate. “But she just kind of exceeded my expectations of the kind of person that she is and the kind of player that she is.

“She's great at communicating with all of our pitchers and has a great relationship with everyone on the team. I don't think I've ever heard a negative thing come out of her mouth. She’s just an overall great person and player.”

Lombardi started all 19 games in 2020 before the pandemic brought a premature end to the season and completely wiped out the 2021 slate. But she gave a glimpse of what she’s capable of in those limited games, batting .356 and impressing Ewing and teammates with her softball acumen.

“Gianna is just someone who comes in and plays and there are no norms; she's rewriting the norms,” Ewing said. “If I asked Gianna to go play third base, she’d go play third base. If I told her go into left field, she'd go into left field. She will go do anything you ask her to do. She'd run through a brick wall for anybody.”

Ewing may have as many as three more seasons with Lombardi after this. The NCAA adjusted its rules on playing eligibility because of the pandemic. So while Lombardi has completed her third year at CSUSM as a biology student, she will still be a sophomore next season in her softball eligibility.

All of Ewing’s players faced an adjustment this year as they completed their first full season in three years, but Lombardi had the added weight of playing her first season without her dad.

Phil was a familiar face at games in 2020, sometimes observing from beyond the center field fence and other times sitting right behind home plate where he could offer encouragement (and occasionally critiques) during games. But Lombardi is persevering, just as her dad would want.

“We had our offseason games during the fall, and I was kind of crying on the way to my first game,” she said. “It was my first game without my dad being there. It was kind of sad, but I always do look on the positive side of it, and now it's like I’m playing for him more than playing without him.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

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Tue, 30 Aug 2022 11:48:37 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_giannalombardi-softball-ar-003.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/giannalombardi-softball-ar-003.jpg?10000
For 15 years, Campus Coffee Has Been a Real Pick-me-up at CSUSM https://news.csusm.edu/campus-coffee-15-years/ https://news.csusm.edu/campus-coffee-15-years/361719By Brian HiroWhen Maya Kummer was a struggling student at Cal State San Marcos, Campus Coffee was a piece of her therapy.

Even on days when depression hit her hardest, she would leave Academic Hall with tears in her eyes, put on sunglasses and walk over to the coffee cart for a pick-me-up – in the form of both a caffeinated drink and pleasant conversation with welcoming faces, owners Tim and Sandra Sabbatini.

“That cup of coffee along with Tim and Sandy’s kindness got me through my hard days,” said Kummer, a 2010 alumna who now works at her alma mater as the coordinator of the TRIO Upward Bound program.

Shannon Nolan-Arañez was a daily Campus Coffee customer when her life was rocked by the sudden death of both her parents. Overnight, she became the head of her household and had to support her siblings financially, making that coffee pit stop every morning feel like a frivolous luxury. After the Sabbatinis learned of her grief, they wrote Nolan-Arañez a sympathy card and occasionally covered the cost of her coffee or treat.

“I love them and cannot thank them enough for being a shining light of love on campus,” said Nolan-Arañez, the coordinator of student involvement for Student Life & Leadership.

On her first day as a CSUSM employee three years ago, Christine Lee was talking about being new with a colleague in line, and a member of the Campus Coffee crew overheard her conversation. When she picked up her latte, she discovered cinnamon in the shape of a Cougar paw floating on the surface.

“It’s one of the lasting memories I have from my first day of work,” said Lee, the outreach and communication liaison for Community Engagement.

It was August 2004, only five days before the start of the school year, when Tim and Sandra Sabbatini opened Campus Coffee as the university’s only stand-alone business, a fresh new iteration of the coffee stand that had carved out a rather modest existence in the spot just outside Science Hall I. Fifteen years later, the married couple from Michigan has established a legacy that goes far beyond brewing the best chai latte in North County, a subject about which you will encounter little debate around CSUSM.

Campus Coffee has become the beating heart of mornings (and early afternoons, for true java junkies) at the university. It’s a place where if they don’t know your name, they know your usual order, and more often than not they know both. It’s a place where your coffee comes with a generous side order of friendly banter (bonus points if you like hockey) and classic rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a place that offers the ultimate mom-and-pop contrast to the pumpkin-latte-peddling corporate behemoth that resides just down the stairs – and that, as a result, engenders tremendous loyalty from its longtime devotees.

“It’s a family-owned, family-operated, family-driven business,” said Todd Snedden, associate director of athletics. “And I think what comes across to the customer, to the campus community, is that we value you, you’re part of our family, come and see us again. It’s just personal. There’s a personal relationship there.”

The Sabbatinis came to CSUSM with the intention of weaving themselves and their coffee cart into the fabric of the campus, and they have done precisely that. Almost from the moment they set up shop, they became a sponsor of Cougars athletics, and today they are the longest continuous financial supporter of the department. It’s no coincidence that many athletes, coaches and athletic staff employees (like Snedden) frequently make the long trek up from the Clarke Field House or The Sports Center, bypassing two other coffee shops on the way.

Campus Coffee has thrown itself wholeheartedly into CSUSM’s sustainability efforts. It encourages customers to bring their own mugs (regardless of the size, you just get charged for a small), it sells silverware, and it no longer offers plastic bags or straws. Last summer, Campus Coffee became the first eatery in San Marcos to pledge to be an Ocean Friendly Restaurant, a Surfrider Foundation program through which restaurants can show their commitment to making sustainable choices for the ocean.

Campus Coffee also supports many other organizations and causes on and off campus, including CSUSM’s Clear the Air program marking the university as a smoke- and tobacco-free campus by distributing custom coffee sleeves every semester.

“We all help each other, support each other,” Sandra Sabbatini said. “That’s what this school is all about.”

Tim and Sandra both grew up in St. Clair Shores, Mich., a small town north of Detroit that borders Lake St. Clair. They met in a dance club when they were 16 and got married a few years later. They fell in love with California during a trip west for spring break in high school and moved here in their mid-20s, driving their “big old Cadillac” across the country.

They settled in Lake San Marcos, where they still live, and in 1992, Tim indulged his passions for coffee and business by opening a store in Carlsbad that he named It’s Coffee Time, located in the shopping center just west of Interstate 5 and south of Poinsettia Lane. For 12 years, it served as the neighborhood haunt of the surf-and-sea crowd.

“Everybody loved their shop,” said Eliza Bigham, a retired CSUSM human development professor who still lives in the area and used to frequent the café in the early 2000s. “It’s a beach community, and there’s a lot of people who do a lot of bike riding, dog walking. It’s nice to have a destination to go to where there’s a smiling face, a cup of coffee and a bowl for your dog.”

In 2004, It’s Coffee Time was the victim of an expansion by the Ralphs in the same strip mall, and the supermarket bought out Tim’s lease. In a quirk of fate, that was right when the person who owned the existing CSUSM coffee cart was seeking to sell. The Sabbatinis long had wanted to work on a college campus – Tim recalls taking a computer class at CSUSM with a friend “when the internet came out” – and they leaped at the opportunity.

“It was perfect timing,” Tim said. “We grabbed it up real quick.”

Sandra joined her husband in the venture after working for a dentist while Tim ran the store in Carlsbad. They scrambled to give the run-down coffee cart a makeover, buying new ice machines, coolers, an espresso maker, a credit card reader, a menu board.

One thing Tim took pains to keep from his prior shop was his roaster. Peerless Coffee is a nearly century-old family business from Oakland that has won numerous awards for the quality of its products.

“When we place our coffee order, we’ll place it in the morning, and it gets roasted that day and delivered the next day,” Sandra said. “That’s how fresh it is.”

Regulars seem to notice the difference.

“The coffee is way better than Starbucks,” said Lisa Carmosino, who works in the School of Health Sciences & Human Services.

Speaking of the “S” word, the Sabbatinis feel no rivalry with the Seattle java giant, which opened its franchise on campus just months before Campus Coffee in 2004.

“It never really bothered us, the Starbucks thing,” Tim said. “We have our little niche, and they have theirs. There’s room for everyone.”

If you’re wondering who the third member of the Campus Coffee team is, no, it’s not the Sabbatinis’ son (though, yes, they get that question a lot). Kyle Duran started off as an ardent, if not obsessive, fan of the cart when he was a student, constantly hanging out on a nearby bench and doing shots of espresso with his buddies. He became an employee during his final semester at CSUSM in 2010, never imagining that he would stick around after he graduated with a marketing degree.

But he has, and hasn’t regretted it for a second.

“I just love the environment here,” Duran said. “Tim and Sandy are the most amazing people in the world. They treat me like a son. And it’s so nice to work outside.”

Tim and Duran first bonded over their shared love of hockey, and they still “talk puck,” as Sandra puts it, constantly between themselves and with sports-inclined customers (“They could talk about hockey 24/7,” Sandra said with mild exasperation). The looseness of the vibe at Campus Coffee, even when the line is long and the Sabbatinis are swamped, is what many people find so appealing.

And they know what you’re thinking: How can someone work so long in such tight quarters with their spouse?

“We love it,” Tim said. “You can’t walk by without bumping back there, so you gotta really like each other. And we like each other a lot.”

When they’re not under the burnt orange awning, Tim and Sandra like to cook, play with their dog, Rico, and travel. Each August, they shut down their business for a month to visit their families in Michigan.

Asked what the next 15 years may hold for Campus Coffee, Tim said: “Listen to what the customers want and just keep going. Hopefully, be busier and busier. This is what I like to do, and we’re happy to be here.”

Not as happy as CSUSM is to have them here.

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Plant-based Restaurant a Big Part of Alumna's Plot to 'Save the World' https://news.csusm.edu/jessica-waite-plot/ https://news.csusm.edu/jessica-waite-plot/365222By Brian HiroJessica Waite had a lot of the same worries that most suburban American kids face, concerns related to school performance, social currency, the health of loved ones.

But for Waite, growing up in Kirkland, Wash., outside of Seattle, her anxiety was broader, deeper, more acute.

“From the time I was little, I’d have panic attacks, and they were about big-picture things,” said Waite, a Cal State San Marcos alumna. “I always felt this sense of urgency, this feeling that there’s so much that needs to be fixed. I knew that there was so much to do on this planet.”

Her upbringing surely fed that worldview. Waite was raised in a family of animal-loving environmentalists. If someone in their neighborhood cut down a tree, her mother would plant at least one to replace it. Her father is an avid composter who abhors waste of any kind. She and her three siblings grew up amid dogs, cats, rabbits, turtles, even goats.

And the Waites had a little plot of land in the backyard for growing fruits and vegetables. Decades later, Jessica has another plot in mind, one she hopes will sprout into something on a grand, even culture-shifting scale.

Now an Oceanside restauranteur and vegan activist, Waite is close to realizing her vision of a dining spot that is entirely plant-based and as close to zero waste as she can possibly manage. The concept, called The Plot, is scheduled to open in December at 1733 Coast Highway, about a block north of the other two restaurants that Waite owns with her husband, regionally renowned sushi chef Davin Waite.

“When we talk about our ‘why’ in life, mine is to minimize suffering on this planet,” Waite said. “Then there are the strategic objectives, like how am I going to get there? And that’s by bringing people closer to their food and showing the health benefits and taste benefits of a plant-based diet.”

Waite, who was a vegetarian by age 7 and has been a vegan for about 20 of her 36 years, considers The Plot to be the most idealistic restaurant she could conceive based on her strongly held convictions. Located in a 4,400-square-foot-building that used to be a sushi house and is being transformed at a cost of about $1.25 million (money that Waite herself raised), The Plot will offer a menu that will fulfill Davin’s vow to do “cool stuff with plants,” it will be supplied chiefly with food grown on area farms, and it will go to extremes to avoid sending material to the landfill.

The 20-year lease that Waite signed even comes with a small rental cottage with a big yard behind the restaurant where she plans to create an urban garden and host private events.

Davin Waite has long been known in local circles for his creative and boundary-pushing dishes, but with this venture he will subtract seafood and four-legged animals, both of which he employs at his other restaurants (animals to a much lesser extent). The Plot menu is still being finalized, but possible items include banana peel tacos, sloppy joes made with mushroom stems and walnuts, a Reuben with beets instead of corned beef, and a vegan twist on chicken and waffles.

“I wanted to do with Jessica a restaurant that is not a bunch of fake meats. There already are people doing that, and doing it well,” said Davin, who has been a chef for more than two decades. “I just really wanted to focus on plants. I mean, I eat pretty well. I’m probably a vegan who garnishes their food with meat. And doing what I do, I definitely think it’s important to have a plant-based restaurant where the chefs remember what meat tastes like.”

If The Plot succeeds as Jessica hopes, she envisions the large restaurant and kitchen acting as the anchor for a chain of similar plant-based outlets, starting in San Diego and Orange counties and spreading outward from there as demand dictates.

“We’re not looking at it as how we’re going to do this in one space,” she said. “It’s how we’re going to do this efficiently and to scale. If we’re going to change the world, we’ve got to do it big, right?”

The Plot is a natural extension of the pair of restaurants Waite already runs and the sustainability projects she has pursued with Davin for almost 10 years. In 2013, a year after she graduated from CSUSM with a degree in psychology, Jessica teamed up with Davin – whom she had worked with at The Fish Joint, a now-defunct Oceanside sushi bar – to open Wrench & Rodent Seabasstropub (the colorful name is an homage to the pubs of England, where Davin spent much of his childhood).

To call it a shoestring operation would be a vast understatement. The couple borrowed $700 to pay for fish on the first night, and Jessica used the last $300 in her bank account to buy restaurant necessities. Wrench & Rodent didn’t even have a street sign for well over a year. But the sushi spot gained a loyal following thanks to enthusiastic reviews on websites like Yelp and the vocal advocacy of Tommy Gomes, a prominent fishmonger from Catalina Offshore Products.

Less than a year into its existence, Wrench & Rodent broke through by being featured as one of the best restaurants in the county by Modern Luxury magazine, alongside such high-end places as Ironside Fish & Oyster and Juniper & Ivy, both in Little Italy.

“We didn’t have access to any kind of a kitchen. We had this little toaster oven to make scallops on,” Waite said. “We were always playing punk music. Just wildness in here. And new customers would be like, ‘What the heck is this?’ But the food is just so good. The food was an experience they couldn’t have anywhere else in San Diego.”

Waite had aspired to attend medical school as a student at CSUSM, and after she graduated, she took law school classes online for one quarter. At some point along the way, however, she decided that the restaurant business wasn’t just a dalliance to help support her husband’s dream, but rather her preferred career path as well. So to bolster her skills, she applied for and was accepted into the two-year MBA program at Pepperdine University.

As she pursued her master’s, Waite in 2016 opened a second restaurant, which happened to be in the same building as Wrench & Rodent (a taco shop vacated the space). Named The Whet Noodle, it’s a ramen joint that puts into practice Waite’s philosophy of byproduct utilization. For example, when fish comes in to Wrench & Rodent, the bones and skin and cartilage can be utilized to make broth for The Whet Noodle. Or fish that can be served raw for only three days at Wrench & Rodent can be grilled or smoked next door.

“That’s a huge part of what Davin does because these are all valuable resources,” Waite said. “You look at any other culture and you’re like, ‘Who is wasting this much, and why would you take something that could be incredible and throw it away because you’re lazy?’ ”

Unlike its neighbor, The Whet Noodle struggled to attract a clientele. Part of the problem was negative online reviews from diners expecting a traditional ramen experience. The restaurant’s website now contains a disclaimer – “We ask that you keep an open mind and a sense of humor” – and after Waite came close to abandoning the idea, she’s happy to report that it has found its niche as a local hangout.

But for all their spunky charm, neither Wrench & Rodent nor The Whet Noodle truly represent Waite in her full-throated zeal. The Plot does. She sprinkles PowerPoint presentations about the restaurant with phrases like “Feeding the evolution” and “Be the change, one bite at a time.” She tells the story of its mission so compellingly that she raised the bulk of the money for the renovation in only a few months. And she has only increased her activism in recent years, including becoming president of Berry Good Food, a foundation that supports a local and regenerative food system in San Diego and northern Baja California.

“It’s not necessarily trying to get everyone in the community to be strictly vegetarian or vegan, but just to have people make the transition and think, ‘Oh, maybe I don’t have to have meat for every meal,’ ” said Victoria Riesgo, who graduated from CSUSM last spring with a bachelor’s in psychology and worked at Wrench & Rodent for five years, rising to general manager. “We do have evidence showing that, as a culture, food systems like ours use a lot of resources and produce a lot of carbon emissions. So it’s like a small step in a societal change.”

Waite is a voracious reader who tends toward nonfiction about health and nutrition. At CSUSM, she was heavily influenced by “The China Study,” a 2005 book that reveals findings from the most comprehensive study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease. One of her favorite recent discoveries is “Kiss the Ground: How the Food You Eat Can Reverse Climate Change, Heal Your Body & Ultimately Save Our World.”

Waite talks a lot about saving the world, though she admits that she does it in part to get a reaction (“I like people’s eyes to pop and look at me like, ‘Is she as crazy as she sounds?”). But she’s dead serious about incremental progress – about doing all she can to make plants cooler to eat, to reduce the suffering of animals, to curtail the damage that humans inflict on the planet.

“It’s about little steps,” Waite said. “I’m not going to sit here and say, ‘Oh, well, we’re gonna save the world. The world is gonna be fixed.’ It is very tongue in cheek, but it also is exactly what I am dedicated to doing for the rest of my life.”

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Mon, 04 Nov 2019 08:30:00 -0800 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_theplot-jessicawaite-046-845884.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/theplot-jessicawaite-046-845884.jpg?10000
Lovely Rita: Alumnus Turned Decrepit Truck into a Refreshing Business https://news.csusm.edu/margarita-truck/ https://news.csusm.edu/margarita-truck/364875By Brian HiroThe listing on eBay was for a 1965 GMC truck, the kind used back in the day to make bread deliveries. The cost was $1,200. The mileage was impossible to know, really, because the truck didn’t have a working odometer.

It didn’t have much that was working, Mario Melendez (’96) learned as he began to consider purchasing the vehicle seven years ago. Melendez owned a taco catering business and had been thinking about adding a food truck to the mix. But this model, which had been languishing in a junkyard for years, wasn’t exactly ready to start cranking out street tacos.

Melendez, though, saw potential where most would have seen only decay. After buying the truck, having looked at only grainy internet photos of it, he flew from his home in Dana Point to Sacramento to claim his auction prize.

“Not only was it collecting rust, it was collecting everything – animals, rat poop. There was a hornet’s nest in there. It was horrible,” recalled Melendez, a 1996 graduate of Cal State San Marcos.

Melendez hired a mobile mechanic to get the rig running, then donned a hazmat suit – he jokes that he resembled Walter White of “Breaking Bad” fame – for the long ride back south. With speeds limited to as low as 40 mph and frequent stops for gas (the gauge didn’t function, after all), a drive that should have taken about seven hours was more than three times that.

These days, Melendez attracts stares on the freeway for a different reason. His idea for a taco truck soon evolved, and now he’s the proprietor of what he believes is the world’s first mobile margarita bar.

And what a bar on wheels it is. Rita, as Melendez coined it, has been fully restored and hand-painted in a striking mint green with vintage lettering and styling. Since it first hit the road in 2012, the truck has been the star of thousands of private events and been used as a prop in TV commercials for such companies as Southwest Airlines, NBC and Humira.

When Melendez cruises down the road, windows open and music blaring, he sometimes can’t help feeling like Lennon and McCartney are riding shotgun.

“You’re on the freeway, and people are waving at you and honking their horns,” he said. “They’re taking photographs. It’s like you’re riding with the Beatles or something.”

Rita is the centerpiece of Rasta Rita, Melendez’s beverage catering company, which expanded two years ago to include Lady, a 1973 Chevy Balboa RV that he rescued from the chopping block – for free this time – and that was lovingly refurbished just like her sister. Business has been so good that Melendez is now on the lookout for a third vehicle that he would deploy as a rum truck.

Rasta Rita, in turn, is an offshoot of Rasta Taco, which Melendez founded in 2006 and which features both the taco catering and what he calls the smallest restaurant in California – a 220-square-foot taco stand in Laguna Beach that was converted from a one-chair barber shop.

You might be asking what the connection is between tacos, margaritas and the Rastafarian culture referenced in the company titles. Melendez stumbled on the idea during a vacation in Jamaica. Traveling through the backcountry, he encountered a series of jerk chicken stands that reminded him of the taco stands of Baja California, where he lived for a spell in the 1990s. He dreamt up the name Rasta Taco while on a bus en route to Bob Marley’s house, and reinforced the link years later by opening a second restaurant location in the Jamaican tourist town of Ocho Rios.

Rasta Rita was conceived as a supplement to the taco business, but thanks to that photogenic truck, it quickly became the main attraction. For her killer looks, Rita owes a huge debt of gratitude to a couple of people. After Melendez completed the harrowing drive south from Sacramento, he had bad experiences with both a mechanic and a painter before finding the men who made the truck hum and sparkle.

Aaron Hamusek of Orange County Hotrods practically rebuilt Rita from the inside out and still maintains it because, as Melendez puts it, the truck is his business and if the engine stalls on his way to a wedding reception, the bride won’t stand for any excuses.

“He does a phenomenal job,” Melendez said of Hamusek. “If something’s broken, he’ll make the part. He won’t just go buy it; he’ll build it. This particular truck needed that because there are a lot of hard-to-find parts.”

As for the design, Melendez was insistent that he didn’t want decals or wraps. Enter Christopher Lord, a Long Beach artist who has a number of national clients and spent a decade traveling the country to paint signs and murals for Lucky Brand denim’s retail stores.

“I was very clear to Christopher that I wanted a billboard type of feel, but I didn’t want it to look like I was selling something,” Melendez said. “It just turned out perfect. The minute I drove that thing off, I could feel it. I could feel that I was doing something unique.”

Melendez budgeted $15,000 for Rita’s restoration but ended up spending more than $100,000. His packed schedule of gigs tells him it was worth it. Assisted by a team of contract workers, he books corporate events, weddings and parties throughout Southern California, but he’ll venture farther if necessary. Rita has been as far north as Palo Alto and as far east as Las Vegas. Melendez even offers a non-alcoholic package with virgin margarita mixes, agua frescas and signature sides.

The unforeseen birth and success of the margarita truck is just the latest curveball in a life that has been full of them. Melendez attended boarding school for five years, served in the Persian Gulf War as a member of the U.S. Navy, and taught English to preschoolers in Mexico. At Cal State San Marcos, where he majored in liberal studies, he worked in the Office of Global Education and had his eyes opened to opportunities to study abroad. He lived in Spain for his final semester in 1996 and loved it so much that he stayed in the country to earn an MBA.

His lifelong ambition had been to try his hand in fashion design, so when Melendez returned to California, he used his business chops to start a men’s clothing line with a Latin influence. Within a year, the clothes were being sold in 50 stores and Melendez had been interviewed by such magazines as People and Newsweek. But the company became a casualty of the economic downturn after 9/11, and he was plunged into a “midlife crisis in my late 20s.”

Melendez never could have imagined that he ultimately would be saved by a margarita truck. Heck, he didn’t even know how to make a margarita.

“He’s said this to me so many times, that the best part of the job is that he gets to bring joy with the truck,” said Jeri Regan, Melendez’s longtime girlfriend. “It’s basically the best guest at any event. He gets to see the intimate part of people’s lives and lifestyles. There’s a lot that goes on in California that you’re never privy to see.”

Rita is Melendez’s ticket. He has catered big corporate parties for Facebook and HBO. He has done events where guests included Angelina Jolie, Queen Latifah, LL Cool J and the cast of the Showtime series “Shameless.” He has been to the house of John Paul DeJoria, the founder of Paul Mitchell hair products, who also happens to own the company that produces Patron, one of the world’s best-known premium tequilas. (“And I’m serving this guy a margarita,” Melendez said incredulously.)

At one especially posh gig, Melendez asked to use the bathroom, went inside the house, and spotted an Oscar sitting on a shelf. The nameplate read Hilary Swank.

“The starstruck part fades because you know that you have a cool truck,” Melendez said. “We’ve been at events at $10 million beach houses in Malibu. And people are outside in the alley with us and the truck.”

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Fri, 01 Nov 2019 08:30:00 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_rastarita011-350159.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/rastarita011-350159.jpg?10000
D'Liteful Detour Leads to New Chocolate Shop for Alumna https://news.csusm.edu/dayleen-coleman/ https://news.csusm.edu/dayleen-coleman/361564By Brian HiroFor many people, deciding what to give family or friends for a special occasion can be agonizing. For Dayleen Coleman, it was a piece of cake, so to speak.

Coleman, for a certain period of her life, was the cake lady. Birthday party? Bake a cake. Baby shower? Bake a cake.

She loved being in a kitchen generally, and baking specifically, as a creative outlet and as a stress reliever after a long day working with at-risk youth at Casa de Amparo or helping to develop the Master of Social Work program at Cal State San Marcos. And she was good at it, too. She watched countless YouTube videos to perfect her technique, and when that didn’t do the trick, she took local classes in baking and cake decorating.

Coleman acquired all the knowledge she needed to make her the queen of the bake sale. Yet still she craved more. So when her husband was given an opportunity to move to England as part of his job with Viasat, she read it as a sign from the universe.

She applied and was accepted into Le Cordon Bleu London, the most competitive branch of perhaps the most prestigious culinary school in the world. For almost a year, she trained under renowned French pastry chefs. She learned the scientific underpinnings for the recipes she already had mastered, plus dozens of new ones (and not just desserts, either). She discovered that, in addition to cakes, she possessed a rare gift for making chocolate.

And when she and her family returned to San Marcos in 2016, Coleman had everything she needed to turn her education into a fresh career. She started D’Liteful Chocolat, a patisserie and chocolatier that she operated out of a commercial kitchen in an industrial park for two years before opening a retail shop in Lake San Marcos last summer.

“When somebody comes in and asks how the macarons are made, I can tell them,” said Coleman, who graduated from CSUSM in 2005 with a degree in human development. “If they say, ‘Oh, I tried it, and all my macarons exploded,’ I can say, ‘You overaerated, you put too much air in them.’ They show me a product, and I can tell them exactly where they went wrong. Because I understand every single step of it. And that’s what I got from Le Cordon Bleu.”

The storefront that D’Liteful Chocolat (the “D” in the name stands for Dayleen, and the “Chocolat” is a nod to her French training) moved into last June represents a charming new public face of a company that has thrived behind the scenes since its founding in 2017. It’s located in a quaint shopping center across the street from the Lakehouse Hotel & Resort, and Coleman speaks fondly about how often hotel guests on vacation stroll by and are delighted to discover her delectable offerings (“It feels more like a destination location than just some place in a strip mall,” she said).

The walls of D’Liteful Chocolat are painted in Coleman’s trademark pastel purple, and every piece of equipment and decoration bears her imprint. Her big splurge was a temperature-controlled display case from Italy that she has dubbed “the shrine.” Inside it are such treats as her colorful macarons – flavors include strawberry, raspberry, lemon, orange, coffee, salted caramel, vanilla bean and chocolate – chocolate mousse, crème brûlée and a lemon meringue tart. The adjacent case contains an assortment of gourmet chocolates and truffles, and she also makes crepes with fresh berries and chantilly cream that some customers tell Coleman are better than those they can find in Paris.

Coleman is frequently asked about her favorite and most popular dessert. The answer is the same: opera cake, which is an almond sponge biscuit soaked with coffee syrup, layered with dark chocolate ganache and coffee butter cream, and topped with a chocolate disc. When the shop inevitably sells out of them, Coleman says, people will buy one anyway, simply to reserve it for the next day.

“Her opera cake is to die for. That is my favorite,” said Tracy Hall, a CSUSM human development lecturer who has been a close friend of Coleman’s for years. “She could work at any five-star restaurant with her talent. These are just exceptional desserts, and they’re beautiful. She has the creativity, the artistic flair, the knowledge. Yeah, she has it all.”

As well-received as the brick-and-mortar shop has been, it’s just one small part of Coleman’s business. She caters private events, sells chocolate at wholesale, designs and creates wedding cakes, and runs workshops and team-building exercises. In the past six months, as a sign of her enduring connection to CSUSM, she made a cake in honor of the retirements of former President Karen Haynes and First Gentleman Jim Mickelson; put together a special box of chocolates for Haynes’ successor, Dr. Ellen Neufeldt; whipped up special cupcakes to celebrate Kellogg Library’s 15th anniversary; and did team-building for the College of Business Administration and the School of Education.

With the opening of the store, Coleman now supplements the half-dozen or so monthly private events at external locations with four workshops held in the kitchen of D’Liteful Chocolat – one featuring macarons and one chocolate for adults and children apiece. The workshop idea is something she brought back from her time in England, when after finishing at Le Cordon Bleu she worked for a company called Chocolate Craft and got involved with team-building events throughout the country.

“I would do sessions on private islands on the Thames, Henry the VIII castles from the 1500s. I had to pinch myself through the whole thing sometimes,” Coleman recalled. “I found that my passion was in teaching. I loved it. Because I love chocolate, and I love seeing other people getting to work and play with chocolate and have the same experience.”

Everything about living abroad might once have seemed fanciful to Coleman, a first-generation college graduate who was raised by a single mother in California’s Central Valley. She was working at CSUSM, and serving as president of the Alumni Association, when the England opportunity arose. Because the office where her husband, Curt, was to work is in Wareham, 116 miles southwest of London, the family chose to reside in a small village called Bishopstoke that’s roughly in the middle.

While her daughters, then 8 and 4, attended the local public school (and wore very British uniforms), Coleman would board a train and commute about 90 minutes to Le Cordon Bleu in the heart of London. The intensive program was four days a week for 10 months, and Coleman was the only American in her patisserie cohort of 15 students.

"The program itself was pretty brutal," said Curt Coleman, a software engineer who has worked at Viasat for two decades. "And then trying to balance that with being a mom and getting up to catch an early enough train that she would guarantee she would be there on time. Dayleen was pretty amazing in her ability to multitask on a daily basis, juggling being a mom and doing the student thing."

After the third of three terms, Coleman secured an internship at Côte Brasserie, a French restaurant in Winchester that had the benefit of being considerably closer to home. Initially offered a position in fish and seafood – “I was like, ‘Did you not see my CV?’ ” Coleman joked – she soon undertook the natural transition to pastry chef, making up to 300 desserts per day.

But her true joy (and skill), as she learned in her time at Le Cordon Bleu, was chocolate. Coleman says she remains in touch with most of her cohort from the school, and she’s the only one who has pursued chocolate for a living.

“At the end of a practical exam, I would present what I made after working with chocolate for three hours, and I wouldn’t have a drop on me and I’d have a smile on my face,” she said. “Most of the chefs were wearing chocolate everywhere and grimacing. It’s hard to work with chocolate. It’s not for everyone. But for me, it’s always felt calming and therapeutic.”

Coleman honed her abilities during an eight-month stint at Chocolate Craft, which is a factory built on a farm that dates back centuries. She was mentored by a chocolatier who doubled as a children’s book illustrator and taught Coleman to treat chocolate not just as a delicious treat, but as a piece of art.

Throughout her life-changing English experience – Le Cordon Bleu, the internship, the job at Chocolate Craft – Coleman was taking copious mental notes, knowing that she would incorporate as much as possible into her own business when she moved back to the States.

With D’Liteful Chocolat now in its third year, Coleman works with a team of seven employees, most of whom are cross-trained to handle myriad duties. Her assistant manager and head baker is Callista Rotondo, whom Coleman hired on a trial basis from Nothing Bundt Cakes more than a year ago and who now can make almost as many desserts as her boss can.

“She has taught me so much, especially with chocolate work. That was something I knew absolutely nothing about,” Rotondo said. “It’s really difficult, but she’s taught me how to make them unique. Anybody can go to the store and a buy a candy bar, but they can’t go to the store and buy what we have.”

Coleman has grand plans for D’Liteful Chocolat. She wants to expand into the space next door when the current owner retires and open a café. She wants to create a series of high-end boutiques in North County that will sell her wares, which still will be produced in the existing kitchen. Farther down the road, she envisions establishing a similar concept in her beloved England.

In the meantime, Coleman will continue to offer a little slice of Europe in a little corner of San Marcos.

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Thu, 31 Oct 2019 08:30:00 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_dliteful-dayleencoleman-019-514368.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/dliteful-dayleencoleman-019-514368.jpg?10000
Erik the Electric Enjoying Feeding Frenzy https://news.csusm.edu/erik-the-electric/ https://news.csusm.edu/erik-the-electric/364338By Eric BreierErik Lamkin is just 26 years old, but he sounds a bit like a grizzled professional athlete closer to the end of his career than the beginning.

When your job requires you to gorge on thousands of calories in a single sitting, it’s safe to say you’re not in it for the long haul.

“I think I have a few good years left in me,” Lamkin said.

Lamkin (’17) plans to enjoy every minute for as long as he can.

Known on social media as Erik the Electric (his nickname in high school), Lamkin posts weekly videos on his YouTube channel that feature him taking on seemingly impossible food challenges – and sometimes they do actually prove impossible.

During his annual food tour last summer, Lamkin created his own challenge at Elm Street Diner in Stamford, Conn. He gave himself 45 minutes to polish off eight dozen doughnuts – yes, eight dozen – covered in 3 pounds of Nutella and sprinkled with white chocolate chips. The plate weighed 13 pounds, and the concoction added up to more than 20,000 calories. Lamkin consumed about 17,000 of those calories before the timer brought an end to his quest as he told viewers that he was throwing in the towel – in this case, the actual Nutella-stained towel he used to wipe off his hands and face as he ate.

Lamkin doesn’t fall short on food challenges often. Some are formal restaurant challenges – the kind featured on shows like “Man v. Food” – and many are simply ones Lamkin has dreamed up that feature him eating copious amounts of fast food or junk food. All are wildly popular.

“It was a hobby that turned into my career,” Lamkin said. “I wake up every single day excited to do what I do.”

Not a day goes by that Lamkin doesn’t encounter at least one person asking, “What’s your real job?” But this is, in fact, his real job.

Lamkin’s videos have a total of more than 150 million views, including nearly 30 videos that have surpassed 1 million views each. That includes a July 2018 video in which Lamkin went on his first date with Kristie Higgs. They each took on a 5-pound burger challenge that included 1½ pounds of fries. Lamkin finished in less than 17 minutes. Higgs gave it a valiant effort before deciding it would be better to leave room for dessert (Lamkin partook in that, too). But the date was an unqualified success. More than a year later, Lamkin and Higgs are still together and have even started their own YouTube channel called The Electrics.

Lamkin’s charisma, coupled with his creativity in conceiving outlandish food challenges, has helped him gain a loyal – and massive – following. He has more than 1 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, including large fan bases in the United Kingdom and China.

Seeing Lamkin’s success as a competitive eater makes it all the more astonishing to learn about his battle with anorexia. Growing up in San Diego, Lamkin was overweight as a child before focusing on fitness as a teenager. But as his commitment to exercise grew, he became obsessed with his weight.

“When I was 16 years old, I was almost too scared to brush my teeth because I didn’t know how many calories were in toothpaste,” he said.

Lamkin’s weight dwindled to 115 pounds at its lowest point. During his sophomore year at Cal State San Marcos, Lamkin’s family pulled him out of school and sent him to a treatment facility. It helped him get to a better place mentally and physically.

Lamkin returned to CSUSM after completing his treatment and switched his major from business administration to communication, which he felt aligned better with his passion for entertaining people. Lamkin’s days were split between school and his job at a local bike shop while his nights were spent making videos, skills he had been honing since high school when he would post videos of himself playing guitar.

“They’d get like three views,” Lamkin said. “I’d hope that one of those views was a cute girl from my high school … but it wasn’t.”

While the guitar videos didn’t lead to any dates, Lamkin was becoming an expert in film editing and Photoshop, skills that would be critical to his later success as Erik the Electric. People tend to think of him solely as a competitive eater, but Lamkin estimates that at least 80% of his time is spent editing.

Lamkin’s YouTube channel had about 100,000 subscribers when he was approached by a YouTube network, which assists users in growing their channel in exchange for a cut of their earnings. Lamkin decided to give it a shot, and the decision paid off beyond all of his expectations.

“I never would have imagined that people from all around the world would want to watch,” he said. “When I go on YouTube, I don’t watch food videos. I go on to see if I can fix my computer cord or something like that. But food is one of those things that everybody can relate to.”

While Lamkin’s YouTube viewers are accustomed to seeing him devour thousands of calories at a time, his diet consists primarily of chicken and vegetables when he’s not doing a challenge. He works out religiously, and it’s an important part of his routine on the day of a food challenge.

It takes Lamkin up to 24 hours to fully recover from challenges designed around fast food or junk food. Restaurant challenges are easier on his body – “it’s usually a lot less food and not a ton of sodium,” he says – and he would eventually love to transition to doing a TV show that focuses on food and traveling.

After his battle with anorexia, Lamkin pays close attention to his health. He gets blood work done quarterly and said he wouldn’t do the food challenges if his health diminished.

While he readily acknowledges the ticking clock on a career as a competitive eater, he also is making the most of every moment. He loves to engage with his viewers, whether it’s someone who wants to know about his next food challenge or someone who wants to talk about how his story of overcoming anorexia has inspired them.

“It’s been a long journey,” he said, “but I’m very proud of where I’m at right now.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

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KIN Whiskey Is a Family Affair for Alumnus https://news.csusm.edu/taylor-lax-whiskey/ https://news.csusm.edu/taylor-lax-whiskey/364180By Brian HiroKIN Whiskey is more than just a clever name to Taylor Lax, a 2010 graduate of Cal State San Marcos.

Lax’s father, Bernard, started the craft spirits company three years ago in the family’s native Los Angeles, and Lax now runs the growing business with a cousin. Its signature product, KIN White Whiskey, is a modern spin on the traditional moonshine culture of the Deep South.

KIN Whiskey, which also makes a brown bourbon, has expanded to sell its products in more than 100 bars and restaurants in California, including Jeune et Jolie, a French eatery in Carlsbad. In addition to his role as KIN’s brand manager, Lax, 31, bartends at Margot in Culver City, and he shares his creative concoctions with his almost 30,000 followers on Instagram, where he posts as @the.cocktail.bandit.

Question: As a born and raised Angeleno, how did you discover CSUSM?

Answer: I used to spend a lot of time in North San Diego County and fell in love with the area. I then toured the campus and realized what a community it was, and loved the smaller class sizes compared to the other universities I was looking at out of state.

Q: How did KIN Whiskey come about?

A: When I was growing up, my father would have moonshine in mason jars from a bootlegger in the back woods of Georgia. After a few run-ins with the law, one day he stopped cold turkey, but not before passing on his tips and recipe ideas. Fast forward a few years, when craft spirits became big, my father decided to take what he knew from this conversation and work with a small distillery in Oregon to create the product we sell today.

Q: Where do you enter the picture?

A: My cousin and I soon became the face of KIN and jumped into the industry with very little knowledge. We had to hustle and learn at the same time, and were literally selling KIN out of the back of our car once we became legitimate, with all the necessary licenses for distribution.

Q: So white whiskey is connected to the moonshine theme?

A: Only in that being unaged, it is reminiscent of moonshine. However, if you taste it, it will not be reminiscent of the taste of a typical moonshine.

Q: What sets your whiskey apart from others on the market?

A: Our white whiskey is a unique product and has a lot of interesting notes to it, unlike a lot of other brands that are similar. Our goal was to make a product that is used in bar programs rather than a novelty gift you buy your friends that comes in a mason jar.

Q: What is your favorite cocktail to make?

A: Anything with freshly muddled produce. I love using seasonal ingredients at their freshest.

Q: What is your favorite cocktail to drink?

A: A white Negroni, which is made of gin and two French aperitifs called Lillet Blanc and Suze. I love bitter cocktails. And there’s something so pretty about a completely clear cocktail with so much flavor.

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Neufeldt Brings Passion for Students as CSUSM's Fourth President https://news.csusm.edu/neufeldt-fourth-president/ https://news.csusm.edu/neufeldt-fourth-president/362343By Eric BreierEllen Neufeldt arrived at Cal State San Marcos’ University Village Apartments on Aug. 23 with a smile and a friendly greeting for volunteers at move-in day. She posed for selfies with proud parents. Shook hands and introduced herself to staff. Warmly welcomed incoming students preparing to live on their own for the first time.

Every person Neufeldt passed didn’t just receive a cordial salutation. Neufeldt took time to learn a little bit about each of them. It didn’t matter if it was a staff member she might see the following week or a parent she likely wouldn’t see again for four years until they return to watch their child graduate. Neufeldt was equally adept at allaying nervous parents and making staff feel like they had known her for years rather than the six weeks she had been on campus as CSUSM’s president.

“Ellen is genuine in all aspects of her life,” said John Broderick, the president of Old Dominion University, where Neufeldt worked for nearly a decade. “She is truly one of the most caring and committed people in higher education I have been around in my 30-plus years doing this. She has a remarkable way of connecting with people.”

Neufeldt’s uncanny ability to make everyone she comes in contact with feel at ease makes it that much more surprising to learn just how shy she was as a child in Cookeville, Tenn. It wasn’t until she was a first-year college student herself that she met people who helped her break out of that shell.

“The fact that people took time to make me feel comfortable and find my place in the world is something I want to do for everybody,” Neufeldt said.

Neufeldt is clearly doing just that at CSUSM. Her appointment as the university’s fourth president began July 1, just two months before the university marked the 30th anniversary of its founding. Less than six months into her tenure, she is already enlisting students, faculty, staff, alumni and community friends in developing a vision for the next three decades. That vision includes building on CSUSM’s mission of social mobility and student success; fostering a collaborative approach that positions the university as a national model for helping individuals throughout the student life cycle; continuing to build innovative academic programs that benefit all members of the campus community; promote innovation and see issues through a diverse lens; and a firm commitment to community-engaged learning by providing students with high-impact educational opportunities that prepare them with the knowledge, skills and values they need to thrive.

The energy and enthusiasm Neufeldt brings to her new job – and her drive to make that vision a reality – should come as no surprise. Higher education and a dedication to helping students fulfill their dreams is part of her DNA.

Growing up in higher ed

Neufeldt’s parents moved to the United States from Canada before she was born so her father could pursue a Ph.D. in history at Michigan State University. Neufeldt was born in Michigan, but grew up in Cookeville, about 75 miles east of Nashville. Her father was a faculty member at Tennessee Technological University, and her mother was an administrative assistant in the university’s College of Engineering.

Neufeldt’s parents had a profound influence on her passion for higher education – even if she didn’t always realize it while growing up. It wasn’t until she was an adult that Neufeldt fully appreciated the obstacles her parents overcame, from her father navigating the challenges of being a first-generation college student to her mother supporting the family at a time when women working outside the home wasn’t widely supported.

“I think becoming president at Cal State San Marcos really was another step in helping me to look back and understand that what they gave and what they did in their lives had such a great impact on mine,” she said. “I grew up in higher education, and very few had that privilege. I’m so grateful for the choices that they’ve made.”

Neufeldt received her bachelor’s from Tennessee Tech in business administration, marketing. Her first job out of college was as a management trainee for a department store chain. She quickly worked her way up to manager, which was an education in itself. Neufeldt had to master everything from the art of unloading trucks to fixing toilets. In the process, she learned important lessons about leadership and self-reliance.

It was while working for the department store chain that Neufeldt realized how much she missed higher education. She had attended nursery school on Tennessee Tech’s campus. She was around the university throughout elementary school. She used its libraries during high school. It was part of her identity. But now, after a lifetime spent around a university, she was living in communities where there were no colleges.

“I really began to understand what I had and what I had been given,” she said. “There was always knowledge flowing, whether we’re talking about cultural events or just new ideas. There’s something about being around a college campus that I had taken for granted after growing up as a part of it.”

The decision to pursue a career in higher education was solidified while she was managing a department store in Nashville. One of her former advisers from Tennessee Tech approached her about attending graduate school and working as a graduate assistant.

It was all the encouragement Neufeldt needed. She earned a master’s in educational psychology and counselor education from Tennessee Tech, but her plans to get a job in academia were derailed by a lean job market. Instead, she took a job as a crisis counselor.

Neufeldt may not have known it at the time, but the experience she gained managing people at the department store and working as a counselor helped shape her future in higher education.

A perfect fit

A university presidency wasn’t on Neufeldt’s radar when she was hired as the assistant dean of students at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in the mid-1990s. It was more than a decade later, when Neufeldt was the vice president for Student Affairs at Salisbury University in Maryland, that it was first mentioned. Salisbury’s president at the time, Janet Dudley-Eshbach, encouraged Neufeldt to consider the possibility.

Those conversations continued with Broderick at Old Dominion during Neufeldt’s eight-year stint at the Norfolk, Va., university. Neufeldt said Broderick was instrumental in her growth as a leader, and his guidance and mentorship continue to have a profound influence on her career.

Neufeldt served as the vice president for Student Engagement and Enrollment Services at Old Dominion, overseeing a budget of $70 million and a staff of nearly 400. The division was a major initiative for Broderick, who entrusted Neufeldt to direct its creation, development and coordination, and it gave Neufeldt the opportunity to pursue her passion for helping students succeed.

“Ellen wants to be engaged with students – with students across all aspects of campus,” Broderick said. “I don’t think anyone could ever say that they attempted to talk with her and she didn’t spend the necessary time to hold up her end of a two-way conversation.”

While Neufeldt’s myriad responsibilities prepared her well for a presidency, there were other aspects of Old Dominion that made her the right person to lead CSUSM into the next decade.

Old Dominion is a comprehensive public university that offers innovative academic programs. It is firmly committed to diversity and inclusiveness. It supports the social mobility of its students. It prioritizes community-engaged learning and has a far-reaching impact on its local economy.

Sound familiar?

“When Ellen realized she was going to have these opportunities to be considered for a presidency, she wanted to go to a school that resembled what we’re doing here in terms of serving first-generation students, not being afraid to work and help students, and embracing all learners,” Broderick said. “And I think she found a perfect fit. Plus, she found some pretty delightful weather, too.”

Weather aside, Old Dominion’s considerable similarities to CSUSM, coupled with Neufeldt’s experience and abilities, made her an ideal fit for the university’s presidential vacancy.

Neufeldt was even familiar with CSUSM from working with its first president, Bill Stacy, while he was the chancellor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Stacy told Neufeldt about the university’s history as a chicken ranch, which made it all the more astonishing for her to see what the campus has become when she visited for the first time in March.

CSUSM’s presidential search, like all California State University presidential searches, was confidential, and the finalists flew to Los Angeles in March to meet with the search committee. Neufeldt saw firsthand the passion committee members had for CSUSM’s mission and their pride over what had been built in less than three decades. After her interview, Neufeldt rented a car and drove 100 miles south to see for herself.

Neufeldt’s incognito visit occurred on the weekend, so campus was relatively quiet. Still, she avoided interacting with anyone to ensure that the search would remain confidential. But it wasn’t long before she would have an opportunity to connect with the campus community.

‘It’s about us’

On March 20, the CSU Board of Trustees announced the appointment of Neufeldt as CSUSM’s fourth president. Not long after, Old Dominion held an event where Neufeldt announced the news that she would be departing for Southern California.

“There were a lot of cheers,” Broderick said, “but there were also a lot of tears. To me, that kind of epitomizes Ellen’s stay here. Everybody was happy for her to get an opportunity to go lead a great institution. But, at the same time, everybody was a little sad that we were losing a good friend and colleague.”

Neufeldt has wasted no time in acclimating to her new home. She wasn’t even on campus two hours on her first day when she made a beeline for Science Hall 1 to meet students participating in CSUSM’s signature Summer Scholars research program. She hasn’t slowed down in her ongoing effort to learn about the campus and the people who make it unique. It isn’t uncommon to see Neufeldt walking across campus engaging with students or for her to pop into an office spontaneously to chat with a staff member.

Retired Marine Major General Anthony Jackson, CSUSM’s interim director of Veterans Services, learned that firsthand in September when Neufeldt made an unexpected visit to talk with members of his team.

The Veterans Services staff had been relocated three times during the summer while finishing touches were put on the newly expanded and renovated Epstein Family Veterans Center. The constant disruptions proved challenging, and Neufeldt wanted to acknowledge the difficulties they endured. The next day, when Jackson asked staff how it felt to have the president of the university stop by, they shared with him how much it meant that she understood what they had experienced.

Jackson was part of the presidential search committee that reviewed candidate applications and interviewed finalists. He was impressed throughout the hiring process, and the first months of Neufeldt’s tenure confirmed his belief that she was the right choice for CSUSM.

“She has those people skills that allow a leader to get out and be comfortable with any audience and be very honest with them,” Jackson said. “She is someone who can engage you with a smile, but you know when it comes time to make hard decisions that she is extremely capable of doing it in a very calm, cool, collected way.”

Among Neufeldt’s initial priorities has been a comprehensive Listening and Learning Tour to gain a better understanding of the people, roles and priorities of CSUSM, and to hear directly from campus and community constituents about the university’s strengths and challenges.

It’s all part of fulfilling her mission to ensure that every person has a voice.

“It's not about me,” Neufeldt said. “It’s about us and how we move this campus forward together.”

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Tue, 22 Oct 2019 08:45:00 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_ellenneufeldt-profile02-269156.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/ellenneufeldt-profile02-269156.jpg?10000
Shouldering the Pain: Surgeries Don't Deter Basketball Star https://news.csusm.edu/jonnae-vermillion/ https://news.csusm.edu/jonnae-vermillion/363888By Eric BreierJon’Nae Vermillion finds a quiet spot before every Cal State San Marcos women’s basketball game and listens to “Something About the Name Jesus,” a song her mother played for her when she was a child.

The music allays the concerns about her right shoulder. It’s easy to understand her unease. After undergoing surgery on the shoulder three times, Jon’Nae continues to play in pain. She knows another injury likely would mean a premature end to her basketball career. But beyond basketball, other thoughts about the potential impact of further damage creep into her mind. From mundane tasks – will she be able to put her hair in a bun? – to the melancholy – when she has children, will she be able to hold them?

Jon’Nae takes a moment to let those thoughts swirl before the music helps calm her. Though the scars from her surgeries are a constant reminder, she’s able to erase all thoughts of reinjuring the shoulder.

“If you’re on the court thinking, ‘What if I get hurt?’ you’re going to get hurt,” Jon’Nae said. “I just play how I need to play. At the end of the day, whatever happens, that’s supposed to happen.

“I’m a tough kid. I can get through whatever’s thrown at me.”

Injuries are part of basketball, but the likelihood might be greater for someone who plays like Jon’Nae. Her game isn’t about guile or finesse. It’s about being physical. Shy away from contact? Jon’Nae welcomes it. She even refers to her style of play as “bully ball.”

“She makes a difference,” said Renee Jimenez, CSUSM’s head women’s basketball coach. “You notice her when you walk into the gym.”

Jimenez first noticed when Jon’Nae was in high school. Jimenez was the head coach at Cal State San Bernardino when she recruited Jon’Nae out of Santiago High School in Corona in 2014. Jon’Nae committed to play for Jimenez right before undergoing her first shoulder surgery. She injured it in the first game of her senior season when an opponent pulled her arm back as she was jumping for a rebound. Jon’Nae thought it might be a dislocation and continued to play. It was only when the pain became too much to bear that she visited a doctor and learned it would require surgery.

Jon’Nae sat out her first season at Cal State San Bernardino as a redshirt, which allows college athletes to extend their eligibility an extra season by not competing in games. Jon’Nae was just 17 when she entered college, so redshirting had the dual benefit of providing additional time to heal while she adjusted to the rigors of higher education.

But the transition to college proved challenging, particularly when it came to taking direction from Jimenez.

“In high school, I did whatever I wanted to do,” Jon’Nae said. “So I felt like in college I was going to do what I wanted to do, too.”

Despite the rocky start to their relationship, there was always mutual respect, which made it that much more difficult for Jon’Nae when she learned after the season that Jimenez had accepted the head coach position at CSUSM. Jon’Nae’s first instinct was to follow Jimenez south, but the coach recommended a different path.

CSUSM was in the middle of transitioning from NAIA to NCAA Division II, which meant the university wasn’t eligible for postseason play. Jimenez thought Jon’Nae was too good to pass up an opportunity to play for the postseason somewhere else.

Jon’Nae decided to attend Mt. San Antonio College, not far from where she grew up in Corona.

“That was probably the best decision I could have made for myself,” she said. “I grew up.”

Jon’Nae helped Mt. SAC win the California Community College Athletic Association women's state championship in her first season, collecting a long list of accolades along the way, including being named the state championship most valuable player. And she did it all while playing the second half of the season with an injured right shoulder that would again require surgery.

Jon’Nae injured the shoulder when she was fouled while going up for a layup in a January 2016 game. She fell to the court and knew right away something was wrong. But she got up, shot her free throws and played in the team’s final 10 games before an MRI after the season showed that she had torn nearly every ligament and suffered 40% bone loss in the socket.

Two months after winning the state title, Jon’Nae underwent her second surgery. She had six screws inserted into her shoulder (on top of the six from the first surgery). Doctors took part of her bicep and a portion of bone from her back to rebuild the shoulder.

But when Jon’Nae was finally cleared to start running again, she knew something wasn’t right. A trip to the doctor confirmed her fear – she had torn the ligaments again and needed a third surgery. The diagnosis came with a warning that she might not be able to play basketball again.

“It was hard because I was always Jon’Nae the basketball player,” she said. “In my head I thought, ‘Well, it’s over. I’m going to get surgery and then I have to move on with my life.’

“I went through this stage of depression. It was really hard.”

To the surprise of everyone, including her doctor, Jon’Nae saw positive results almost immediately following the surgery. She missed the 2016-17 basketball season while she recovered, but returned to Mt. SAC the following season and exhibited the same dominance to which teammates and foes alike had become accustomed.

While Jon’Nae and Jimenez didn’t always see eye-to-eye at Cal State San Bernardino, they remained in touch in the ensuing years. When it came time for Jon’Nae to transfer to a four-year school, she wanted to play for Jimenez.

“We grew up a lot together,” Jimenez said. “I was young when I coached her at San Bernardino. I was still trying to figure it out. I think she would tell you I’m a lot more relaxed now than when I was first coaching her. And she’s a lot more mature now than she was when she was 17.

“But I think San Marcos has really helped her grow up a lot and really pay attention to her academics and understand the importance of graduating. Before, it was all basketball. Now she’s understanding how to be a leader.”

As she approaches graduation next May, Jon’Nae is still working to grow as a leader. At Mt. SAC, if she was unhappy with a teammate’s effort in a game or practice, she made it abundantly clear. And she was used to her Mt. SAC teammates doing the same. At CSUSM, she joined a young squad of players who weren’t accustomed to such blunt criticism.

Dynnah Buckner was on the receiving end of Jon’Nae’s candid critiques more than once as a freshman last season. Early in the season, Dynnah often stopped by Jimenez’s office to ask why Jon’Nae was constantly yelling at her on the court. While Jimenez typically agreed with the message Jon’Nae was delivering, she encouraged her to provide it in a more constructive manner. And she emphasized to Dynnah that Jon’Nae’s criticism came from a desire to help Dynnah improve.

“At the end of the day, it’s all love,” Jon’Nae said. “When I'm on the court and I say something to you, you can’t take it personally. I'm not going to think twice about what I'm saying and how I'm saying it to you, because what I'm saying to you is the truth. No matter how I say it, it’s the truth. So you need to take it. And then if you want to have a conversation later, then we can do that, too, after the game – after we win.”

A turning point came when Dynnah took Jon’Nae up on that willingness to have a conversation. She asked if they could meet to talk things through. The next day, Jon’Nae invited Dynnah to join her on a trip to Los Angeles to see one of Jon’Nae’s friends play basketball for Cal State L.A.

“That's when she really explained why she was on me the way she was,” Dynnah said.

Jon’Nae said she was critical because she knew how great Dynnah could be and how important Dynnah was to the team’s success. She wanted Dynnah to stop worrying about making mistakes and simply play the game to the best of her abilities. And, perhaps most importantly, Jon’Nae finished by telling Dynnah that she always has her back.

“Her intentions were never bad,” Dynnah said. “At first, I sort of took it that way because it was the first time somebody really just came at me in a blunt way saying, ‘You need to get this together. You need to pick it up.’ But it was all out of love and wanting me to do better.”

On the court, it all comes down to winning for Jon’Nae. It doesn’t matter if it’s cross-town rival UC San Diego or a pick-up game at 24-Hour Fitness. Jon’Nae expects to win.

And she has high expectations for the Cougars this season. The team finished 18-10 a year ago, winning its first California Collegiate Athletic Association tournament game before ending the season with a loss to UCSD in the semifinals.

Jon’Nae wants to help CSUSM take that next step and reach the NCAA tournament. She worked throughout the summer to strengthen the shoulder and anticipates shedding the brace she has worn since her time at Mt. SAC, giving her more mobility on the court. She knows the shoulder won’t be 100 percent, and Jimenez plans to limit Jon’Nae’s practice time as the season progresses to help her stay healthy.

But Jon’Nae is used to playing in pain. She no longer has full range of motion and has accepted that she likely never will. The scars on her shoulder may serve as a constant reminder of what she has been through, but they no longer carry a negative connotation.

“I used to look at my scars and I used to be disgusted,” she said. “But now I’m proud of it. Scars tell the story of survival.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

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Mon, 21 Oct 2019 14:58:48 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_jonnae02copy-382758.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/jonnae02copy-382758.jpg?10000
Passion for Baseball Gives Way to Pursuit of Medical Career https://news.csusm.edu/isaias-torres/ https://news.csusm.edu/isaias-torres/362070By Eric BreierIsaias Torres frequently tagged along while his father, Luis, worked at Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs. Isaias did so out of necessity – he was in elementary school and his father couldn’t afford childcare.

Some days, Isaias would hang out in a lobby waiting room, sometimes the cafeteria. Other times he would try to find a spot near his dad where he wouldn’t be in the way. Isaias wasn’t shy about talking to hospital employees and peppered his father with questions about the people he saw and their responsibilities.

By the time Isaias was in middle school, he was old enough to stay home and watch his younger brother, Josiah, while their father was at work.

But it wasn’t long before the hospital trips became part of Isaias’ routine again.

When Isaias was 16, Josiah was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease, a condition in which a person’s immune system attacks their thyroid. It took visits to multiple specialists to diagnose the problem, and Josiah was eventually prescribed thyroid medication that got it under control.

The compassion of doctors as they helped Josiah had an indelible impact on Isaias that continues to resonate as he approaches graduation from Cal State San Marcos.

“It was pretty hard to see my brother go through that, but seeing how the doctors worked with him really inspired me to pursue medicine,” said Isaias, who will graduate in May with a bachelor’s in kinesiology.

Tireless encouragement from his father and mentorship from CSUSM kinesiology professor Richard Armenta have been integral to Isaias’ success. He also is grateful for much-needed financial support from longtime CSUSM donors Lee and Rosita Hieb. When Isaias’ financial aid package was reduced as he entered his fifth year at CSUSM in 2018-19, he found assistance thanks to the generosity of the Hiebs, who established a scholarship in 2014 to help students with a financial need and an interest in a medical career.

“You love these kids who push themselves, because then he is also being an example for his brother,” Rosita Hieb said. “That's really beautiful and very selfless.”

Isaias’ dream of a career in medicine – of helping others like doctors helped his brother – has provided motivation for nearly a decade. It even drove him to give up his love of baseball so he could focus on his future.

Challenging transition

Luis was a single father trying to support two boys. Shortly after Isaias was born, Luis took a job at the hospital as a transporter, helping to move patients and equipment throughout the building. He previously worked at a grocery store, but wanted the hospital job so he would have health insurance for his family. Over the course of 20 years at the hospital, Luis eventually worked his way into his current position as a CT technician.

Isaias’ mother was never a consistent presence in his life as she struggled with drug addiction and spent time incarcerated. Isaias lived with her for a short period when he was in second grade, but it was a stretch marked by frequent absences, poor nutrition and academic struggles.

Moving in with his father changed everything. Isaias began to thrive in school, even qualifying for the Gifted and Talented Education program, more commonly known as GATE.

Though money was tight, Luis made sure his boys, both talented baseball players, had an opportunity to play travel ball, even when it meant borrowing money.

A first-generation college student, Isaias largely navigated the higher education process on his own. He applied to a handful of universities and learned of his acceptance to CSUSM in April 2014. A few months later, he was offered a scholarship to play baseball for the Cougars.

But the transition to college proved challenging. Isaias’ grade-point average was under 3.0 after his first semester, a disappointment for someone used to consistently being over 3.5.

“I didn’t know how to be a good student,” Isaias said. “I just thought I could get by like I did in high school.”

Isaias’ grades slowly improved, but he still wasn’t achieving the results he expected from himself. Compounding his difficulties, he learned that his brother was sick again. Josiah was diagnosed with pleural effusion, a buildup of fluid around the lungs, and valley fever, which is caused by a fungus that enters a person’s body through their lungs.

The disappointment over his grades, coupled with his brother’s illness, provided a wake-up call.

Isaias rededicated himself to his studies. He became more disciplined and focused on improving his time management. When it came to his brother’s health, seeing doctors once again provide care that was both skilled and compassionate reaffirmed his decision to pursue a career in medicine.

Isaias still remembers one doctor who knew his father assure Luis that he didn’t need to worry, that the hospital staff would take care of Josiah.

“Hearing that and seeing that, that’s something that I would love to tell people someday – ‘I’m going to take care of you,’ ” Isaias said. “My dad was so thankful and just happy to hear those words of affirmation.

“The way that doctor showed compassion and empathy toward my brother, that’s something that I want to do in the future.”

Making sacrifices

Ensuring his dream would one day become reality meant making sacrifices elsewhere. Baseball, which had always come first, had to take a backseat to schoolwork. As Isaias’ grades improved, he still managed to perform on the field. After missing the 2016 season because of shoulder surgery, he returned the following season and started 42 games, led the team in home runs and RBIs, and was selected to the All-California Collegiate Athletic Association second team.

Isaias put up solid numbers again in 2018 when he started 29 games, but he made a difficult decision at the end of the season. Despite having one more year of playing eligibility, he decided it was time to step away from baseball to devote all of his efforts toward completing his bachelor’s and preparing for medical school.

He wasted no time, participating in the UCSD Summer Training Academy for Research Success shortly after his final season ended. He has also spent two-plus years in the Palomar Health Pathmaker Internship program, which provides hands-on experience to students interested in health care careers. This past summer, he participated in a 10-week National Institutes of Health (NIH) research program in Maryland.

“I always call the NIH the holy grail of research because that's where the majority of our research funding comes from,” Armenta said. “To get an opportunity to go and work at kind of the hub of research funding in health and in science was an invaluable experience for Isaias. And I know he got a lot out of it.

“It's a really competitive program. They get thousands of applications for very few spots. It was an awesome experience for him that has only helped him grow more.”

Armenta has been instrumental in Isaias’ growth as a student ever since he took Armenta’s statistics and research methods course during the spring 2018 semester.

Isaias and Armenta immediately bonded over a shared love of baseball (they’re both fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers). But beyond their mutual allegiance to the Dodgers, they come from similar backgrounds. Armenta, like Isaias, was a first-generation college student and was able to provide expert guidance based on his own experiences.

“Without his help, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” Isaias said. “He really stuck his neck out for me and got me into places that I never would have thought about.”

The next stop will be a place Isaias has thought about often – medical school. UCLA and Stanford top his wish list, but first he will pursue a post-baccalaureate research program for a year to help prepare him for medical school.

Isaias’ brother is healthy and attending Riverside City College, where he will play baseball in the spring. While Isaias will be closely following Josiah’s progress – both on and off the field – he has no regrets about his own decision to step away from the game. In fact, when his dad suggested he pursue a master’s so he could play one more year, Isaias said, no, he’s committed to medical school.

“I played for 17 years, and to stop playing was very difficult,” Isaias said. “But I knew it was time to move on and do the things that would help me set myself up for a better future.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

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Tue, 15 Oct 2019 16:04:30 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_isaiastorres-co-9-202103.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/isaiastorres-co-9-202103.jpg?10000
Philanthropy a Way of Life for Hiebs https://news.csusm.edu/philanthropy-a-way-of-life-for-hiebs/ https://news.csusm.edu/philanthropy-a-way-of-life-for-hiebs/360506By Eric BreierGiving back is a fundamental part of life for Lee and Rosita Hieb.

Now retired, they understand the challenges of charitable giving for young people when they’re early in their careers and trying to get established.

But Lee and Rosita also know a small amount can go a long way.

“If you can establish a pattern of giving at an early age – and it may not be for much – to get involved and to get that mental capacity of giving back can have a big impact,” Lee said. “We’ve been fortunate to be able to do that, and we plan to continue that.”

The Hiebs have been giving back to Cal State San Marcos students for nearly 25 years. Thanks to a planned gift made through CSUSM’s Legacy Society, their contributions will have an impact for generations.

“Joining the Legacy Society, we wanted to leave something,” Rosita said. “I don’t want to say something tangible because it’s more important than that. Things that are tangible can be here today and gone tomorrow. But to use your mind, your education, and to pass it on to other people is important.”

Lee and Rosita became acquainted with CSUSM through their friendship with Bob and Ruth Mangrum, early university supporters who played a critical role in the development of CSUSM athletics. The Hiebs were excited to learn about the fledgling university from the Mangrums and quickly became involved. Rosita participated in planning for the university’s annual Gala, including serving as the chair once and co-chair another time, while Lee was a member of the Cougar Club athletic committee.

The Hiebs gained a greater understanding of the need for student scholarships through their involvement with CSUSM’s President’s Circle with Rosita even serving as a member of the committee.

In addition to their legacy gift, the Hiebs in 2014 established an annual scholarship for an undergraduate student who demonstrates an interest in the medical field. The gift was inspired by Rosita’s father, a native of Peru who received a scholarship to attend Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In a neat coincidence, Rosita’s father began his medical schooling at another San Marcos – Universidad Nacional de San Marcos in Lima, Peru, the longest continuously operating university in the Americas.

The Hiebs’ philanthropy goes beyond their generous financial contributions. They like to stay in touch with and mentor scholarship recipients.

An avid runner, Lee has kept close count of the miles he has logged since he started running in 1984. He is approaching 43,000 miles, the equivalent of circling the earth almost two full times.

But it is the last 7,000 miles that are most meaningful. That is distance he has run since being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Lee established a support group – named, in a nod to common Parkinson’s symptoms, Movers and Shakers – to help others with the disease. The group meets on the first Tuesday of each month as part of Bible study through the Hiebs’ church.

“It’s another way of reaching out to the community and people that have the illness,” Lee said. “We share commonalities, and it’s important to help people understand that life isn’t over with a diagnosis like that.”

In fact, Lee still runs 3-5 miles five days a week.

While Lee does some occasional consulting work and Rosita is a community volunteer, they are both largely retired now and spend much of their time traveling. After Lee’s diagnosis, they vowed to make at least one international trip a year, and it soon grew into two international trips a year. They have now visited 71 countries, including multiple mission trips.

Faith is an integral part of their lives and they are focused on continuing to help others and encouraging others to do whatever they can to build their own culture of philanthropy.

“The cost of college is very expensive,” Lee said, “and having scholarship programs that can benefit people for generations afterward … what a way to give.”

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Tue, 15 Oct 2019 15:22:00 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_rositaandleehieb-000-362269.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/rositaandleehieb-000-362269.jpg?10000
Pronouns: 'It's About Respecting Someone's Identity' https://news.csusm.edu/pronouns/ https://news.csusm.edu/pronouns/360510By Eric BreierDanni Flowers follows a simple routine when it comes to introductions.

Hi, my name is Danni. I use they/them pronouns. If you don’t mind me asking, what are your pronouns?

That process became unexpectedly complicated last spring while Danni was working as a peer educator at Cal State San Marcos’ Gender Equity Center.

As is their custom, Danni included their pronouns while welcoming a visiting student to the center. But each time the student visited, incorrect pronouns were used when referring to Danni. At first, Danni thought it might be a misunderstanding and they or one of their co-workers would politely correct the student. But it soon became clear that the misgendering was intentional.

“It’s about respecting someone’s identity,” said Danni, who is double majoring in art, media and design and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. “I don’t tell you my pronouns just to tell you. It’s because it’s who I am, and referring to me any other way is hurtful because you’re not viewing me as who I am.”

The Gender Equity Center is part of the Student Life Centers for Identity, Inclusion, and Empowerment that help foster an inclusive and welcoming environment for all students. While it provides a safe space, fosters dialogue about gender equity and social justice, and provides critical resources for students, the tumult surrounding Danni’s misgendering served as a reminder of the need to remain diligent when it comes to educating the campus community about the importance of pronouns.

“Some people will say, ‘Why they/them? What does that mean?’ ” said Marina Flowers (no relation to Danni), a literature and writing studies major who is the peer coordinator in the Gender Equity Center and uses she/her pronouns. “And we say, ‘Let’s talk.’ That’s what we’re here for. We’re here to have an open conversation, a dialogue about these pronouns.”

While some grammarians resist using “they” as a singular pronoun, it has been used that way for centuries. The Oxford English Dictionary traces its usage back as early as the 14th century and notes that it likely was commonly used long before that. The singular “they” was even voted the 2015 word of the year by the American Dialect Society.

Many people and organizations are trying to remove gender from their language. Last summer, the city of Berkeley proposed changes to make its municipal code more gender inclusive by changing words like “manhole” to “maintenance hole” and “manpower” to “human effort.”

Fernanda Hernandez Garcia, a fifth-year human development student, began using they/them/their pronouns a little more than a year ago. Fernanda began identifying as queer in their second year at CSUSM, and the usage of they/them/their was part of a natural progression.

“I'm not this cookie-cutter model for a woman that comes from a Latina background or a woman that is first generation,” said Fernanda, who worked in CSUSM’s LGBTQA Pride Center as a peer educator for two years. “I felt that they/them/their was my way of starting to encompass this experience that I am kind of already doing something different from what is expected of me.”

Fernanda said it has become standard practice in many of their human development courses for professors to begin the semester by having students introduce themselves with their names and pronouns.

One of Fernanda’s past professors, Martín Leyva, addresses students with phrases like “Good afternoon, y’all” or “How are you all doing?”

“It’s not up to me how someone identifies or who they are; it’s up to them,” said Leyva, who uses he/him pronouns. “And it’s my job to respect that and identify people how they want to be identified.”

Fernanda often doesn’t correct people when they misgender them, preferring to wait for an opportunity to reintroduce their pronouns.

“Something that I’ve learned is that if I let every little thing bother me, I kind of stop myself from then making other progress,” Fernanda said. “I am fortunate that for me it doesn’t cause so much dysphoria or anxiety, because friends of mine have shared with me that every time they’re misgendered and someone says ‘she’ even after they’ve tried multiple times to introduce themselves and let it be known that their pronouns are ‘he’ or ‘they,’ they let me know that it’s really a cringing experience for them.”

That was the case for Danni last spring when they were being intentionally misgendered. While the Gender Equity Center has long engaged in conversations about pronouns and even offers free buttons to make it easier for people to share their pronouns, the misgendering of Danni sparked center staff to redouble efforts, including the creation of a more robust website, increased advocacy efforts and becoming more visible on campus.

“Misgendering can be very much an accident,” Danni said. “But when it's intentional, you're reminding me of someone that I'm not. You're reminding me of a self that I'm not comfortable with anymore. So, hearing she/her pronouns when it's by accident, I totally brush it off. Hearing it over and over, it does bring this pain in my chest and discomfort to my body because that's not who I am. It's someone completely different that I've left in the past.

“It was hurtful at the time, but I get over things quickly. I’m on to bigger and better things. I’m not going to let one person hold me down.”

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Sun, 06 Oct 2019 09:00:00 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_danniflowers-726360.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/danniflowers-726360.jpg?10000
The Love Story of Sparky and Stache https://news.csusm.edu/the-love-story-of-sparky-and-stache/ https://news.csusm.edu/the-love-story-of-sparky-and-stache/340205By Christine VaughanIt’s safe to say that when Karen Haynes first met Jim Mickelson, it wasn’t exactly a classic boy-meets-girl love story. It was an ordinary, but also unexpected, encounter between a social work advocate and a social work professor. The clincher was perhaps the world’s worst pick-up line.

Why aren’t BSW interns placed in information referral systems?

“That would have been a deadly pick-up line, right?” said Haynes, laughing as she recalled the moment Mickelson asked her that question during an after-hours networking event while attending a conference in Cincinnati.

At the heart of the query was a challenge to the prevailing belief that the referral system was not robust enough to give baccalaureate social work students adequate field experience. Although the conversation occurred in a disco, they never danced. Instead, a debate ensued, which led to the pair coauthoring an article on the topic.

“I knew in that moment that she was out of my league,” Mickelson said.

Haynes and Mickelson have been together ever since – first and always as colleagues, then as spouses and parents. On June 30, Haynes will retire after 15½ years as Cal State San Marcos’ third president. Mickelson will join her after more than 12 years as the founding director of ACE Scholars Services, which supports former foster youth at the university.

Theirs is a love story that has spanned more than three decades and two presidencies. Soon, they’ll trade in the titles of President and First Gentleman to begin new adventures as Sparky and Stache, as they’re affectionately known to their grandchildren.

The book of love

A few years after that first chance meeting, while attending another social work conference in Washington, D.C., the pair continued their lively discussion over cocktails at a folksy bar. There, they bemoaned the absence of political advocacy within the field of social work. Haynes, then an associate professor at Indiana University, had started a social work political action committee in the state. Mickelson, who was a social worker in Detroit, had established a similar one in Michigan. Two drinks in, they concocted an idea.

On a nondescript white cocktail napkin, they penned the beginnings of what would be their great manifesto – a book that would revolutionize social work to influence policy change. It would teach aspiring social workers how to harness political action skills. It would be the rallying cry that advocacy is the central mission of social work practice. Topic by topic, they outlined the chapters and began divvying up the sections. She’d write the first half; he’d write the second.

For the next year, Haynes and Mickelson mailed 5.25-inch floppy disks back and forth from Bloomington to Detroit. Soon, they were piling up long-distance phone charges as they debated and discussed their book, their profession, their lives and their children.

“Affecting Change: Social Workers in the Political Arena” was first published in 1986 and has since had seven editions released.

“We had so many good intellectual debates and discussions writing the book together,” Mickelson said. “And we still do.”

When Haynes accepted a dean’s position at the University of Houston in 1985, Mickelson – who, upon hearing the news, exclaimed, “Why the heck would you move to Texas?” – followed her there after a year and then the two married.

Balancing dual careers

In Texas, they pursued their respective careers, each blazing a path of influence framed by their shared values of social work. As the sole woman in the administration at the University of Houston, Haynes created the nation’s only curriculum specializing in political social work. Mickelson developed and directed CHILDREN AT RISK, a child advocacy nonprofit, and garnered a reputation as the most persistent child advocate in Houston.

In 1995, the chancellor of the UH system asked Haynes to be the interim president for the Victoria campus, 125 miles away from their suburban Clearlake home, for one year. Never aspiring to be a president, Haynes agreed to fill the role temporarily. It didn’t make sense to uproot their lives for such a short stint, so Mickelson remained in Houston. Their daughter had just left for college, and suddenly their four-bedroom home felt very empty. On most weekends, Mickelson made the nearly two-and-a-half-hour drive through the flatlands of South Texas to Victoria.

Some weeks, he’d have to rush out of work on Friday and bolt down Highway 59 to attend a special event as the presidential spouse. One time, he forgot his dress suit pants and had to piece together a more casual look. And surprisingly, only once did he get a speeding ticket.

“We were both succeeding in our careers and we wanted to continue to do that,” Mickelson said. “But it got really hard, emotionally, to be apart for that long.”

The one-year interim appointment turned into two years. Haynes thrived in her new role. When the time came for a national presidential search, Haynes was nominated for the position. In 1997, she was appointed the eighth president of the University of Houston-Victoria (Haynes remains the longest-serving president in that university’s history). It would be two-and-a-half more years before Mickelson joined her.

“We knew at the time it was not a good career move for Jim,” Haynes said. “Obviously, there are fewer opportunities in a region that small, and very little political advocacy work.”

But Mickelson found opportunities. One year, following six teenage suicides in the small town, he orchestrated a community rally to pressure elected officials to provide better mental health services.

“We are both driven by those same core social work values – around addressing social injustices,” Mickelson said. “She’s trying to do that through higher education, and I’m trying to do that by removing barriers.”

Madam President and the First Gentleman

Over the 24 years of his wife’s two presidencies, Mickelson’s identity has often been mistaken. He once was called her driver and often was confused for a boyfriend. Some flubs are even comical, like when Mickelson is assumed to be the president.

It happens like this: The pair are attending a conference for presidents and their spouses. Introductions and pleasantries begin, and someone will turn to Mickelson and ask, “Where are you a president?”

Mickelson, in his quick wit, often wanted to respond, “Nah, Blondie is the president.” But he knew that comment would likely result in a sharp side elbow from Haynes.

While the scenario has played out in different scenes, the underlying sexist assumption is that clearly the man would be the president. At the time of Haynes’ first presidency, less than one in four university presidents were women, of which less than half were married. The role and presence of presidential husbands were largely absent. Folding napkins, hosting high tea, choosing centerpieces or approving invitation stationery were gendered roles commonly filled by presidential wives.

“People didn’t know what to do with a male presidential spouse,” Mickelson said.

To navigate this new world and address the erroneous gendered assumptions, the couple asked the university’s advancement professionals to deliberate. The title “First Gentleman” was suggested. It made sense and it has stuck with him ever since.

Intentionally making time

Every morning, when at home, Mickelson brings Haynes a cup of coffee. With the exception of the four years they lived in different cities, it’s been a daily ritual that begins a time to catch up, plan the day or week, and stay up to date on higher education, and state and national issues.

“We’ve been co-authors, collaborators, colleagues and best friends as well as parents and spouses trying to navigate two careers,” Haynes said. “If you keep communication open, even when it’s testy, and you respect what the other person is doing, it’s a lot easier to do the daily give and take. I think the fact that we have both respected what each other does professionally made a lot of it easier over time to give the support needed.”

Protecting their time together has been a priority for Haynes and Mickelson. They intentionally block off a weekend every six to eight weeks that is free of university business and events. Seasoned travelers, the pair have visited nearly 40 countries together, exploring cities and villages as much like a local as possible.

But perhaps more interesting than their travel destinations are that Haynes and Mickelson completely unplug during their vacations. The practice stems from Haynes’ value in work-life balance, but also derives from her leadership style to equip, empower and trust her staff in her absence.

“My colleague presidents have always said, ‘How in the world can you do that?’ ” Haynes said. “And I have always said, ‘If you don’t have a team you can trust, that’s what’s wrong.’ ”

From this day forward

Haynes and Mickelson aren’t ones to offer marriage advice (“Unless it’s at the request of our children, which once given is swiftly ignored,” said Haynes, laughing). But if there is one overarching theme of their marriage, it would be concessions.

“We both had to concede at some point,” Mickelson said. “I had to move and start over several times. Karen had to put up with the political pushback that came from me being a vocal child advocate. Working for a nonprofit, there were literally months when I didn’t get paid, and that was difficult. We both gave so the other could pursue their passion.”

Even though they never danced at the disco on the night they met, dancing has become a metaphor in their marriage. Whether it’s struggling to determine who leads or side-stepping political disagreements, extended family dilemmas or dual careers, they’ve been committed to dancing for the fun of it, not for perfection. And they try to avoid stepping on each other’s toes while letting each other shine in solo performances.

As they embark on their shared retirement, their short-term plans involve time with three children, and their spouses, and four grandchildren and lots of travel.

In the fall, the couple plans to take an extended trip to Montreal to revisit the city where Haynes lived while she earned her Master of Social Work at McGill University. From there, they’ll take a 11-day cruise to New York (Haynes grew up in northeastern New Jersey). There, they plan to see “Hamilton” and “The Book of Mormon” on Broadway and visit a selective magic club.

As for the long term, that’s still to be determined. But a line from their wedding vows Haynes pledged to Mickelson nearly 33 years ago offers a clue:

“Ahead of us lies anything we choose – constrained only by our vision.”

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Wed, 05 Jun 2019 15:49:00 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_haynes-2011g-758093.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/haynes-2011g-758093.jpg?10000
Feminism in Fuchsia https://news.csusm.edu/feminism-in-fuchsia/ https://news.csusm.edu/feminism-in-fuchsia/340215By Christine VaughanDo women need to dress like a man to rise to leadership?

“The apparel oft proclaims the man.”

Shakespeare penned the line in “Hamlet” as Polonius’ parting parental advice to his son, but the statement – with its modern translation that clothes make the man – exposes a perplexing inequity for women in today’s workplace.

To rise into leadership, do women need to dress like men? Can a women show her femininity and still be seen as an effective leader?

When women began entering the corporate world in record numbers in the 1970s, women’s workwear attempted to mirror the power suits of traditional executive leadership. Enter the iconic looks of pantsuits, wide lapels, shoulder pads, pinstripes and monochromatic palettes.

While workplace attire has relaxed in American culture in the last two decades, the change has not necessarily been equitable, especially in top leadership roles. Women early in their careers might push the fashion standards forward or feel more freedom to dress to their preferred style, but the higher a woman climbs the leadership ladder, the more her wardrobe begins to be stripped of color, femininity and personal style.

“With a desire to be seen and heard for their expertise and not their clothes, it’s understandable why women moving into leadership roles would dial back their personal style,” said Shira Tarrant, an expert in gender justice issues and author of “Fashion Talks: Undressing the Power of Style.”

A quick Google search reveals that there is a never-ending rabbit hole of articles, blogs, tips and books instructing women what they should wear in the workplace. Many make the same claims: Don’t overaccessorize but be bold. Add color but not an aggressive color. Avoid trends but be stylish. Dress for the job you want but stay true to yourself. Be powerful and strong but not overbearing. Stand out but blend in. The paradoxical tips make heads spin.

“As women, we’re in this catch-22,” Tarrant said. “If we dress in suits and gray tones, we risk being considered conformist and inauthentic. If we dress differently, we risk being perceived as lacking authority or expertise. And it’s not simply men judging women; women judging women contributes to these implicit biases.”

Why the hubbub over what to wear?

Research shows that women in the workplace are judged more harshly on average for things that have nothing to do with their performance. People are more eager to make connections between a woman’s appearance and her competency, than they are with a man. Those judgments can cost women, literally.

Today, female full-time workers make only 80 cents for every dollar earned by men, despite being nearly half of the workforce and having more college and graduate degrees than men, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Women reach glass ceilings much earlier in their careers and are often sidestepped in promotions.

“Not only does what a woman wear affect how others perceive her abilities, which definitely contributes to the pay gap, but women are also spending more – a lot more – on their professional wardrobes,” Tarrant said.

In an attempt to avoid the gendered biases, many women unconsciously trade their preferred style for a more toned-down, more masculine wardrobe, in hopes of obtaining the opportunities given to their male counterparts.

“Even in 2019, it is difficult to be judged as both a good woman and a good leader,” said CSUSM President Karen Haynes, who built a reputation early in her career for defying conventional thinking that women leaders ought to dress in subdued tones and tailored pantsuits.

It hasn’t always been easy for Haynes. Drawn to bright colors, bold accessories and statement pieces, she once toned down her look. She had just been appointed dean of the Graduate School of Social Work at the University in Houston in 1985, and she was the only woman among 13 deans, and the first female administrator for the university. Trying to overcome sexism and prove she deserved her position of influence, she found herself emulating a masculine style, dressing in black, gray or navy suits and wearing modest jewelry.

“I noticed that it began to affect my self-esteem, and I seemed to be losing myself in trying to dress like the leaders that surrounded me,” Haynes said. “I felt literally and figuratively buttoned up.”

One day, Haynes decided she’d had enough.

“It took me a while to say, ‘The only way I can do this position is if I can speak in an authentic tone and stand up for my own style in leading,’” she said.

Her unapologetic conviction became so legendary that a national leadership program began telling its aspiring women leaders, “Don’t wear that – unless you’re Karen Haynes.”

Even the famous fuchsia suit that she wore during her open forum interview to become CSUSM’s third president made headlines. But it wasn’t just because she wore fuchsia. She intentionally referenced her outfit in her opening remarks and, in doing so, shared her sense of humor and authenticity rather than letting the campus derive its own conclusions and judgments about what she wore.

“We can’t change what we don’t talk about or see,” she said. “My style allows me to express who I am. I hope that my path and my determination to be true to myself can serve as an inspiration for other women.”

“That’s our challenge as feminists,” Tarrant said, “to keep the lens focused on the political implications and meanings of our assumptions and thoughts. As women continue to break glass ceilings, it’s OK that our wardrobe is part of that conversation. It starts first – like it did for Dr. Haynes – by embracing the importance of authenticity.”

In the lobby of Craven Hall, the university’s flagship building, hangs the official presidential portrait of Dr. Haynes. She is easy to spot. She’s the feminist wearing fuchsia.

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Wed, 05 Jun 2019 15:25:00 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_maddie-457624.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/maddie-457624.jpg?10000
The Office Space of President Haynes https://news.csusm.edu/office-space/ https://news.csusm.edu/office-space/340190By Christine VaughanFrom the deep-hued paint on the walls to the faint aroma of coffee, President Haynes’ office is filled with delightful, unexpected and storied pieces.

1. Goodbye Taupe, Hello Presidential Purple // It was one of the first changes she made to her office. Initially, Haynes was told by the university architect that she could not have purple walls. Haynes still laughs as she recounts the story. “I replied, ‘I may not be able to change everything, but this I can,’ ” she said.

2. Signed with an “S” // Gifted by University of Houston-Victoria donors and designed by an artist who commissioned pieces for past U.S. presidents, the bronze-plated signature piece includes Haynes’ middle initial – “S” for Sue. While she was a dean at the University of Houston, Haynes’ mail often got mixed with that of her associate dean, Dr. Karen Holmes. Trying to mitigate mistakes, Haynes began using her middle initial in communications and within her signature. Although it didn’t make much of a difference in the mail sorting, the initial stuck. To this day, she includes the “S” when signing documents.

3. Penned with Purpose // Haynes has authored, coauthored or contributed to eight published books, including the revolutionary book she coauthored with her husband, “Affecting Change,” which focuses on advocacy as the central mission of social work practice. She keeps a copy of each of the seven editions in her office.

4. Haynes in Arabic // In the late 1970s, Haynes worked in Cairo for the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which was housed within the Egyptian Institute for National Planning. This nameplate, written in Arabic, sat on her desk. “Active listening takes on a whole new meaning when your team’s first language is different from your own,” she said.

5. A Different Lens // One of more than 60 such objects owned by Haynes, this kaleidoscope was a gift from Professor David Bennett to thank Haynes for her candid insights on leadership success and failure during “In the Executive’s Chair,” a signature course of the College of Business Administration.

6. You’ve Got Mail // Haynes receives an average of 1,000 emails and 60 physical memos or documents requiring her authorization or review, weekly.

7. Some Like It Hot // Every morning at home, First Gentleman Jim Mickelson brings his wife a cup of coffee, which she prefers light with a little sweetener. But Haynes rarely finishes the cup. Instead, she sips it slowly throughout her morning, and then makes a second cup at the office. She keeps one mug warmer on her vanity at home and one on her desk.

8. Fuchsia Suit Wins // The legendary suit that Haynes wore, and referenced, during her open forum interview in 2003. One of three candidates vying to be the third president of CSUSM, Haynes famously said, “If you want to know why I’m wearing a fuchsia suit, it’s because I want you to remember me; and I’m pretty sure neither of the other candidates (who were men) will be wearing fuchsia.”

9. Tools of the Trade // Purchased from the jewelry store Casanova’s Downfall in Houston, these are the earrings Haynes wore during her campus interview. Haynes is known for her colorful, bold jewelry sets, often purchasing new pieces from wearable art festivals and boutique shops. Keeping those pieces together became a challenge, until Mickelson found inspiration at a hardware store. With rubber liners and easy gliding drawers, a customized top-chest toolbox holds Haynes’ many pieces.

10. The Object at Hand // In a time-honored CSU tradition, the outgoing senior president gifts a custom-made cane to their system successor. Haynes received her purple-jeweled cane in 2016 from President Ruben Armiñana, who was retiring from Sonoma State. Upon his retirement, Haynes became the first woman in CSU history to hold the title of senior president. In April, Haynes ceremonially passed the baton in the form of a new cane to Dianne Harrison, president of CSU Northridge.

11. A Renaissance Partner // Haynes’ husband, Mickelson, is an eclectic artist and hobbyist. His portfolio includes knitting, woodworking, photography, magic and stained glass. He built and gifted this piece to his wife in 1985 when she became dean of the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Houston.

12. Sparky’s Family // Known to her grandchildren as “Sparky,” Haynes displays photos of her three children and four grandchildren throughout her office. Many of the images were photographed by Mickelson, who served as an unofficial university photographer for the first six years of Haynes’ tenure at CSUSM.

13. A Daily Dose // Every morning, Haynes reads Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, and weekly she digests ACE’s President to President and AASCU’s Federal Highlights, keeping pulse of trends and challenges facing higher education, institutions and presidents.

14. Stocked Up // In any given week, Haynes has upward of 40 appointments on her calendar. Often on the go, Haynes keeps her refrigerator stocked with salads, cottage cheese, protein drinks, ready-to-go snacks and water.

15. Students First // In 2015, Haynes was honored by the California State Student Association as President of the Year, the highest award bestowed by the student-led organization. Students honored Haynes by saying, “Her student-centered leadership style, willingness to involve students in decision-making and support for statewide student advocacy efforts makes her a standout president.”

16. Audacious Goals // In a pinnacle of her career, Haynes successfully concluded CSUSM’s first comprehensive campaign in 2018. It was at her urging that CSUSM declared an ambitious $50 million goal – unheard of for such a young institution to attempt in its first campaign. Not only did she lead the university in exceeding its goal, but Forward Together shattered all expectations, raising $55 million.

17. A Source of Inspiration // Haynes has long been a champion for women’s rights and the advancement of women leaders. She keeps a photograph of her role model, Ann Richards, former governor of Texas, who she met through Leadership Texas, a women’s leadership network.

18. A Pearl of Wisdom // Gifted by her former chief of staff, Matt Ceppi, Haynes’ likeness was modeled into a bobblehead. Don’t look too closely, though. The bobblehead features Haynes sporting pearl earrings and a pearl necklace. Haynes, known for her bold jewelry, still laughs when she looks at it, exclaiming, “When have I ever worn pearls?”

19. Fit for a Queen // A birthday gift from her staff when she turned 70, the jeweled tiara features Haynes’ favorite color: purple.

20. A Little Levity // “And they thought every decision was strategic,” said Haynes, joking. A gift from her staff, the Magic 8 Ball pays tribute to one of Haynes’ signature leadership beliefs – make time for fun.

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Wed, 05 Jun 2019 13:35:00 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_haynes-office-cropped-640984.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/haynes-office-cropped-640984.jpg?10000
Fuchsia Suit Remains Symbol of Success Under President Haynes https://news.csusm.edu/president-haynes-legacy/ https://news.csusm.edu/president-haynes-legacy/337346By Eric BreierKaren Haynes still remembers buying the suit.

It came from a shop in Amsterdam, purchased while Haynes and her husband, Jim Mickelson, were teaching abroad one summer. This was before Haynes was appointed Cal State San Marcos’ third president, before she even knew where the university was located.

At the time, it was simply another suit to wear for work. Who could have known that this particular fuchsia outfit would come to symbolize a 15½-year presidency at CSUSM?

Haynes’ tenure, covering more than half of the university’s existence, will come to an end on June 30 when she retires as CSUSM’s longest-serving president.

“She’s been a perfect president in an important moment in time for this campus,” said Neal Hoss, CSUSM’s vice president of Finance and Administrative Services.

Haynes devoted more than three decades in academic leadership to creating opportunities for others. Her career has been defined by firsts – first in her family to earn a degree, first student admitted to the University of Texas-Austin’s social work Ph.D. program, first female academic administrator at the University of Houston, first female senior president of the California State University system.

Haynes’ legacy at CSUSM includes taking a small university of some 7,000 students when she arrived in 2004 and growing it into the educational hub of the region, a university that today has 17,000 students who represent the diversity of the surrounding communities. The 10 buildings that comprised campus back then have more than doubled under her leadership. The university’s alumni base, about 13,000 when she arrived, is approaching 50,000 – and Haynes has shaken the hands of nearly three-quarters of those graduates at commencement.

It’s not happenstance that the majority of those graduates are the first in their families to earn a four-year degree or come from an underrepresented background. It was all part of fulfilling the promises Haynes made when she accepted the appointment to become CSUSM’s president, from raising the educational attainment rate to creating a student body that mirrors the diversity of the region to ensuring that CSUSM was no longer referred to as “the best-kept secret.”

“What she says she’s going to do and what she says she believes, you see evidence in her actions,” said Patricia Prado-Olmos, CSUSM’s vice president of Community Engagement and a member of the campus community since 1997.

Bold goals – and achieving those goals – have been a hallmark of Haynes’ presidency. Much like a certain fuchsia suit.

Unexpected path

Haynes has often said she never wanted to be a university president, and she certainly didn’t take a traditional path to the position.

Like so many of CSUSM’s alumni, Haynes is a first-generation college graduate, earning her bachelor’s from Goucher College in Maryland and her master’s in social work from McGill University in Montreal. She began pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Texas-Austin when her son was 18 months old and gave birth to her daughter in Egypt six months before completing her doctoral dissertation and three years after enrolling.

Haynes’ higher education journey continued when she was hired in the late ’70s as an assistant professor of social work at Indiana University. She ascended to full professor before accepting a position as the dean of the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Houston, where she became the university’s first female academic administrator – the lone woman among the 14 deans throughout her 10-year tenure.

When Haynes was appointed the interim president of the University of Houston-Victoria in 1995, she was thought to be the only social worker in the country who was a university president.

The move from dean to president wasn’t without challenges. The appointment was only supposed to be for a year, so Mickelson remained in Houston, where he was a well-known child advocate, while Haynes lived and worked 125 miles south in Victoria.

“We both knew intellectually that being a president meant something different than being a dean,” Haynes said. “We probably didn’t initially realize how much it meant in terms of the significantly higher degree of visibility.”

The University of Houston-Victoria conducted a national search for a permanent president and determined that the best person for the job was already in the position. Haynes served for 8½ years, turning a university that had campus climate issues when she arrived to one that regularly ranked among the top employers in public higher education in Texas.

But by the early 2000s, Haynes was ready for a new challenge. She became one of three finalists for a presidential appointment at a California State University institution – but it wasn’t the campus in San Marcos.

Making a statement

Haynes was a popular candidate for the presidential opening at Sacramento State in 2003. Though the job went to someone already in the CSU system – CSUSM’s second president, Alexander Gonzalez – going through the hiring process helped Haynes get to know then-CSU Chancellor Charles Reed, who still had two vacancies to fill – one at Chico State and another at CSUSM created by Gonzalez’s departure. Reed told Haynes she would have to choose just one to pursue.

Chico State was well-established, with more than 100 years of history. The opportunity to help shape a young university was too appealing to pass up. Haynes removed her name from consideration at Chico State and soon became one of three finalists for the job at CSUSM.

Today’s CSU presidential searches are conducted confidentially, but when Haynes was in the running for CSUSM’s opening, candidates were required to be on campus, meet with multiple constituencies, and appear at an open forum that provided an opportunity for the campus and external community to ask questions.

As Haynes was preparing for the forum, she showed Mickelson two suits she was considering: a navy blue one – what might be considered the norm for a university president – and the fuchsia suit from Amsterdam.

Mickelson had just one question.

“Do you want the job?” he asked.

Haynes replied that she did.

“Then wear the navy.”

Haynes chose fuchsia. She did, however, take Mickelson’s other suggestion.

“He said to me, ‘Then you need to make a statement about it,’ ” Haynes said. “And he was right.”

Haynes opened the public forum by telling attendees that she chose the fuchsia suit because she was the first of three candidates and she wanted to ensure that they would remember her at the end.

“And I’m certain,” she added, knowing the other two finalists were men, “that I’ll be the only one in fuchsia.”

On Nov. 20, 2003, the CSU announced that Haynes would become CSUSM’s third president. Less than three months later, on Feb. 2, 2004, Haynes began her tenure at CSUSM.

It never occurred to Haynes at the time that it would be the beginning of an unprecedented stretch at CSUSM.

Bold and audacious

It’s easy to forget in 2019 how relatively small and undiscovered CSUSM was when Haynes arrived.

Kellogg Library hadn’t yet celebrated its official opening. The athletics department had six teams competing at the NAIA level. People were more likely to talk about the chicken ranch that the university land used to be than they were about it being the education hub of the region.

Haynes was drawn to the campus’ youth and potential. She saw the possibility for influence and vision. She knew it offered an appealing, fun challenge. She focused on the two words that have been a mantra throughout her presidency: bold and audacious.

Among the bold promises made by Haynes were that CSUSM would raise the educational rate of the region and the student body would reflect its diversity.

“That took the intention and focus of so many people across this campus,” Prado-Olmos said, “from admissions to recruitment to reaching back to the K-12 schools to building the support systems inside campus for students who were coming in and represented a very different reality than other students we may have had beforehand.”

Haynes delivered on those promises and countless others, helping CSUSM grow into a successful model for 21st century higher education.

Haynes oversaw the launch of the Alliance to Accelerate Excellence in Education, providing a guaranteed pathway to college for 200,000 K-12 students in the region. She hired the first full-time tribal liaison in the CSU system and developed a Native Advisory Council to advise her on serving the needs of local tribal communities. She launched the CSU Institute for Palliative Care to prepare current and future health-care workers while educating the community about the benefits of palliative care. She has been a champion for student veterans and their dependents, who make up 12 percent of CSUSM’s student population. She helped revive the Southern California branch of the ACE Women’s Network as part of her efforts to open doors for other women in academic leadership.

In December, Haynes successfully closed CSUSM’s first comprehensive fundraising campaign, Forward Together. At the time of its 2012 launch, no other university in the CSU – and likely in the nation – had attempted a campaign of its magnitude at such a young age. CSUSM shattered its $50 million goal, raising more than $55 million.

“She’s one of the most impactful presidents of an academic institution that I have ever known,” said Ruth Westreich, founder and president of The Westreich Foundation and a longtime CSUSM supporter. “She has created a legacy of success, of innovation.”

Being who you are

Haynes is a rarity among university presidents, holding the position at CSUSM more than twice as long as the average university presidency of 6½ years. She is the first woman to hold the role of senior president in the CSU system.

Haynes has often said to her leadership team, “Why would I leave if there’s still excitement?” She thrives on rising to challenges and making the most of opportunities.

“The thing that stands out to me is that she always remained positive and focused on the students,” Hoss said. “She cares about people and she has more energy than anyone.”

It’s the people who give Haynes energy, and it’s the people she will miss most. After 15½ years, she has as much enthusiasm for the job as she did on the day she arrived. But she also feels like now is the right time to step away.

CSUSM has enjoyed unprecedented success under her leadership, maturing as an institution and gaining visibility throughout the region and beyond.

Haynes and Mickelson are looking forward to spending more time with their three children and four grandchildren. They plan to travel, a passion for Haynes since she boarded her first international flight to Malaysia when she was 23 years old.

Perhaps one of those trips will take them back to the Netherlands, maybe even to a certain clothing shop in Amsterdam.

Haynes still has the fuchsia suit she wore to that public forum nearly 16 years ago. It fits today just as it did on Nov. 5, 2003. There have been times over the years when she has wondered if the suit has seen better days, when she considered donating it. But each time, she holds on to it.

“I don’t know if I’m going to be able to let that go for a while,” she said. “It’s that story of that suit and the fact that the story has taken on a symbolism that’s been important to me. It’s the question, ‘Can you do the job and be who you are?’ That’s the story, right?”

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Tue, 04 Jun 2019 15:29:23 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_haynes02-107103.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/haynes02-107103.jpg?10000
Mickelson Leaves Rich Legacy as Face of ACE https://news.csusm.edu/jim-mickelson/ https://news.csusm.edu/jim-mickelson/336642By Brian HiroWhen Damien Brantley was at his lowest point, when he felt like he had nothing left and nowhere to turn, Mr. Jim was there.

That was what Brantley called Jim Mickelson, the founding director of ACE Scholars Services. The innovative Cal State San Marcos program for former foster youth had opened a door for Brantley to attend college against the odds, had put him on track to graduate from college – in defiance of even greater odds.

It was all on the verge of derailing, though, when his great aunt died. This was his foster mother, the woman who had raised him and given him some semblance of stability in a chaotic upbringing. The suicidal thoughts that had bedeviled Brantley in high school returned. He worried that he might have to drop out of CSUSM, and God only knew where that would lead.

Brantley told Mickelson about his foster mother’s passing but insisted that he didn’t need help. Mr. Jim knew better. He all but ordered Brantley to go to the campus counseling center and checked in on him constantly during the ensuing weeks to monitor his recovery.

“I somehow escaped from one of the darkest places in my life,” Brantley said, “and I truly believe if he didn’t do what he did, I don’t know where I would be right now.”

Mickelson, 70, will retire this summer, along with his wife, CSUSM President Karen Haynes. He will step away from ACE, the program he created more than 12 years ago as a one-man operation in a one-room office in Craven Hall. He will travel. He will volunteer his time. He will indulge his passions for magic and photography.

What he’ll leave behind is a legacy that is reflected in people like Brantley, who graduated in 2017 with a degree in computer science and now works as a developer for a big software company in Tokyo. It’s reflected in the 64 photos that adorn a wall at the entrance to the Jan and Esther Stearns Center for ACE Scholars – each one representing a former foster youth who graduated from CSUSM and contributed to the university’s growing reputation as a national leader in producing success stories from perhaps the most vulnerable populations.

“The students in those pictures on the wall are my legacy,” Mickelson said. “I have a center, I’ve got policies, I’ve got staff, but that’s not what I’m passionate about. It really is about all these young people.”

Finding his home on campus

Mickelson had worked with at-risk youth for decades when Haynes was appointed president of CSUSM in 2003. He had earned a master’s degree in social work from Wayne State University in Detroit. In Houston, he had started and led a nonprofit called CHILDREN AT RISK with such fervor that the Houston Chronicle labeled him “the most persistent child advocate in town.”

Relocated to California, Mickelson was looking – with little success at first – to find an outlet where he could apply his expertise. An opportunity arose when he discovered that CSUSM, under the auspices of the Educational Opportunity Program, was trying to build a program to assist former foster youth.

Mickelson offered his services as a volunteer to Lorena Checa, then the director of EOP and now vice president of Student Affairs. He still recalls the date of his first day on the job: Feb. 10, 2007.

“It was an empty office,” Mickelson said. “All I had was a phone. The computer wasn’t hooked up yet. Lorena gave me a bunch of loose-leaf notebooks from a conference she had attended. That was it.”

Mickelson started with nine students and no money. After researching previous approaches to supporting former foster youth, he decided that a different kind of program was needed. He chose the name ACE – it stands for Achieving College Excellence – then set about addressing the lack of funding as he began to develop a top-tier program.

Early seed money came from several sources, but ACE’s trajectory fundamentally changed when Mickelson met Esther Stearns, then the president and chief operating officer of LPL Financial. A parent to three foster children with her wife, Jan, Stearns called Mickelson in 2008 after reading a newspaper article about ACE and the development of the Tukwut Towel as a fundraiser.

Mickelson arranged a campus tour, after which he thought he might receive $3,000 from the Stearnses. They shocked him by giving $25,000. Their donations kept increasing, reaching $1 million in 2014 to go toward both a beautiful new center for ACE off Tukwut Courtyard and an endowment that Mickelson had created six years earlier. Named for its benefactors, the Stearns Center features a large study area with a computer lab, offices for staff and a spacious student lounge.

“We were blown away by the creativity of the program he put together. It’s unique and really based on the needs of former foster youth,” Esther Stearns said. “I find Jim’s sense for what these young people need to be instinctive and impressive. He just has touched so many lives.”

Even before the physical footprint expanded, Mickelson was creating a one-of-a-kind program. He signed agreements with regional counties (it now applies statewide) offering priority, front-of-the-line admission to foster youth who meet the minimum entrance standards, thus removing a significant barrier preventing such students from pursuing higher education. He negotiated a plan that allows ACE students to live in on-campus housing with reduced rent.

He instituted working scholarships that give students campus jobs, and a head start on a potential career (four products of that program became full-time CSUSM employees). He established seminars that help both freshmen and transfer students with their transition to a four-year university.

And Mickelson hired two full-time counselors who, like him, have a master’s in social work, in keeping with his belief that the program should be rooted in social work values. According to national statistics, three out of four foster youth want to attend college, but only 10 percent make it there, with the majority lost to homelessness or incarceration. ACE Scholars Services boasts a retention rate of about 85 percent, far above the national average of 50 percent.

“I am always moved by Jim’s ability to paint a picture of the frighteningly low graduation rates and employment figures associated with foster care, while celebrating the resilience, accomplishments and potential of the individuals impacted,” said Cecelia Kouma, the executive director of Playwrights Project, who has worked with Mickelson and the CSUSM theater department to produce plays based on the stories of ACE Scholars. “Jim cares deeply for the youth he serves through ACE.”

The youth, in turn, care deeply for him. ACE students have fondly nicknamed Mickelson “The Godfather” because he’s the one who works out complex issues that students encounter. Mickelson has come to embrace the tag, even forming a godfather’s list for students with at least a 3.0 grade-point average.

“He expects greatness, but not in a sense that he’s disappointed if you don’t get there,” said Priscilla Arciniega, a 2015 ACE alumna. “It’s more like, ‘I believe you can do anything,’ and not in a cheesy way. He wants you to go for your dreams.”

Word about ACE has gotten out. Mickelson said the chancellor from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater came to campus in March to study the program.

“I don’t think there is another program like this in the nation. There’s no place like ACE,” Mickelson said.

‘Injustice is what drives me’

Mickelson can relate to ACE students who struggle in school. He did, too. A self-described “lousy” student growing up in a suburb of Detroit, he gravitated to non-academic pursuits like gardening and photography. He once won an award at a state fair for beets he grew, and in high school he would shoot weddings for couples who couldn’t afford a professional.

A high school adviser bluntly told him he wasn’t college material, but Mickelson went anyway. After seeming to confirm the adviser’s suspicions by failing out of Northern Michigan University as a freshman, he persisted, ending up at Colorado State University-Pueblo, which accepted him on probation.

It wasn’t until a determined Mickelson was in his master’s program at Wayne State, and almost 30, that he finally learned the source of his trouble: He was dyslexic.

“I just thought I wasn’t capable,” he said. “Even now, I probably spell at a fourth-grade level. Thank goodness for computers. I dictate all the time.”

Mickelson says pursuing a career in social work was the best choice he ever made, “other than marrying my wife.” Asked why he’s so motivated to help at-risk youth, he replied: “Probably the injustice that occurs. Given all that this country has, we do not treat our children very well. That injustice is what drives me.”

He admits to moments of sadness that soon he no longer will be the face of ACE. Fifteen former foster youth are expected to graduate in May, which would mean 79 photos on that wall in the Stearns Center.

“Most people think the foster care system is terrible,” Mickelson said. “It’s not the system. It’s what got the children into the system that’s terrible. For young people to come here and achieve a degree after all of that is really quite amazing.

“I love what the alumni photos on the wall represent and I am proud each day I walk by them of the accomplishments of those students. They are my legacy.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

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Mon, 03 Jun 2019 09:00:00 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_img-9634-353709.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/img-9634-353709.jpg?10000
A Distinguished Career: Provost Retiring After Long Tenure https://news.csusm.edu/graham-oberem/ https://news.csusm.edu/graham-oberem/336245By Eric BreierBecoming a provost was never part of Graham Oberem’s plan. He never expected to be an administrator of any type at Cal State San Marcos.

But when Oberem steps down as CSUSM’s provost at the end of June, it will mark the end of a 6½-year tenure, more than double the California State University average of three years for the position.

“Dr. Oberem has been an exceptional leader and advocate for Academic Affairs,” said President Karen Haynes, who also will be retiring at the end of June. “I appreciate his thoughtfulness in consideration of university challenges and opportunities, his creation of a strong Academic Affairs leadership team and his seniority and credibility among the CSU provosts.”

A native of South Africa, Oberem arrived at CSUSM in 1996 as the university’s first physics hire. CSUSM didn’t have a physics department at the time – and Oberem was told there wouldn’t be one – so it was suggested that he become faculty in either chemistry or computer science while he taught physics courses. Instead, he convinced his dean to allow him to be an independent unit, providing the opportunity to manage his own budget while he set up the new physics labs.

Before his first semester on campus ended, Oberem wrote to the dean laying out exactly why the university needed a physics department. Most university physics departments at the time focused on preparing students for graduate school, but Oberem advocated for an applied physics program.

“Part of the reason I came here was because of the students we serve,” Oberem said. “I believed strongly that if we had a degree that emphasized applied physics, these students would be highly marketable in the regional job market with a bachelor’s degree. That really did prove to be true, even from the outset.”

The physics program celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2017, and the department was recognized earlier this year by the American Physical Society for being ranked sixth in the nation based on the number of undergraduate physics degrees awarded to underrepresented minorities.

Oberem’s career took an unexpected turn in 2006 when he agreed to serve a four-year term as an associate dean for the erstwhile College of Arts and Sciences. The split of the colleges was announced at the end of his term, and then-Provost Emily Cutrer asked if he would stay on two more years and move to the new College of Science and Mathematics.

Near the end of the year, Cutrer announced that she was hiring an associate vice president for planning and academic resources, the position now known as vice provost. Intrigued by the job description, Oberem applied and, following a national search, was appointed to the position on May 1, 2012.

By the end of the year, Cutrer had left for a presidential opening in Texas. Haynes asked Oberem to serve as the interim provost while a national search was conducted for a permanent replacement. For the second time in less than a year, Oberem was an applicant in a national search and, for the second time, he got the job.

As Oberem’s time as an administrator nears its end, he is looking forward to spending more time with his family and pursuing his other interests – he is an accomplished musician and enjoys photography. He also is considering participating in the Faculty Early Retirement Program, which allows eligible tenured faculty to continue teaching part-time.

Oberem is grateful for more than two decades at CSUSM. Founding the physics department was just one of many notable achievements. As provost, he led the creation of the Office of Undergraduate Studies and he was also part of the effort to launch the university’s engineering program. But more than anything, he will miss the people.

“The people here are incredible,” he said. “What’s unique about this campus is the level of collaboration and genuine caring for one another. That’s one of the reasons that I came here.

“It’s just been really amazing.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

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Fri, 31 May 2019 08:55:50 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_graham-oberem-664134.new-326328.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/graham-oberem-664134.new-326328.jpg?10000
A Place to Call Home https://news.csusm.edu/malika-berens/ https://news.csusm.edu/malika-berens/334265By Eric BreierMalika Berens doesn’t know exactly how long she cared for her younger sisters after the three siblings were abandoned by their birth mother while growing up in Kazakhstan.

She thinks it was three months. Her middle sister, Madina, estimates that it was closer to two. Whether it was two or three, one thing is certain – for a 9-year-old looking after a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old, it felt like an eternity.

Malika and her sisters got through those months on their own. They got through nearly two years in an orphanage. And they got through a seemingly interminable adoption process to create a new family with a loving couple from Fallbrook.

“We were meant to be,” Malika said.

Graduation day is a time of celebration and joy, but it will also be a bittersweet occasion for Malika. Crossing the commencement stage at Cal State San Marcos in May ends a six-year journey to earn her bachelor’s in biochemistry. It also means an end to driving from her parents’ Fallbrook home to campus each day with sisters Madina and Zarina, who also attend CSUSM. There will be no more daily lunches together on campus or study sessions in Kellogg Library, which they affectionately call their second home.

“We’ll have to start doing things on our own,” said Madina, also a biochemistry major who will graduate in 2021. “It’s going to be different.”

Malika won’t be going far as she enters the working world with an eye toward beginning nursing school in 2020. But considering where they’ve been, it will be, as Madina notes, different.

 

The road to the orphanage

Malika and her sisters grew up in Priozersk, a small city of less than 14,000 people known for a military base that is used by Russia for testing anti-ballistic and anti-aircraft defense systems.

The girls’ birth father, who was in his 60s, died of unknown causes, and their birth mother’s abuse of drugs and alcohol increased after his death. Their birth mother was prone to disappearing for days at a time before finally resurfacing to bring the girls more food. Then the temporary disappearances became permanent. The girls had no idea where their birth mother went. Malika stopped attending school so she could care for Madina and Zarina.

The girls managed to get food from a local market that allowed customers to purchase on credit, but the store owner soon had to cut them off because nobody was paying the bill. Malika was forced to beg for food.

“It was humiliating because we would ask people we knew,” she said.

A neighbor took the girls in after they had already been living on their own for months, but it didn’t last long. The strain of trying to care for three young girls in addition to her own children and grandchildren was too much to bear, and the neighbor called the police after two months. Malika and her sisters were placed in a temporary group home of about 80 children before being transported to a large orphanage in Karaganda, about 300 miles north of Priozersk.

While Malika and her sisters were fortunate to be placed in the same orphanage – some siblings were split up – they rarely saw each other. The more than 400 children in the orphanage were divided into age groups. Though Madina and Zarina started off in the same group, Madina soon aged into the next group. If they were lucky, the girls might see each other in the cafeteria. More commonly, they had to wait until a big celebration like Christmas or a summer activity.

“The hardest part was not knowing what was happening with my sisters,” Malika said. “If one kid was in trouble, everyone in the age group was in trouble and got punished. Knowing that happened in my age group, I couldn’t imagine what was going on with my sisters.”

While Malika and her sisters were becoming accustomed to life in the orphanage, some 7,000 miles away in Fallbrook, Peter and Sylvia Berens had been discussing adoption.

 

‘Love at first sight’

Peter and Sylvia’s first attempt at adoption was stymied by a paperwork mix-up, and they never even met the children whom the adoption group had targeted. The mistake helped Peter and Sylvia move to the top of the list the following year. They received a stack of photos of children waiting to be adopted. Peter didn’t even make it through half of the photos.

“When I saw the picture, I knew,” he said.

It was a photo of Malika, Madina and Zarina.

“We didn’t plan for three kids,” Sylvia said. “But we saw them and – something in their eyes, their sparkle – we knew they were going to be our kids.”

As part of the adoption program, the girls flew to the U.S. for a six-week trial period. The girls didn’t speak any English, and Peter and Sylvia spoke no Russian.

Despite the language barrier – “It was a lot of hand signals back and forth,” Peter said – they instantly connected.

“When people say love at first sight,” Malika said, “that’s how it was with our parents. We knew we were going to be together.”

But it was an arduous process. If everything went according to plan, Peter and Sylvia knew it would be nearly a year before they would get to bring the girls to the U.S. permanently. Six weeks together made it even more excruciating to see the girls board a plane to return to the orphanage in Kazakhstan.

Malika made one request of Peter and Sylvia before departing for Kazakhstan: She asked if they would visit the orphanage at Christmas. Peter and Sylvia couldn’t make any promises, but that December, as kids in the orphanage were preparing for the holiday, Malika noticed a buzz of excitement. Children were running to the windows and Malika could hear them saying, “The Americans are here.” She went to the window to see what the commotion was about.

It was Peter and Sylvia.

“I got really emotional,” Malika said. “That made it more real because I knew they wanted us and they loved us.”

Peter and Sylvia made two more trips to Kazakhstan – once for a bonding period with the girls and a final visit to bring their daughters home. The girls officially became U.S. citizens on May 5, 2005, at the moment their plane landed on U.S. soil.

 

A second chance

There were still adjustments and challenges. On their first night as an official family, Zarina woke up at 2 a.m. screaming yabloka, yabloka, yabloka while running wildly around the kitchen. Peter and Sylvia had no idea what she was saying nor the severity of the problem. They called one of their employees, a native of Uzbekistan who spoke Russian. Peter apologized for waking him and explained the situation. The employee asked what Zarina was saying.

Yabloka,” Peter said.

“She wants an apple,” he replied.

The girls’ English steadily improved, and they thrived at St. Joseph Academy in San Marcos. The only thing they enjoyed more than school was frequent trips abroad with their parents.

“I think that’s how our love of education started,” Zarina said. “On every trip, our parents would make sure we went to a museum and learned something. Then we’d go back to class and could say, ‘Oh, I saw that.’ We could make a connection.”

When it came time to choose a college, CSUSM was an easy choice. Though Peter and Sylvia each earned a doctorate in physical chemistry from UC San Diego – and Sylvia also completed her undergraduate work there – they encouraged their daughters to attend CSUSM, where they thought a smaller-college experience would be beneficial.

It was a prescient decision. Malika and Madina credit chemistry professor Jackie Trischman for providing critical mentorship throughout their time at CSUSM.

Laurie Schmelzer, the director of student services for the College of Science and Mathematics, also proved instrumental in Malika’s success at CSUSM, virtually from day one. Malika met Schmelzer through her freshman GEL Chemistry & Biochemistry Learning Community course, and Schmelzer helped Malika develop the confidence to take on leadership roles in events like Super STEM Saturday.

“She was so shy but always had questions about what needed to be done before the next class, who she should talk to about advising,” Schmelzer said. “It was obvious that she was going to make the most of her college experience, and she jumped right in.

“She has been an amazing mentor to her two sisters, and that compassion carries over into every aspect of her life. I’m going to greatly miss her visits to my office and spending time with her at outreach events, but I can’t wait to see what she does next.”

Malika is hoping to work as a certified nursing assistant before starting preparations for nursing school. She hopes to enroll in CSUSM’s Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing program in spring 2020.

Malika learned about compassion and caring at a young age, and it remains at the forefront of everything she does.

“I believe that God has a plan for everyone,” Malika said. “It might not be the plan we are envisioning, but we should always be grateful for what we have because we never know when it’s going to be taken from us. God has been a huge part of my life. I feel like being adopted was part of his plan.

“My parents have provided us with unconditional love and support. They’ve been there through the hard times. It sounds clichéd, but they’re my heroes. They’ve given me a second chance in life, one I’ll never take for granted.”

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Tue, 14 May 2019 08:00:00 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_malikaberens-019-271368.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/malikaberens-019-271368.jpg?10000
Family Matters: Alumnus Pays Tribute to Adoptive Parents https://news.csusm.edu/steps-matt-walsh-feature/ https://news.csusm.edu/steps-matt-walsh-feature/323022By Brian HiroHis suitcases were packed. The social workers were on their way. 

Matt Walsh was only 14 years old but had endured a lifetime of abuse at the hands of a woman who had adopted him from the foster care system when he was an infant. Now he was headed back to foster care, as soon as the social workers arrived at the home of the Escondido family that had taken him in temporarily.  

Tom and Kim Zarro, the parents of that family, had a different idea. They already had two children and weren’t exactly looking for a third. But their faith wouldn’t allow them to send Walsh away. 

“I’ll never forget my wife’s words,” Tom Zarro said. “She looked at me and said, ‘How can we go to church on Sunday and let this boy go back to the foster system?’ And it absolutely cut me like a knife. I had no answer.” 

Walsh stayed. In a nurturing environment for the first time in his life, he thrived. With the help of ACE Scholars Services, Cal State San Marcos’ unique program for former foster youth, he attended the university and developed into a leader, even becoming student body president by his senior year. 

Now 27 and working for his adoptive father’s transportation company, Walsh is in position to give back, and he’s doing just that. This spring, for the third time, he will hand out a $500 cash award to the ACE Scholars graduate whom he deems the most outstanding. The award is named after Tom and Kim Zarro. 

It’s in honor of them because I wouldn’t be here without them,” Walsh said. “It’s my gift to honor them and my family.” 

Tumultuous childhood

Walsh was essentially born into foster care. He doesn’t know anything about his birth parents, and doesn’t care to. He was adopted at age 2 by a single mother who was far from benevolent.

She was addicted to drugs and alcohol. She was physically and emotionally abusive. Walsh remembers being homeless for most of his youth – living out of cars and hotels throughout North County. He missed a disturbing amount of school.

“It was just me and her,” he said. “She didn’t work. She was on disability and got a check from the government for having a foster kid.

“There was no redeeming factor, like she was trying her best. There was no silver lining. She was just a very unhealthy and very bad person.”

Walsh didn’t feel empowered to do anything about his predicament until he reached Rincon Middle School in Escondido. He finally acquired a good group of friends from good families, and they all told him the same thing: What your mother does isn’t normal, Matt.

So on the day after his 14th birthday, in the spring of his eighth-grade year, Walsh spilled his guts to the school counselor – everything about his mom, about her drug abuse, about his bruises and scars. After school officials intervened, he was removed from his mother’s care and sent to Polinsky Children’s Center, a San Diego facility for the temporary emergency shelter of children who must be separated from their families for their own safety.

Following a short spell at the center, he ended up staying with the family of a friend from Rincon. The Zarros lived in the same Escondido neighborhood, and Walsh soon became even closer friends with their son, Taylor, who was one year younger. He gradually began to spend less time with the family that first took him in and more time with the Zarros.

In the summer of 2005, with Walsh facing a trip back to Polinsky, Tom and Kim made their fateful decision.

“The social workers showed up, but at the end of the day, we couldn’t send Matt back,” Tom said. “We asked if we could just be his foster parents, and the state fast-tracked the process. That was the beginning of the end of Matt’s foster life.”

Assimilating another teenager, especially a badly scarred one, into an established family didn’t come without struggles, however. Walsh had absorbed so much abuse that he slept with a baseball bat. He was angry, introverted and malnourished.

The Zarros pulled him out of public school and enrolled him at Calvin Christian. They put him in counseling and immersed him in their already-active lives, from sports to youth ministry through their church. Just as importantly, their two children, Taylor and Devan, welcomed Walsh into the family with open arms.

“It was probably six months to a year before we said, ‘OK, we don’t have a bad apple here. We have an opportunity to really make a difference and impact this kid, so we will stay the course,’ ” Tom said.

After graduating from Escondido Charter High, Walsh chose CSUSM because he liked the teaching program. Even though he lived nearby in Escondido, he opted to eschew commuting and move into the dorms. It was a sign of his desire to throw himself into campus life, and that’s just what he did.

Reinventing himself as a bubbly people person, Walsh made an immediate impression at the ACE Scholars welcome dinner in his freshman year.

“Students were getting up and introducing themselves, and there’s Matt – he had very bushy hair, barefoot – talking about the fact that his goal in life was to become vice president,” said Jim Mickelson, the director of ACE Scholars Services. “Everybody was like, ‘Why vice president?’ He said it’s the best job because you get to do different things without all the pressure and responsibility. I had to chuckle.”

While Walsh grew more and more involved at CSUSM – he joined the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and became a resident adviser, in addition to his prominent role in Associated Students, Inc. – he grew more and more appreciative of the work of ACE, even though he rarely benefited from it. After all, throughout high school, he was part of a supportive family with financial means.

“I’m always trying to draw attention to ACE Scholars,” Walsh said. “When I was student body president, my big goals were to talk about veterans and talk about foster youth.”

CSUSM still close at heart

Walsh graduated from CSUSM in 2014 with a double major in social science and political science, but he has hardly left the university in his past.

The chapter adviser of SAE, he’s on campus for meetings at least once a week. When he heard in late September that Mickelson would be retiring at the end of the current school year, he brought lunch over for the entire ACE office. Every December, he drops off holiday cheesecakes to select people on campus.

He left his job as executive director of the Republican Party of Orange County last year – tired of heightened partisan rancor, he now works in operations for his father’s company, Cargo Management Group – but he’s still a politician at heart.

“I think he’d make a great employee if there was the right spot on campus because he just loves this place,” Mickelson said.

Recently, that has meant translating his passion into action. Walsh himself was recognized as the outstanding ACE graduate in 2014, and he decided to resurrect the award after it went away a few years later. Mickelson and his staff make recommendations, and Walsh picks the winner. He envisions it as a cash prize with “no strings attached.”

“Buy a PlayStation, go to Vegas, pay off debt, do whatever you gotta do,” Walsh said. “It’s a nice gift to give someone, like ‘Hey, you made it through college, you did what 98.5 percent of those out there like you will not do. You truly made it.’”

Given his abject upbringing, Walsh, too, has truly made it. And he’ll never stop paying tribute to those who helped make his transformation possible.

“These are two people who already had two children, definitely didn’t need more stress in their life,” he said. “They did what was right and said, ‘Here’s a kid who could use our help. What kind of people would we call ourselves if we turned him away.’

“If that story is the motivation for other people to give, then that would be the goal.”

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Tue, 05 Mar 2019 09:00:00 -0800 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_rgbmatt-walsh-201807-132424.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/rgbmatt-walsh-201807-132424.jpg?10000
Higher Yearning: Alumna Overcomes Challenging Upbringing https://news.csusm.edu/tiffany-teusch/ https://news.csusm.edu/tiffany-teusch/320848By Eric BreierTiffany Teusch didn’t give much thought to college as a teenager.

Teusch failed most of her high school classes as a freshman and sophomore. She spent her final two years of high school transitioning to a new school, a new living situation and trying to complete her normal coursework while simultaneously making up for the classes she flunked.

“I wasn’t one of those students who was saying, ‘Let’s do college applications,’ ” Teusch said.

But nearly 10 years later, Teusch has her bachelor’s. She graduated from Cal State San Marcos at the end of the fall semester with a degree in sociology and has already started work toward her Master of Social Work through Arizona State’s online program.

Teusch is grateful for many things on the path to her degree. For the support of ACE Scholars Services. For extra financial assistance through a Pardee Foundation Scholarship. And certainly for her son, Javius, who inspired her pursuit of a bachelor’s and master’s.

“Tiffany is one of the most dedicated and hard-working individuals I have had the opportunity to work with,” said Leigh Quijada, coordinator/counselor for ACE Scholars Services, which supports former foster youth at CSUSM.

“She excelled in her academics at CSUSM all while raising her young son and growing both personally and professionally. She has overcome challenges with such positivity and resourcefulness.”

Teusch grew up in Julian, a town of about 1,500 an hour east of CSUSM. Her parents both struggled with drugs, and her mother left when Teusch was still a toddler. By the time she started high school, she was mostly taking care of herself. School wasn’t a priority, and her grades suffered as she attended sporadically.

“I was kind of on my own,” Teusch said. “I was responsible and I was working, but I was also partying a lot. It’s a very small town, so there’s really nothing else to do. I was just partying a lot and drinking a lot and smoking a lot, which I didn’t even really like. I don’t like being high, so I don’t know why I was doing that. I think it was just an escape or something to do.”

Teusch stopped drinking and smoking before the end of her sophomore year. She stopped showing up at parties. She focused on doing better. But as summer vacation was about to begin, life took a dramatic turn for Teusch and her younger brother.

Someone at her school called Child Protective Services.

“They said, ‘They’re not going to survive summer at home when they’re not coming to school,’ ” Teusch said.

Teusch spent a few months in a foster home before being placed in San Pasqual Academy, a residential education campus in Escondido for foster teens. Teusch spent her days in school, her afternoons working and her nights at an adult school to make up the classes she had failed.

During her post-high school transition to a housing program, she learned about financial aid for college and decided to take a few classes at Palomar College. Teusch took a break from Palomar to obtain a certificate in medical billing and insurance coding from UEI College, which offers vocational and trade school programs, so she could better support herself. At 23, she learned she was pregnant. Looming parenthood fueled her desire to finish her associate degree and transfer to CSUSM to complete her bachelor’s.

Juggling motherhood, school and work was challenging. But ACE provided a strong support system, and the Pardee Foundation Scholarship, awarded to students with a financial need who have at least a 3.25 grade-point average, alleviated some of the financial stress.

“The scholarship was very helpful since I couldn’t work as much,” Teusch said. “It really helped cover the gap between what I made at work and financial aid.”

But Teusch faced another unexpected challenge. For the first time, she was starting to understand how the difficulties she faced as a child were impacting her as an adult.

“I don’t think that I really felt my struggle until I was an adult,” she said. “I didn’t feel all the internal stuff, the depression and anxiety. I didn’t have a name to put to it. I just kind of lived through it. I think when I had my son is when I realized, ‘OK, there’s some stuff going on here.’ ”

Teusch credits CSUSM’s Student Health and Counseling Services for helping her work through those issues. Her goal is to pursue a career in clinical therapy after receiving her Master of Social Work.

She has already been working to help others, including students at a familiar place. Almost a decade after graduating from San Pasqual Academy, Teusch returned last fall to work as a peer mentor.

“One of their favorite things to throw out is, ‘You don’t know what I’m going through.’ And I say, ‘Actually, I do,’ ” Teusch said. “They can’t use that with me. They realize, ‘Here’s someone who left and has come back, and so they are here for me.’ I think it’s a big deal for them.

“I know when I was there, a lot of people who came back were just looking for services, looking for housing, looking for help. They were kind of struggling. I’ve had my own struggles, too, but I think that being able to come back and show them that you can succeed is a big deal.”

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Mon, 04 Mar 2019 09:00:00 -0800 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_tiffanyteusch-004-474301.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/tiffanyteusch-004-474301.jpg?10000
Vista Couple Deepens Relationship to CSUSM as Donors https://news.csusm.edu/steps-mannino-harris-feature/ https://news.csusm.edu/steps-mannino-harris-feature/323029By Brian HiroBarbara Mannino and Syd Harris were no strangers to Cal State San Marcos when they attended the ACE Scholars Services scholarship donor reception in 2015.  

Mannino had been on the advisory council to President Karen Haynes for more than five years, dating back to her decades-long role as the CEO of the Vista Community Clinic. Harris, Mannino’s husband of almost 30 years, had loaned a piece of his stone artwork to the university.  

The longtime residents of North County had watched CSUSM spring up from nothing – Mannino still remembers the site near a Jerome’s furniture store – and become increasingly impressed by its evolution into a pillar of the region. 

On this day, however, the couple’s connection to the university grew more personal. As they listened to the inspiring speech of Julius Williams, a former foster child turned ACE Scholar, they thought of their own adopted daughter, whom Mannino took in as a foster child during her first marriage. They thought of how much Kim Mannino Sun could have benefited from something like ACE, CSUSM’s unique program that supports former foster youth. 

“She’s been very successful in her life, but she struggled in school, and if there had been something like ACE for her, I think she might have finished high school and gone to college,” Mannino said. “So when we heard Julius speak, we were really moved and inspired by him.” 

Mannino and Harris returned to their home in Vista, talked it over, and decided that they wanted to start giving more than time and art to the university. It was the start of a new phase of a wonderful relationship. 

The couple made a five-year pledge to fund a working scholarship for an ACE student, a commitment that they renewed in 2018 for five more years. Last fall, too, they increased the amount of their legacy gift, which will go to ACE as well as to the new engineering program and Veterans Services. 

The latter two initiatives also are near and dear to the couple’s hearts. Harris was a professional engineer for almost 40 years before being reborn as an artist late in life, and he grew up as an Air Force brat whose family moved all over the world because of his father’s job.  

“While the ACE program was important for both of us – maybe more for Barbara than me initially – I wanted something that I could direct some of my attention to,” Harris said. “That’s where the engineering and veterans component came from. Based on what the university is doing, it seems to be a good fit.” 

The stepped-up level of donating to CSUSM fits into a general pattern of giving back for the couple. After retiring in 2012 from a 30-year career running the nonprofit Vista Community Clinic – which she expanded from a shoestring organization with a budget of $500,000 and a staff of 30 to a regional fixture with a budget of $35 million and a staff of 530 – Mannino threw herself into volunteering.  

A dog lover who has three mixed breed rescues, she began giving her time to the San Diego Humane Society, the Animal Rescue Resource Foundation and the county Department of Animal Services. She read to second- and third-graders through the Oasis program at Olive Elementary School in Vista. She continued her work as a coach for other CEOs and nonprofit leaders as part of the Fieldstone Leadership Network. 

And in December 2017, she heightened her engagement by joining the CSUSM Foundation Board. 

“When I retired, I didn’t want to be responsible,” Mannino said. “I was asked to be on several boards, and I said no. I really did just want to walk dogs, read to kids, and listen, but I didn’t want to have to make decisions. After five years, I was ready to take a step back in, and I was fortunate that Cal State San Marcos came forward with the foundation opportunity.” 

As for Harris, he has loaned to CSUSM indefinitely a large alabaster sculpture that sits in the McMahan House, and more could be in the offing. About 60 of his pieces decorate the inside and outside of the couple’s Vista house, in the same neighborhood where President Haynes and Jim Mickelson, her husband and the director of ACE, live. 

“I’ve encouraged him to leave some of his pieces to the university,” Mannino said. “There are enough of them to go around, and they’re beautiful.”  

Besides their philanthropy and other retirement pursuits, Mannino and Harris are avid travelers who have been on more than 50 vacations in the last six years alone. They consider their most memorable experience to be a trip to San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja California, a remote spot that’s the only place in the world where humans can have physical contact with whales. 

“There were 331 whales in the lagoon when we went, and 10 percent of them are friendly,” Mannino said. “They bring their babies up to the boat, and you can touch and kiss them. There’s nothing else like it.” 

The couple doesn’t have any children together, though they treasure their time with Kim and their two adult grandkids, Kimberly and Kevin. They both live in the South, along with Kim, but for most of her life, Kimberly, now 30 and the mother of a 4-year-old boy, would stay with Mannino and Harris in North County for the entire summer. 

“She developed her own circle of friends, she worked at the clinic, and really became part of our West Coast family,” Harris said. “It was a joy.” 

The couple was unsuccessful at convincing their granddaughter to attend CSUSM, but they are still dorm parents, in a sense. The niece of Mannino’s son-in-law is a junior from Malaysia whom Mannino and Harris helped to move into her apartment. 

It’s just another tie that binds them to CSUSM. 

“It’s really been a miracle because I never expected it to grow like it did,” Mannino said. “One of the things that really impresses us about the university is that it’s such a community gem and is really focused on strengthening and building the community. 

“Choosing to give to Cal State San Marcos and being able to further the education of people who might not otherwise have had the opportunity to go to college, and one day will be able to give back tenfold, is a legacy that my husband and I are very proud of.”  

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Wed, 27 Feb 2019 12:00:00 -0800 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_rgbbarbara-and-syd-09-238391.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/rgbbarbara-and-syd-09-238391.jpg?10000
On the Spot: Living on Your Terms https://news.csusm.edu/steps-palliative-care/ https://news.csusm.edu/steps-palliative-care/324045By Brian HiroWhen you’re a college student, the last thing you want to do – well, other than study for another final or write another term paper – is talk about the end of your life. 

College students, or just young people in general, like to think of themselves as invincible, as immortal. The notion of death is too distant, too hypothetical, too unpleasant.  

But end-of-life conversations don’t have to be only about dying. They can also be about living – specifically how you want to live. 

This is where WGYLM comes in. The alphabet-soup acronym stands for “What Gives Your Life Meaning?” and it’s an annual campaign at Cal State San Marcos to increase awareness about palliative care and the importance of aligning health-care decisions with your personal values. 

The idea is to get people thinking and talking about what is important in their lives, as a means of ensuring that loved ones know what to do in the event of a serious illness or accident – which, after all, can strike at any age, without warning. 

The creators of WGYLM hope that those difficult discussions lead to action in the form of signing an advance directive, a legal document that has two components to it. First, you name a health care advocate who will speak for you if you become incapacitated and can’t speak for yourself.  

Second, you specify the kinds of care that you do and do not approve. Do you want CPR? Do you want hydration? Do you want to be on a breathing apparatus?  

It’s recommended that anyone over the age of 18 fill out an advance directive. According to national statistics, though, 89 percent of college students and 74 percent of adults haven’t done so. 

“It’s important that people have the conversation,” said Sharon Hamill, the faculty director of the CSU Institute for Palliative Care at Cal State San Marcos. “Last spring, we had a campaign on campus, and part of it was: Will you pledge to have a conversation about what’s important to you? We’re not going to get a ton of people signing advance directives because it’s really personal, and it usually takes people a couple of times before they’re comfortable doing it. But we want the conversation started.” 

Hamill recalled a talk with a female student about which family member she would name on her advance directive. The student said she would name her father, not her mother, because her mother wouldn’t let her die, no matter how many machines she was hooked up to and for how long. 

Hamill told the student, “If you feel that way, it’s important that you talk with your mom about it now. You don’t want her finding out about that in an emergency room. 

Hamill says she encourages students to have tough conversations about quality of life and end-of-life decisions over the holidays, when families congregate together. For Christmas, she planned to give an advance directive to each of her three sons – ages 28, 26 and 21 – and their gift to her would be filling it out and giving it to their doctor.  

“My youngest said, ‘You know, Mom, it just makes me go all existential,’ ” Hamill said. “I replied, ‘Well, it should.’ These are the kinds of things you need to let people know so that if, God forbid, something happens, we’re able to act in accordance with what you would have wanted.  

“If you don’t ever tell anybody, then what are you going to do?” 

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Wed, 27 Feb 2019 08:00:00 -0800 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_palliative-wgylm012-436585.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/palliative-wgylm012-436585.jpg?10000
Additional Scholarship Funds Taking Athletics to Next Level https://news.csusm.edu/scholarship-funds/ https://news.csusm.edu/scholarship-funds/320849By Jay ParisIt’s another step in the right direction for Cal State San Marcos.

Forward Together, the University’s first comprehensive fundraising campaign, was a bold ambition. Some wondered if CSUSM aimed too high when setting a goal of raising $50 million.

“We’re one of the youngest Cal State University campuses in the system, and to try and do a campaign at such a young age, well, some saw that as being risky,” said Jennifer Milo, CSUSM’s athletic director. “We don’t have the alumni base yet, but it still was very successful.”

The naysayers didn’t understand the drive of an unrelenting Milo and the steely leadership of CSUSM President Karen Hayes. They were two of the forces behind securing additional scholarship funds for student-athletes, which was a requirement for the Cougars to earn NCAA Division II status.

“Scholarship money is the lifeblood of any program,” said CSUSM women’s basketball coach Renee Jimenez. “They always say, ‘It's the Jimmys and Joes and not the Xs and Os.’ But if you don't have the resources to recruit really good kids and student-athletes, you are definitely at a disadvantage.”

That drawback was underscored when the Cougars departed the NAIA and moved up to the NCAA. Suddenly, CSUSM was competing against different, and better, opponents.

To raise its game meant raising money, and the Cougars’ administration and coaches rolled up their sleeves and did just that. But their work was only a winner because of the community support from people keen on what’s happening at the growing University.

With its eyes on competing for national championships, it’s a natural strategy to fill the coffers toward that aspiration.

“The best teams in the country are the teams with the best scholarships,” CSUSM men's basketball coach B.J. Foster said. “That’s just the way it goes.”

CSUSM coaches no longer need to worry about leaving a recruit’s home concerned about losing another prized student-athlete because of scholarship limitations.

Before the success of the Forward Together campaign, coaches often chased down a recruit only to face them as an opponent during the season.

“That is a very frustrating thing, there is no question about that,” Foster said. “Because of the great location of the school and with the great academic programs that we have here, we have that advantage to go ahead and rival those schools.

“But when you are talking about recruiting against private schools, and even some in our league that are able to offer housing, meals and everything, it's going to trump a beautiful school with great academics because they don’t have to pay for anything.”

Thanks to Forward Together, that’s no longer the case.

“It levels the playing field once that happens and it just gives us more options in recruiting where you can weather an injury or two, which is invariably going to happen,” Foster said.

Foster has held down the fort just fine with limited funds. He can point to having the California Collegiate Athletic Association player of the year in 2017-18 and others on the all-conference first and second teams. But any squad is only as good as its depth, and that was where Foster would see the biggest disadvantage because of limited scholarship funds for his players.

“We’ve had those really good players, but after those three or four guys a lot of the guys were walk-ons or competing on a partial scholarship. If you can put together five or six players the caliber of our best three last year, who knows, you might be competing on the national stage. But when you couldn't do that with your recruiting, that was a very frustrating thing.”

Angst has transitioned to eagerness as a bigger pot of scholarship money continues to transform an athletic program that is already full-steam ahead.

“We’ve made huge strides since 2009 in our department,” Milo said. “The growth in the last nine years has obviously been incredible with our transition to the NCAA. But we wanted to go after the best and brightest student-athletes, so we put our head down in going to work to grow our scholarship capacity.”

The program has been heaven sent for coaches, who can now recruit players who once seemed off-limits.

“I think you are going to see a big jump in performances this year, and in some ways it has nothing to do with what I do as a coach or what Jen does as an administrator,” Jimenez said. “It’s about getting the talent, which Forward Together allows us to do. It’s hard when you have to go into a living room and beg someone to come when you can’t give them what another school is offering them. That is embarrassing for the coaches.”

That’s no longer a concern for CSUSM coaches.

“We can say, ‘Hey, this is what we are going to give you. We can do it in a great location and you will get a fantastic education and a first-class basketball experience,’ ” Jimenez said. “It’s hard turning down good players, and now we feel like we can compete for those players by giving them an offer they can't say no to.”

That so many people said, “Yes” when approached by CSUSM to enhance Forward Together has been revealing.

“For the school to be so young and to see how quickly the community and the donors have grasped on to athletics and helped raise scholarship money is exciting,” Jimenez said. “They are the ones that have their hand prints all over our program.

“It takes everybody to try and win a national championship and everyone has to be involved, from the donors to the administrators to the coaches and the players.”

It’s an endeavor in which everyone is pulling in the same direction on the athletic rope. Those supplying the bang for the athletic buck can’t be overlooked.

“I think it shows that we have finally arrived,” Milo said. “Some of the donors might not even have an allegiance to CSUSM, but their involvement shows that people are ready to invest in our school. They can see the amazing education the students are getting and then believe in the vision presented by President Haynes.

“This might seem like an overnight success, but it has taken a lot of hard work to reach where we are today. Our athletic funding has gone from $150,000 to more than $800,000, but it has taken a lot of work. We’ve gone from people saying, ‘Who is Cal State University San Marcos?’ to us preserving and educating people on who we are and what we do. A lot of people didn’t know about us.”

The Cougars hurdled some of those obstacles with the resounding success of Forward Together.

“Everybody wants to be part of something special,” Foster said. “These additional funds will help build the school spirit and pride in the university. We're going to have something here that the alumni and the community can really sink their teeth into.”

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Mon, 25 Feb 2019 15:46:48 -0800 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_byjeffdavis.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/byjeffdavis.jpg?10000
Chemistry Student Brings STEM to Local Middle Schools https://news.csusm.edu/steps-emmanuel-morales-feature/ https://news.csusm.edu/steps-emmanuel-morales-feature/323030By Brian HiroIt’s a Monday afternoon in October at Del Dios Academy of Arts and Sciences, which means it’s time for a little STEM. 

Sixteen students from sixth through eighth grades line up outside a classroom door 15 minutes before the lesson is to begin at the middle school in Escondido. The regular school day is over, so they don’t have to be here. They want to be here. 

They want to see, and learn from, Emmanuel. 

Soon, Emmanuel Morales, a senior chemistry major at Cal State San Marcos, arrives along with a fellow STEM ambassador from the university’s Center for Research and Engagement in STEM Education (CRESE). Wearing a white CSUSM T-shirt with the words “Learn STEM Lead STEM,” he starts unpacking his supplies and informing the students about that week’s assignment: They will create a robotic arm out of ordinary household supplies like cardboard, plastic straws, popsicle sticks and string.  

“This is a semi-difficult project,” Emmanuel tells the middle-schoolers. “The idea is to simulate the function of tendons in the hand and wrist.” 

As he circulates around the room over the next hour, helping groups of two and three with their construction at separate tables, it’s clear that Emmanuel has earned the students’ respect with his soft-spoken, patient demeanor. 

The kids are very attached to him,” said Sophia Gonzalez, an English teacher at Del Dios who supervises the weekly STEM sessions. “He doesn’t say a whole lot, but he’s very open with them and doesn’t really dictate; he just offers his expertise or alternate solutions. Today, they were all looking forward to him. They enjoy coming here, and I think it’s because of how he interacts with them.” 

Emmanuel is in his third year as a STEM ambassador, one of the senior members of a group of about 20 CSUSM undergraduate science students who fan out weekly to 12 middle schools across the San Marcos, Escondido and Vista school districts. They do their work through a program called Mobile Making – funded by a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation, as well as a donation from Carlsbad-based Nordson  the purpose of which is to bring design-based, STEM-related activities to underprivileged schools that wouldn’t otherwise have exposure to such disciplines. 

Twice a week, Emmanuel stops by the CRESE center in the QUAD building – it’s nicknamed the STEMbassy – to load up on the materials that he’ll need for that day’s project. Besides the robotic arm, among the activities that STEM ambassadors (who also attend Saturday training sessions once every few weeks) assist students with are building basic robots with toothbrushes and cell-phone motors, creating solar-powered vehicles from recycled materials, and powering motors and buzzers with conductive Play-Doh. 

It’s all part of a nationwide trend toward the lost art of making things. Makerspaces are popping up in schools around the country – CSUSM is considering installing one – and Mobile Making is just a way to take the same concept on the road. 

“Making in general is a big movement right now,” said April Nelson, the program director for CRESE. “The mobile part is unique to us. We are definitely one of the schools leading the charge on this, and we’d like to be more of an example.” 

The Emmanuel of the age of the students he’s mentoring now would scarcely recognize the Emmanuel of today. Back then, not only was he not doing STEM activities at school, but he didn’t even know what STEM was.

He was raised in a part of Vista where, he says, “not many people think about college. Most people just want to get a job and start making money.”

Emmanuel was one of those people. He lacked confidence in his intelligence and academic potential. He switched from Rancho Buena Vista to Vista High after his sophomore year, and didn’t have many friends at the new school. And on the home front, his dad temporarily moved out of the house during his high school years, leaving him without a father figure during that crucial, angst-ridden stage of development.

That was when the man Emmanuel still refers to simply as Mr. Robinson entered the picture. Mark Robinson is a Vista High science teacher who’s in his 25th and final year at the school – he plans to retire this spring to focus on his prosperous side venture of winemaking.

Emmanuel took Robinson’s chemistry class as a junior, and something immediately clicked. He discovered that, unlike with other subjects, chemistry came easily to him. More importantly, he found in Robinson an adult figure who believed in him, who thought he was smart, who thought he was special.

“He was a very big influence for me,” Emmanuel said. “He always told me, ‘You’re a fantastic student to have around here, you’re picking up this chemistry very quickly.’ It felt good hearing that from him.”

Robinson, like Emmanuel a first-generation college student whose father wasn’t present in his life, saw in Emmanuel a kindred spirit. They frequently would sit and talk after class and after school about topics far beyond just chemistry.

“He was an incredibly fascinating human being,” Robinson said. “He was serious about the subject matters, but he was way more interesting after class. He had so many ideas, a gazillion little hypotheses in his head. We would talk about anything and everything – philosophical things, science things, earth things, botany, ethnobotany, you name it. If you ask me to pick a word to describe him, it would be curious. He has a curious mind. He’s blessed.”

Emmanuel liked Robinson so much that he proceeded to take his anatomy class as a senior. He went from getting Bs and Cs in most classes to taking AP courses. At Robinson’s urging, he began thinking about college for the first time.

“When I graduated, he told me he was very proud of me,” Emmanuel said. “He would jokingly say, ‘If I could adopt you, I would.’ ”

After he arrived at CSUSM, Emmanuel started looking for opportunities to teach, to take Robinson’s influential tutelage and pay it forward. When he learned about the STEM ambassador program, he knew he had found the perfect avenue.

“The best part is seeing the students’ smiles and knowing that I taught them something,” Emmanuel said, “that they’ll go home and think about trying to be a STEM student.”

Emmanuel used to aspire to be a high school science teacher like Robinson, but Robinson himself convinced him to aim higher. Emmanuel now says he wants to get a job at a company like Viasat or Genentech and try to earn a master’s degree while working.

Asked if he thinks of himself as a Mr. Robinson for the middle-schoolers, Emmanuel smiles.

“That’s something I can take pride in,” he said. “He was very highly looked upon at our school, and I want to be looked at that way as well. The students look up to me; my coworkers look up to me.

“It’s great to think that all this happened because he told me I should continue going to school and get an education.”

Here’s to you, Mr. Robinson.

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Tue, 19 Feb 2019 09:00:00 -0800 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_rgbemmanuelmorales-crese-2018-23-724403.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/rgbemmanuelmorales-crese-2018-23-724403.jpg?10000
Daring to Dream: CSUSM Aimed High with Campaign https://news.csusm.edu/steps-winter-2019-cover-story/ https://news.csusm.edu/steps-winter-2019-cover-story/320291By Brian HiroThe first gift of the day came in just after the clock struck midnight. By 6 a.m., when the late-autumn sky was still dark, 114 donations already had been made. 

The pace rarely waned during Giving Day at Cal State San Marcos on Nov. 27. Administrators gave. Faculty gave. Students gave. Alumni gave. Community members gave. All around campus, people could be spotted wearing blue heart stickers, a telltale symbol of the spirit of generosity at the university. 

By the time the 1,488th and final gift was registered at 11:59 p.m., CSUSM – with the help of matching gifts from Jack Raymond, chair of the university’s Foundation Board  had raised $448,955 in a single day. That’s an astounding increase of 2,877 percent over the inaugural Giving Day three years earlier. 

When President Karen Haynes announced the launch of CSUSM’s first comprehensive fundraising campaign at the University Student Union ballroom in September 2015, surely there were skeptics. How could a university that only recently had celebrated its 25th birthday hope to raise $50 million, which was double the goal that initially had been proposed by the Foundation Board? Most comprehensive campaigns are built chiefly on the strength of alumni, after all, and CSUSM – as young as it is – simply doesn’t have a vast pool. 

The remarkable growth of Giving Day, however, is just one of the many signs that what CSUSM lacks in age, it more than makes up for in ambition. Haynes’ financial target for the Forward Together campaign might have sounded audacious to outsiders, but it was par for the course to anyone familiar with this campus and its leader. 

“I am fairly comfortable with bold goals if I think that they are attainable,” Haynes said. “Yes, it was a little scary, but it pushed all of us to stretch to say it is possible. I just thought the $50 million number felt right for this campus and the way we acted.” 

As it turned out, the $50 million figure not only was attainable, but it was surpassable. When Forward Together officially ended as the calendar turned to 2019, the campaign had blown past its objective, ultimately landing on $55,035,210 as the amount raised. 

How impressive is that? Consider that CSUSM raised more in the seven years of the campaign than it had in the first 21 years of its existence combined. Consider that nearly three-fourths of the university’s alumni graduated during Haynes’ tenure as president. 

It’s difficult to establish with certainty, but CSUSM does have good reason to boast that it’s the youngest university in the nation to undertake such an ambitious fundraising challenge at such a young age. 

And if not in the nation, it’s certainly the youngest in the 23-campus California State University system. As if inspired by the boldness of CSUSM, exactly a year after the public launch of Forward Together, Cal State San Bernardino – a university then twice as old as CSUSM – announced that it was embarking on its own $50 million campaign. The very next month, Cal State East Bay – a school that was more than twice as old and has an alumni base nearly three times as large set off on a $60 million campaign. 

“I think some of them got the impetus, whether their presidents would admit it or not, to say, for example, ‘Why can’t East Bay do it at 60 years for $60 million?  Haynes said. “So there was a little skepticism around the CSU about our campaign, but there were some that thought, ‘Wow, we’ve never done it and we’re 60 years old, we’re 80 years old.  

Because of its limited institutional history, Cal State San Marcos approached the campaign in its own youthful, scrappy, entrepreneurial manner – what might be called the “CSUSM way.” Most universities carefully arrive at a campaign goal figure by hiring a council that does an assessment based on its donor base. CSUSM did it based on a round, impressive number thrown out by its president during a Foundation Board retreat in 2012. 

“The meeting where we came up with the dollar amount, I wouldn’t recommend that for other institutions,” said Cathy Baur, vice president for University Advancement. “But it says a lot about our fortitude, our willingness to take a gamble and know that we have a good story to tell and have such strong support in the region that we could actually make it happen.” 

Most universities structure campaigns around a series of major gifts from well-heeled alumni. CSUSM did receive a number of donations of at least $1 million, but Forward Together would not have succeeded without the committed participation of a veritable army of staff, faculty, students, alumni and community members making sometimes small but meaningful contributions.

The number of gifts in the campaign was almost 26,000, and the average gift size was about $2,200. That’s approximately half the amount of the average gift size for San Diego State during its recent comprehensive campaign.

“We always viewed this campaign as the one to prepare us for the next campaign,” Baur said. “Part of our goal was to build and work on that culture of philanthropy. We really feel like we have done a good job with that. Every single senior manager on this campus contributed to the campaign through either a one-time gift or a multiyear pledge. I think that’s indicative of the commitment people have to this university.”

Major fundraising campaigns, of course, didn’t used to be the province of CSU schools, which only a couple of decades ago received about 80 percent of the money for operating costs from the state. That number has fallen to 55 percent, with student tuition and fees accounting for the rest. Yet CSUSM continues to grow, both in students and in stature, and the demand for cutting-edge programs and services from the surrounding region only intensifies.

That desire for transformational change in the face of ongoing financial belt-tightening by the state was the motivation for Forward Together, which was built around the three pillars of “Preparing Tomorrow’s Leaders,” “Building Great Communities” and “Solving Critical Issues.”

“In my early years in this business, there were people who would say, ‘I don’t know what you suits are doing here, but if you’re raising money, don’t raise it for my program,’ ” said Kyle Button, the associate vice president of development, who was recruited by CSUSM to help run the campaign in 2014, a year before the public launch.

“The idea was that they’d never get the money back from the provost or the state if they saw their program as appealing to private support. We don’t hear that so much anymore. The game has changed. We’re now a part of doing business.”

Once the campaign priorities were established, it was time to venture out into the philanthropic community and do a little storytelling. And CSUSM knew it had good stories to tell.

Katherine Kantardjieff had come to CSUSM in 2011 from Cal State Fullerton, where she had gained experience in fundraising as a chemistry professor. In her new position as dean of the College of Science and Mathematics, she was sent on something of a road show around San Diego with a development officer, meeting with potential donors and heralding the innovative people and programs in her college. She came armed with so-called “wow” statements, and perhaps her most powerful one was about CSUSM’s proposed EngiBeering certificate program that would explore the science and engineering behind brewing craft beer – a powerful message in San Diego, which has come to be nicknamed the “Capital of Craft.”

“The end of the wow statement was, ‘Come join us and help us fuel a billion-dollar industry because life is too short for bad beer,’ ” Kantardjieff said. “It was all about getting people’s attention and making them feel good and making them want to know more.”

Kantardjieff also put together an advisory council in 2012 composed of “a team of people that was chomping at the bit to champion for this university.” One of the members was Simon Kuo, the vice president of corporate quality for Viasat, and it was partly through the cultivation of that relationship that CSUSM in early 2018 received $1.5 million from the Carlsbad-based global communications company (along with several employees) to become the founding partner of the university’s engineering program.

“It’s not that easy to fundraise. You have to have a compelling vision,” Kantardjieff said. “When it comes to engineering, the reason we got a donation from Viasat is that the community believes we can do this. We have their trust, we have their confidence. They know we can deliver.”

The gift from Viasat was far from the only one that will cause real and lasting change at CSUSM. Jan and Esther Stearns donated $1 million to ACE Scholars Services, the university’s one-of-a-kind program to support former foster youth. The Epstein Family Foundation gave $1 million toward a much-needed physical expansion of CSUSM’s Veterans Center. A small group of donors made it possible for the university to become an All-Steinway School, a designation held by fewer than 200 colleges, universities and conservatories worldwide. And for the first time in the 2017-18 academic year, more than a million dollars was dispersed to students in privately funded scholarships.

“Those are the kinds of quantum leaps that you want to create through a comprehensive campaign,” Button said. “The results are visible and palpable and real, and that does make a good case in the future for the next campaign of support.”

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Thu, 07 Feb 2019 13:00:00 -0800 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_2015-09-forwardtogether-launch-944762.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/2015-09-forwardtogether-launch-944762.jpg?10000
A True Trailblazer: Leadership a Key to Campaign's Success https://news.csusm.edu/karen-haynes-trailblazer/ https://news.csusm.edu/karen-haynes-trailblazer/317051By Eric BreierJack Raymond marvels at the success of Cal State San Marcos’ first comprehensive fundraising campaign.

When the quiet phase of Forward Together was launched in 2012, Raymond wondered if the $50 million campaign goal might be a stretch for such a young University. But Raymond, a longtime supporter of CSUSM and chair of its Foundation Board, didn’t view that as a negative.

“There’s nothing wrong with stretch goals,” he said.

Plus, he knew CSUSM had a unique advantage – President Karen Haynes.

“Karen is the person who has made the sea change in the University,” Raymond said.

When the Foundation Board was determining the campaign goal in 2012, someone suggested $25 million to coincide with the university’s 25th anniversary in 2015. Haynes, never one to shy away from bold goals, responded, “Why not $50 million?”

When the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve, it signaled the close of CSUSM’s campaign. The University didn’t just meet its ambitious $50 million goal, it crushed it. The campaign raised more than $55 million, funds that will help CSUSM continue to prepare tomorrow’s leaders, build great communities and solve critical issues for years to come.

Dan Epstein, who provided the gift that pushed CSUSM over the $50 million threshold, said Haynes’ leadership was critical in making the campaign a success.

“She was the driving force, and people got involved because of her,” said Epstein, who gave multiple gifts throughout the campaign, including $1 million that is allowing for a much-needed expansion of CSUSM’s Veterans Center.

“She’s been able to reach out to so many people in the community and gotten people behind the University’s mission, which is very clear – it is providing access to higher education for people who might not otherwise attend college.”

Seeing CSUSM work to expand access for underrepresented students resonated with numerous donors, and they credited Haynes for making that one of her primary goals upon her appointment as president in 2004.

“President Haynes has always struck me as a gracious and thoughtful leader, clear in her intent to serve the community, provide opportunities to students who may not otherwise have such access to education, and support the development of the ‘whole person,’ ” said Emilie Hersh, who serves on the Foundation Board and is an Executive in Residence for the College of Business Administration.

Julie Pardee first met Haynes and Jim Mickelson, Haynes’ husband and founder of CSUSM’s ACE Scholars Services, about a decade ago. Impressed by the education her son, Chris, and his wife, Natalie, received at CSUSM, Pardee wanted to help other students.

The Pardee Foundation Scholarship annually provides 50 awards of $2,000 to CSUSM students who show financial need and have a minimum 3.25 grade-point average. They later added a yearly gift to ACE, which supports former foster youth.

“Karen and Jim inspired us, and we’ve been thrilled to watch it continue to benefit the students who have received these benefits for over 10 years,” Pardee said. “Each year we receive personal letters from the recipients and are blessed by each one.

“Karen has grown CSUSM in creative and innovative ways. It’s been an honor to be part of her inspiring ways.”

The University’s growth was another common element that donors highlighted in describing the importance of Haynes’ leadership.

Ann Hunter-Welborn, another longtime supporter and a member of the University Council before CSUSM was founded, has seen the University’s growth from the beginning.

“For years, people referred to the three major universities in San Diego County,” Hunter-Welborn said. “I can’t tell you how many times I corrected people – ‘There are four!’ That correction is no longer necessary.

“Karen Haynes has provided the leadership that put CSUSM on the map. The University is firmly a part of the San Diego community, recognized for its offering of a sound education, for its contributions to the social fabric, and for its participation with the business community. Dr. Haynes’ enthusiasm is infectious, her wisdom is unbounded, and her drive for excellence is apparent in everything she does.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Christy Wilson, the executive director of the Rancho Santa Fe Foundation.

“She’s brought a vibrancy to Cal State San Marcos,” said Wilson, who has attended every one of Haynes’ Report to the Community addresses. “People weren’t talking about CSUSM much before she arrived. It was there, but it wasn’t talked about a great deal. She’s brought a vibrancy and helped the campus feel more alive.

“She’s not afraid to lead and she’s not afraid to take risks. She takes a stand and she believes in it and executes on it.”

Haynes’ tenure as CSUSM president will end on June 30 when she retires. While the campaign may have ended, its success will leave a long-lasting legacy thanks in large part to Haynes’ leadership.

“She’s one of the most impactful presidents of an academic institution that I have ever known,” said Ruth Westreich, a longtime supporter of numerous CSUSM initiatives. “Her impact will live on.”

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Thu, 07 Feb 2019 12:59:00 -0800 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_forwardtogether-celebration-088-287660.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/forwardtogether-celebration-088-287660.jpg?10000
For the Love of the Craft https://news.csusm.edu/craftbeer/ https://news.csusm.edu/craftbeer/296706By Christine VaughanFew job titles have earned the envy status that Judith Downie ’94 has in San Diego County.

When Downie introduces herself as a craft beer historian, jaws drop and questions begin to pour in. It’s an unexpected title for a librarian, especially one who five years ago couldn’t stomach the taste of beer. While today she favors a good mead, stout or fruit sour over the iconic hoppy India Pale Ales of the region, she knows craft beer and is leading the effort to preserve its history, which dates back 150 years in the region.

From capturing that history to launching a first-of-its-kind EngiBeering™ program, beer initiatives are bubbling up at Cal State San Marcos.

A FLAVORFUL HISTORY
The first recorded brewery to pop on the scene in San Diego was Chollas Valley Brewery in 1868 by German immigrant Christian Dobler. Naturally, German-style lagers were the preferred brew at 5 cents a glass. Agriculture dominated the region’s industry and a small handful of breweries emerged in that first wave before Prohibition.

The second wave of craft beer in San Diego (1933-1983) brought mixed results and several false starts. Home winemaking was legalized, but not home brewing, which included the sale of supplies to make beer. At first, alcohol could only be served in restaurants, not bars or saloons in California. Confusion over government regulation and taxation stalled business. Four breweries came and went. Some closed operations, others moved north to Los Angeles.

For three decades, craft beer production disappeared in San Diego, unable to compete with brewery giants like Coors, Budweiser and Pabst Blue Ribbon.

In 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed legislation that permitted home brewing. By 1983, California legalized the sale of craft beer, ushering in the third and current wave of craft beer for San Diego.

Bolt Brewing opened in Fallbrook in 1987. Then came Old Columbia Brewery, the first craft brewery of Karl Strauss and his cousin, which was soon renamed Karl Strauss Brewing Company. It is the longest continuously open brewery in San Diego.

Downie points to a pivotal moment that may have clinched San Diego’s place in beer history. In 1997, a consortium of craft brewers came together to form the San Diego Brewers Guild.

“It was Greg Koch, the founder of Stone Brewing Co., who said, ‘We can work together or fail separately,’ and it feels apropos to say, but the rest is history,” Downie said. “One characteristic that has undeniably influenced the success of craft brewing in our region has been the genuine collaboration among craft brewers.”

Today, San Diego boasts the title of “Capital of Craft” with over 150 licensed brewers. And it’s a powerful economic engine, producing more than $870 million in output annually.

In August 2017, the University Library launched the Brewchive™, a comprehensive archive celebrating the San Diego craft brewing industry. The collection is one of only a handful of specialty archives nationwide focused solely on beer.

“They put their heart and soul into this industry and we want to make sure that history is preserved and celebrated,” said Dr. Jennifer Fabbi, dean of the CSUSM Library.

The initial idea for an archive to record and preserve San Diego brewing activity was at the suggestion of Char Booth, associate dean of the library and a home brewer.

Tap handles, growlers, beer lists, coasters, recipes, brewing logs, manifestos and marketing materials are all part of the growing collection of the Brewchive™. As the library collects and digitizes these historical documents and artifacts, it is also curating signature collections, including the Stone Brewing Co. Collection and Women in Craft. Oral histories told by homebrewers and professionals are also featured in the online archive.

“Our business students and the students enrolled in the upcoming EngiBeering™ program can learn from both the successes and failures the local breweries have gone through,” Downie said.

RAISE YOUR HAND AND RAISE YOUR GLASS
This fall, the University will welcome its inaugural cohort of students into the EngiBeering™ certificate program. The two-part certificate, or what’s referred to as a stackable certificate program, explores the science and business of craft brewing.

“Industry leaders need to fill this critical gap in their workforce,” said Dr. Jackie Trischman, biochemist and program director of EngiBeering™. “They need trained professionals who have business insight but also know the science of making exceptional craft beer.”

Some of the courses for the 18-month program include recipe development, sensory evaluation to identify flavors and beer quality (yes, students will actually drink beer), learning the brewery processes, the evolution of beer, brewing science and an internship. Unlike traditional classes, EngiBeering™ lab courses will happen on-site at local breweries. And most notably, the program’s teaching faculty are professionals currently working in the industry.

“It’s exciting to me because there is more science involved in beer production than people think,” Trischman said. “A brewer is a scientist.”

EngiBeering™ was developed by eight CSUSM faculty across three colleges in partnership with more than 12 brewers including alumni Kyle Adams ’13 of Prohibition Brewing Company and Mike Stevenson ’12 of Culver Beer Company.

“The brewing community is one of the most congenial and positive groups I have ever met,” Trischman said. “The love for their craft shines through their work, and it’s that same passion that built this program.”

THE CRAFT BUSINESS
As a prominent industry for the local economy, generating more than $100 million in tax revenue annually, craft brewing is a serious business. Measuring its impact and predicting its growth is in the hands of business researchers at CSUSM.

Since 2015, the College of Business Administration has published its semiannual San Diego Craft Brewer Confidence Index, a survey conducted in partnership with the San Diego Business Journal, that gauges local brewer confidence in the industry. The latest report, released in April, revealed that brewers continue to display an impressive level of optimism in their businesses. Nearly 64 percent expect to add employees and 32 percent expect their total barrel output to increase from 11 percent to 20 percent in the next year. Business confidence is a predictor of industry growth, according to researchers.

The college also produces an annual Economic Impact of Craft Breweries Report, in conjunction with the San Diego Brewers Guild and the San Diego North Economic Development Council, analyzing the impact of the industry on the region. On Oct. 10, the college will host the Craft Economic Summit, unveiling its latest findings and discussing trends and forecasts for the craft brewing industry.

“The industry is thriving,” said Ed Ashley, director of business community relations for the college. “Stone Brewing Co. grew up a nine-iron away from us and our campus has grown right alongside it. We share the heart of the brewers and the love for the craft.”

WHAT'S THE CATCH? A BASEBALL IN A BEER
Gabrielle DiMarco was simply enjoying a beer and a ballgame on June 5 at Petco Park.

While it was mostly a forgettable evening for the Padres, who lost 14-1 to the Atlanta Braves, it turned into a life-changing experience for Gabrielle when a foul ball landed in her beer cup.

That alone likely would have gotten Gabrielle on the nightly sports highlight shows. What followed made the Cal State San Marcos literature and writing studies student a social media sensation.

Gabrielle, with encouragement from the surrounding fans, proceeded to drink the entire beer with the baseball still firmly planted in the cup. Video from the moment went viral with Gabrielle even receiving marriage proposals from as far away as Australia.

“I’m going to keep it in that cup forever,” Gabrielle told The San Diego Union-Tribune. “I’m never taking it out. It’s a trophy.”

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Life with No Destinations https://news.csusm.edu/life-with-no-destinations/ https://news.csusm.edu/life-with-no-destinations/296708By Christine VaughanLike many great stories, it began over cocktails.

It was Oct. 9, 2013. Danika Garlotta ’06 can still recall what she was drinking as she and her husband Chris talked about wanting to travel the world but struggling to find the time. Somewhere between a Scotch Egg and an Old Fashioned, Chris turned to Danika and said, “Let’s take a sabbatical.” It was unexpected, unthinkable and completely exhilarating. Within three months, the couple quit their well-paying jobs, sold everything, rented out their house in San Francisco and said goodbye to family and friends as they boarded a one-way flight to Rome.

To ease her mother’s angst and assure her that she was not dead on the side of the road halfway across the world, Danika set up a blog to chronicle their adventures. Their plan was simple.

“We would do what we want, stay where we wanted, and if we didn’t like someplace, we’d move on,” Danika said.

With no itinerary and no end game, she began sharing their adventures in their travel blog aptly named “No Destinations.” Four years and more than 200 destinations later, Danika and Chris have transformed their dream of seeing the world into a profitable, luxury-travel brand.

LIKES LONG WALKS ON THE BEACH
“We’re not the backpack-across-Europe, stay-in-a-youth-hostel type of people,” said Danika, laughing. “We prefer luxury and style and love to explore beautiful beaches and cities. Our focus is not to travel to, but instead experience new places, cultures and people.”

And their experiences run the gamut from eating at questionable alleyway cafes in Hanoi, Vietnam, while sitting on plastic stools to a 12-course meal at a Michelin-rated restaurant in Paris. Along the way, they’ve had some truly once-in-a-lifetime adventures, including swimming with sea turtles in the crystal blue waters of the Maldives, trekking through the dense rain forests of Malaysia, hiking a breathtaking Icelandic glacier and exploring the deserts of the United Arab Emirates on camelback.

Think luxury, but laid back – and that’s No Destinations.

“We’re finally doing something we love, and we get to do it together,” Danika said.

But the two are very different. Danika describes herself as the frantic worrier, while she says her husband always manages to stay cool under pressure. Consider their packing styles, and humor, as shared on their website, nodestinations.com:

Danika: My packing style is chaotic, stuffed and somewhat unrealistic.

Chris: My packing style is simple and organized – basically the complete opposite of Danika; one pair of shoes is enough.

The couple met on Match.com shortly after Danika graduated from CSUSM in 2006 with a degree in communication. Friends at first, it took three years before they would fall in love and later get married on a white sand beach in Cabo San Lucas with a handful of their closest family members in attendance.

A LIFE OF ITS OWN
As Danika will tell you, they didn’t set out to create the world’s best travel blog. They set out for discovery. They set out to experience new cultures and see new things without being confined to two weeks of vacation time.

And for the first year, they did just that. Soon, the blog’s readership expanded beyond family and friends and, in 2016, it caught the attention of Libby Kane, a reporter with Business Insider. Danika and Chris were in China at the time, and although Danika postponed the Skype interview a few times due to a cold, the three finally connected. The article and its accompanying video interview went viral.

“It was wild,” Danika said. “Overnight we saw our following on Instagram and Facebook increase by the hundreds of thousands.”

Thirty million views later, No Destinations was entrenched in the spotlight. Since then, their travels have been featured in Food & Wine Magazine, Forbes Travel Guide, Travel+Leisure, along with 16 other luxury travel publications

A LIFESTYLE THAT WORKS
Although the Garlottas have banished the stereotypical 9-5 workday, they do work. They call themselves digital nomads – freelancers on the constant move.

“Just because we’re traveling does not mean we are ‘on vacation’ even though sometimes our office is a cabana on the beach in Indonesia,” Danika said.

Before boarding their flight to Italy in 2014, Chris worked for startup tech companies in Silicon Valley, doing graphic design and web and app development. He is the founder of zingsale.com, a service that alerts Amazon users when a particular item drops in price. Danika was the head of marketing for a string of boutique hotels in San Francisco.

Today, Chris continues to work remotely for a few tech companies, while Danika is a marketing and design consultant for a handful of clients, in addition to managing No Destinations full time. Both work 20-40 hours a week, and depending on travel schedules, they decide when to take on new projects or clients.

Because they live in a different city every few weeks and primarily stay in apartment rentals, there is one nonnegotiable amenity must: a desk with a chair that has a back. Being a digital nomad can present its challenges, at times, like staying on top of constantly changing time zones, preparing for periods when WiFi access is limited or nonexistent in some areas, and relying almost exclusively on digital communication methods.

The travel duo recently became a trio with the addition of their son Axel, born in December 2017. Chris and Danika have started a travel bucket list for Axel – and are already putting their little guy’s passport to good use. In the last few months, the Garlotta family has traveled to United Arab Emirates to take in the gorgeous views, went on a safari in Sri Lanka and got up-close with an elephant, and sailed to the Bahamas on a luxury cruise.

Still on their bucket list: Antarctica and Australia.

In traveling the world, Danika discovered something unexpected.

“These experiences have taught me how truly big and open the world is and that there isn’t just one traditional path to happiness,” she said. “The toughest decision we ever made was making the decision to just do it. I never would have imagined that this life was possible, and now I cannot imagine our lives any differently.”

Follow along on their adventures at nodestinations.com or @nodestinations

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Hitting All the Right Notes https://news.csusm.edu/music-program/ https://news.csusm.edu/music-program/290008By Eric BreierCal State San Marcos’ campus looked quite a bit different when music professor Bill Bradbury joined the faculty in 1993.

Only Academic Hall, Craven Hall and Science Hall 1 had been built. As for a state-of-the-art music studio, well, only if you count a closet in Science Hall 1.

“It was not a lot bigger than my office,” Bradbury said. “We had a mixing board and some mics and I could squeeze about eight or 10 students in the closet.”

Times have certainly changed.

In the past three years alone, CSUSM has added a music major, an innovative music lab and received the prestigious designation as an All-Steinway School, among other milestones.

“It’s really a new era for music on our campus,” Bradbury said. “There are a lot of exciting things happening for our students.”

Inventory upgrade

Earning the All-Steinway School designation was not even on Ching-Ming Cheng’s radar when she arrived at CSUSM in 2011.

Cheng, an associate professor of music and a renowned classical pianist, took one look at the 61-note keyboards being used by students at the time and knew an upgrade was paramount.

By 2015, thanks to a fundraising event at which Cheng performed, CSUSM was able to open a music lab with 30 new, 88-key digital pianos.

The music lab was the first step on an important journey for the University’s music program.

In October 2016, nearly $150,000 was raised for the purchase of a Steinway D Concert Grand piano, the instrument of choice for most concert pianists. CSUSM students experienced playing on the Steinway D in the spring as part of their senior capstone projects.

“It’s like you’ve been driving a Volkswagen and all of a sudden somebody gives you a Tesla,” said Dana Burnett, a lecturer in the music department.

Building on the momentum from the acquisition of the Steinway D, the University publicly announced its goal to become an All-Steinway School on April 9, 2017, following a performance by Cheng at the California Center for the Arts Escondido. CSUSM reached its goal exactly one year later, joining an exclusive group of fewer than 200 universities and conservatories worldwide with the All-Steinway School designation.

“In music, especially in piano performance, having a good instrument can bring you to the next level,” Cheng said. “For all the elite music schools around the world, becoming an All-Steinway School is really the goal. When you present yourself as an All-Steinway School, you don’t really need to say much more. That’s when you know that the teachers know what they’re doing, and the school knows what’s important and how to support students.

“I’m really grateful and happy to be in this community where everybody supports music so much.”

Student-centered approach

The All-Steinway School designation and the music lab aren’t the only unique aspects of the program.

Music professor Merryl Goldberg, who arrived at CSUSM the same year as Bradbury, notes that the small professor-to-student ratio is a boon for students, who are able to provide input into the structure of their degree.

“Their path might be rock ’n’ roll, it might be classical or mariachi or some type of folk music, but we’re able to support and nurture students in any path they choose,” Goldberg said. “It’s really student centered.”

The program has a group of core courses that all music majors take and then they are free to emphasize a specific area based on their interests.

“The flexibility in creating your own degree that works for you is really unparalleled,” said Spencer Osborne, who will graduate in spring 2019 with a degree in music composition. “I don’t know another school that does that.”

Students’ musical experience when they arrive at CSUSM runs the gamut from those who are highly skilled to others who are at a beginner level.

Kristina Vo is one who arrived at CSUSM highly skilled on the piano, but she never considered majoring in music – not until she took a course with Cheng.

Kristina started playing the piano when she was 7 years old and continued through high school. Then she quit, figuring it was time to focus on her economics major when she enrolled at CSUSM.

Then Kristina signed up for an intermediate piano class taught by Cheng. With her previous playing experience, Kristina figured she would get an A in the class before moving on to fulfilling other graduation requirements. Instead, with encouragement from Cheng, Kristina added a second major and graduated in May with degrees in economics and music.

“The professors are really passionate about teaching and conveying their passion to students,” Kristina said.

Burgeoning program

The growth over the past few years has attracted talented musicians eager to be part of CSUSM’s burgeoning music program.

“We have really high caliber faculty,” Bradbury said. “There’s a lot of faculty-student interaction, which is really important, especially in music.”

Renowned trumpeter Curtis Taylor, a Grammy Award-winning artist who has played in a dozen countries and with some of the heavyweights of jazz, is one such instructor.

While some of his students are relatively new to their instrument, Taylor embraces the challenge of getting them up to speed. A music lecturer at CSUSM since spring 2016, Taylor begins each semester by finding a common starting place and building upon everyone’s knowledge base.

“That happens through the instruction and the concepts I teach, but it also happens through the students who know a little more helping the students who don’t know as much,” Taylor said. “I try to foster that team-building environment.

“It’s so rewarding. Even if people don’t go on to have a career in music, you can take the skills you learn from music in practice and discipline and consistency, and you can apply it to any area of your life that you want to excel in.”

Malesha Taylor is another recent addition to the music program, becoming the department’s voice teacher in the spring.

Malesha Taylor taught Vocal and Instrumental Instruction in the spring and will be leading a performance ensemble that will perform traditional and contemporary gospel music in the fall.

“What I really like about this music department, which is unique to all music departments that I’ve ever seen, is the students are learning different genres,” said Malesha Taylor, noting that the repertoire of her students includes classical, Latin jazz, traditional jazz, musical theater, pop and soul, among other genres.

Bright future

Curtis Taylor and Malesha Taylor are two of nearly a dozen lecturers in the music department. Bradbury, Cheng, Goldberg and department chair Mtafiti Imara comprise the full-time faculty.

Their presence and work toward developing the music major – not to mention the revamped music lab and All-Steinway School designation – have helped put CSUSM’s music program on the map throughout the region.

“Our award-winning music faculty are skilled and talented artists, teachers and scholars,” said Julia Johnson, dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, Behavioral and Social Sciences. “They have won multiple awards, including Emmys and grants from organizations like the National Endowment of the Arts or the Federal Department of Education Arts in Education Program.

“Additionally, they travel globally to perform for and to educate audiences in every part of the world. Students studying music at CSUSM have the benefit of learning from these accomplished professionals as they work toward their own professional goals as musicians.”

Bradbury still remembers the email he sent to faculty when the music major was approved three years ago. He noted that the “grunt work” was done, referring to the committees, the seemingly endless paperwork and designing the curriculum. It was time to start the “real work.”

“Now we have students coming here expecting this degree,” he said. “We have faculty with so much energy who are so supportive of the students. It’s really an exciting time.”

The department members aren’t resting on their laurels. Space constraints are an ongoing issue as the music department shares Arts 111, the campus’ lone performance hall, with dance and theater classes. One of the more immediate priorities is raising funds for student scholarships.

But seeing all that has been accomplished in a short period of time, Cheng has no doubt they can reach these goals and more.

“Every semester something good happens,” Cheng said. “We’re growing so fast. We keep getting the right support.

“The community really sees the importance of music education and arts education.”

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Rhapsody in Brew: Alumni Grow Culver Beer Co. Into Thriving Business https://news.csusm.edu/culver-beer-company/ https://news.csusm.edu/culver-beer-company/290006By Eric BreierBen Fairweather and Mike Stevenson have learned more than their share of lessons while working to open Culver Beer Company.

But the biggest surprise?

“The money going out the door,” said Stevenson, laughing.

“Lucky for us beer is a pretty good bartering option,” Fairweather added.

A few growlers of Tiger Ride or Strange Ways, two of Culver’s signature beers, goes a long way when it comes to getting help with welding or installing fire sprinklers.

The lessons Fairweather and Stevenson learned are paying off as Carlsbad-based Culver continues to thrive since opening its doors in February 2016.

“One of my favorite things is all the regulars we have,” Fairweather said. “We have all these friends from all walks of life. That’s what’s cool about it. People say it’s like the local Cheers.”

Fairweather and Stevenson both grew up in coastal North County and attended Cal State San Marcos. But it wasn’t until after graduating – Fairweather with a business administration degree in 2014 and Stevenson with a bachelor’s in economics in 2012 – that they met through mutual friends and bonded over their shared passion for craft beer and a desire to start their own brewery.

Fairweather had tried his hand at home brewing during college with minimal success – “That’s why I had to get Mike involved,” he said with a laugh – but he possessed the necessary business acumen to open a brewery.

Stevenson also did some home brewing while at CSUSM, but wasn’t happy with the results. After graduating, he emailed breweries in Germany offering free labor in exchange for a bed and meals so he could learn the ins and outs of brewing. After six months at a brewery near Cologne, Germany, he returned to San Diego to work at Twisted Manzanita Ales and Spirits.

“The experience in Germany was really cool,” Stevenson said, “but the experience at Manzanita truly taught me craft production brewing.”

Once Fairweather and Stevenson decided to open Culver, they began navigating the lengthy, and often complex, approval process. The six-month waiting period to present their proposal to the Carlsbad City Council gave them ample time to work on plans for the business.

They secured warehouse space on Loker Avenue in Carlsbad and were able to move quickly once the city approved the tasting room.

There were hiccups along the way – they chose the name Culver after learning of trademark issues regarding their original choice – but Fairweather and Stevenson treated them as part of the learning process.

They decided on a Frankenbrew system, which saved money by using parts from a variety of sources. By implementing cost-effective measures such as repurposing old dairy tanks, they were able to devote more resources to new fermenters.

“A lot of breweries will start over $1 million in debt because they’ll just buy a brand new system,” Stevenson said. “That was a little scary for us and there wasn’t really a way we could have done that.”

Fairweather and Stevenson were also able to rely on strong network of connections in getting Culver open. They did much of the labor themselves and used the ultimate currency in their business – beer – to get help with some of the more complicated projects.

“There’s a big sweat equity aspect of it,” Fairweather said.

The tasting room itself has undergone quite a makeover since first opening. Fairweather regularly scours Craigslist and eBay for potential additions. Even the bar top in the tasting room came from part of an old bowling lane.

One highly anticipated change is coming this summer with the opening of an adjacent deli, Locally Toasted. While some breweries rely on food trucks, getting one scheduled can be a challenge so Fairweather and Stevenson figured they might as well have their own on-site food option for customers.

But beer will always have center stage. Culver produced 240 barrels last year and is on pace for 500 in 2018.

As the craft brewing capital of the world, San Diego County is well known for its IPAs, and Culver certainly offers its own array of IPA options. But Fairweather and Stevenson also take pride in the other styles they offer. Tiger Ride, a Belgian blonde, won a bronze medal at last year’s San Diego International Beer Festival.

“Mike does a great job spreading out the beers and having a broad range available,” Fairweather said.

Fairweather and Stevenson said they’re continuing to learn as they grow the business, and they look forward to expanding in the coming years.

While each day brings a new lesson, they are also applying the lessons learned from their time at CSUSM.

In Stevenson’s case, that includes using the knowledge imparted by CSUSM economics professor Ranjeeta Basu, who showed him the importance of analyzing data sets. As Stevenson notes, every sale that goes through the register tells them something.

“Even if I don’t use it right away, six months down the road I’ll have a big data set in case I have a question,” he said.

Then there were the other practical lessons learned at CSUSM.

“I’m really good at Excel,” Stevenson said, with a laugh.

“All of the professors were always helpful,” Fairweather added. “Even after I had graduated they were happy to answer questions. It’s a nice culture that they’ve created at Cal State San Marcos and it’s cool to be part of that.

“And, yeah, Mike’s really good at Excel.”

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Wed, 01 Aug 2018 12:23:01 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_culver-portraits-007.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/culver-portraits-007.jpg?10000
Crafting a Career: Colburn Uses Passion for Beer to Help Local Breweries https://news.csusm.edu/todd-colburn/ https://news.csusm.edu/todd-colburn/295869By Brian HiroLong before San Diego came to be known as the “Capital of Craft” and the 78 was nicknamed “Hops Highway,” Todd Colburn was a lover of beer. This was in the 1980s — before Stone, before Karl Strauss, before Ballast Point — and he and his best friend (an accomplished homebrewer) would plan road trips around trying to find these far-flung, off-the-beaten-path things called microbreweries.

Colburn still loves beer. But he has turned his passion into both a career and a fulfilling side gig.

After a five-year stint as the senior marketing director for local beer behemoth Stone Brewing, Colburn in 2016 founded Higher Gravity Brand Advocates, a San Diego-based consulting firm for the craft brewing industry. For small breweries that don’t have a marketing department, Colburn and his team help them with branding, logo design, copywriting, public relations and social media, among other services.

“There are so many breweries now that it’s hard to stand out,” Colburn said. “That’s where Higher Gravity brings value, to help brands of all sizes and phases to stand apart from other breweries, to do things that are unique to make consumers want to buy their beer.”

Also two years ago, Colburn began working at Cal State San Marcos as an adjunct faculty adviser in the College of Business Administration, leading student teams in the Senior Experience program, often on projects related to the craft beer industry.

Colburn, a member of the College of Business Administration advisory board for several years because of his association with Stone, a longtime partner of CSUSM, decided to pursue a closer involvement with the college after attending a dean’s breakfast in the spring of 2016.

“The passion and enthusiasm was infectious and inspiring,” he said. “I called up Dean Jim Hamerly and said, ‘How can I do more?’ It’s been a natural for me to be an adviser, and I’ve really enjoyed it.”

Colburn is also on the leadership team of the San Diego Brewers Guild, which last year partnered with CSUSM to produce a 2017 economic impact report on local craft breweries. And he’s a major advocate for the CSUSM Extended Learning program called EngiBeering™, which is launching this fall to serve people who work at breweries and want to advance their careers or for those who just want to learn about brewing science. It will be the only such program in North County.

“I’m involved in all these initiatives,” Colburn said, “and really my main motivation is to elevate awareness for craft beer in San Diego and make it the capital of craft beer in the world, and develop Cal State San Marcos to be a research and resource hub for craft beer.”

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Wed, 01 Aug 2018 12:11:52 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_colburnatamplified-012.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/colburnatamplified-012.jpg?10000
On the Spot: Is America Failing the Working Mother? https://news.csusm.edu/failing-the-working-mother/ https://news.csusm.edu/failing-the-working-mother/296710By Christine VaughanPerhaps you’ve heard, breast is best. Or, party at the breast, coined by the late Encinitas lactation trailblazer Vicki Wolfrum. They are catchphrases that many new mothers hear. They are simple, yet salient, slogans that align with the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation that babies be exclusively breastfed for the first six months of life, with breastfeeding continuing beyond the first year.

Despite the medical community being armed with extensive research on the value of breastfeeding for both mom and baby, if meeting the one-year benchmark were a college course, America would receive a failing grade.

In the U.S., 81 percent of mothers initiate breastfeeding, but by three months that number is nearly cut in half with only 44 percent of mothers exclusively breastfeeding.

“A lot of nursing mothers struggle to pump the milk their babies need once they return to work and many inevitably give up,” said Olivia Nolan, a recent graduate of CSUSM’s public health program. “In order to improve public health, this needs to be a public conversation.”

Nolan, along with public health graduate students Shawnee Morgan and Lisa Hammond, pioneered a research study that explored lactation supportive environments for both working mothers and student mothers.

“We’re working to change the American culture,” Morgan said. “Just like you see a restroom sign, we want lactation rooms to be readily available and normalized. It doesn’t need to be something we whisper about.”

The team conducted surveys, led focus groups, toured work sites across California, curated an index of resources and even shared their findings with lawmakers. They discovered a great chasm. Many mothers are unaware of available resources and many employers are falling short in supporting the new working mom.

In 2010, it became federal law that employers provide nursing mothers with private space other than a bathroom for pumping breast milk, as well as reasonable break time to express milk as frequently as needed by the nursing mother.

“But current laws are too vague and offer little enforcement,” said Nolan.

By six months, the number of nursing mothers exclusively breastfeeding plummets to 22 percent.

“I get it,” Hammond said. “With many mothers already feeling the often unspoken ‘mommy tax,’ many avoid asking for accommodations for lactation.”

But accommodating lactation is an economic no-brainer, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. The AAP reports that for every $1 invested in creating and supporting a lactation support program (including a designated pump site that guarantees privacy, availability of refrigeration and a hand-washing facility, and appropriate mother break time) there is a $3 return.

“Employers can be key to a mother’s success,” said Lisa Bandong, the supervising faculty for the research team. “The best first step we can all take is to start the conversation.”

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Wed, 01 Aug 2018 12:09:22 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_pump-bathroom-010.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/pump-bathroom-010.jpg?10000
End of an Era: Running Legend Leaves Lasting Legacy https://news.csusm.edu/steve-scott/ https://news.csusm.edu/steve-scott/290009By Jay ParisIt was a run-of-the-mill workout when one of the Cal State San Marcos runners sensed someone on her hip. But it wasn’t just anyone tagging along – it was running legend Steve Scott.

“He jumped in and ran with me,” Natalie Rodriguez said, “then he started going pretty fast. He still has it and he still loves to run.”

The only cross country and track and field coach in CSUSM’s history, Scott stepped down at the end of the spring season after nearly two decades at the helm of the Cougars.

“I feel honored to have had him as a coach,” Rodriguez said. “He doesn't act like he was a superstar back in the day.”

There was a time when Rodriguez didn’t know much about Scott’s résumé. But it wasn’t long before she learned about the Great Scott.

Learned that he was a two-time Olympian – and would have been a three-time Olympian had the United States not boycotted the 1980 Games. Learned that he held the American mile indoor mark (3 minutes, 47.69 seconds) for 26 years. Learned that he ran an unprecedented 136 sub-four-minute miles. Learned that he is a member of the USA Track and Field Hall of Fame.

“When I researched him I was amazed at what he had accomplished,” Rodriguez said. “I’m so lucky to have had him as a coach and a mentor.”

Luck? The Cougars got a big dose of it when Scott agreed to come aboard.

Inauspicious beginning

The christening of CSUSM’s Mangrum Track and Soccer Field in 1999 was a big deal. Longtime Cougars supporter Bob Mangrum wanted his running hero, Scott, to preside over the opening ceremonies. Scott was all in, although he wasn’t sure where CSUSM was located.

“I thought it was across the 78 freeway from where San Marcos City Hall is,” Scott said with a laugh. “The only buildings on campus then I think were Craven Hall and the University Commons.”

There were few cellphones back in 1999 and when Scott's ride was late to the track’s ground breaking, Scott didn’t make it to the ceremony.

“When I said I would do it I had no idea what Cal State San Marcos was or where it was,” Scott said. “And when it became clear I couldn’t make it, I couldn’t call anyone because they were already out on the track.”

An embarrassed Scott finally reached someone at CSUSM with a mighty mea culpa. But Scott’s rare misstep turned into a stroke of good fortune for CSUSM.

Scott wanted to make things right so he went to Mangrum’s Valley Center home, where they enjoyed grub and a run. Mangrum revealed that the Cougars were starting a track and cross country program and, oh by the way, would Scott know of any coaching candidates?

Scott’s right arm shot up so fast it’s a wonder he didn't dislocate his shoulder.

“Yeah, me,” Scott said.

With his racing career in the rear-view mirror, the rat race wasn’t agreeing with Scott. He was selling sponsorships for the Carlsbad 5K, an event he co-founded, and hawking nutritional goods.

“I was miserable,” Scott said. “I needed something I could be passionate about, like I was with my running. So when he asked about finding a coach, it was the answer to my prayers.”

One of a kind

There were few runners like Scott. After graduating from Upland High School, about 90 miles north of CSUSM, he ran for UC Irvine before embarking on a running career that few equaled.

Scott set the American indoor and outdoor records in the mile and the indoor standard at 2,000 meters. Track and Field News had Scott ranked No. 1 in the U.S. in 10 different years.

There are scads more eye-popping marks and milestones. Scott even established the world record of playing a round of speed golf, scoring a 95 on 18 holes in under 30 minutes.

Some would like to hear more tales of Scott’s running dominance, but he isn’t one to boast.

“He’s a very humble man and he does not brag about what he did,” CSUSM runner Lisa Flora said. “We have to pry it out of him.”

Greatness as an athlete doesn’t always translate into being a top-flight coach. Often those who have performed at the highest level don’t have patience to teach someone not up to those standards.

Then there is Scott.

“At the beginning of the season he always reminded us that he is happy as long as we are happy,” Flora said. “And to make him happy, you don’t have to be fastest on the team. As long as you are doing your best and are a good teammate, he is happy. That was always his main objective.”

Lasting legacy

What will the next 20 years bring for the CSUSM cross country and track and field programs? Scott sees only positive visions.

The school successfully made the transition to NCAA Division II, and Scott said few universities offer what CSUSM does.

“It’s got tremendous potential,” he said. “I could see this school being a dominant force in all of the California Collegiate Athletic Association sports because of the size of the school and our location, close to the ocean. It pretty much has everything, and other schools pale in comparison. Plus, we can start tapping into our graduates and have them support their alma mater.”

Any time CSUSM Athletic Director Jennifer Milo needed a voice to spread the word on CSUSM, Scott was always available.

“He was the first one to say ‘yes’ if asked to go speak to a group or do an event or clinic with youngsters,” Milo said. “He always lent a hand. That’s what is special about Steve and who he is as a person.”

This being school, everyone gets a report card. When Scott’s evaluations landed on Milo’s desk, she knew the scores before opening the folder.

“The student-athletes all say how much Coach Scott cares about them,” Milo said. “To Steve, it’s not just about how fast they run or how many miles they run. It’s how they are as people and how they are developing in college and working toward that degree and getting that job once they graduate.”

After two decades, Scott is moving on to the next chapter of his life, but the Cougars are the better for his time at CSUSM.

“I hate to lose Steve’s leadership in our department, but he has built his legacy and is leaving here having accomplished everything and more than he could have hoped for,” Milo said. “His student-athletes are better people because they had Steve Scott in their life.”

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Wed, 01 Aug 2018 10:24:09 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_stevescott-02.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/stevescott-02.jpg?10000
Gift From Burnhams Benefits Nonprofits and Students https://news.csusm.edu/burnham-leadership-experience-fall-2017/ https://news.csusm.edu/burnham-leadership-experience-fall-2017/251250By Eric BreierCal State San Marcos’ Senior Experience Program has helped regional businesses and nonprofits for a quarter of a century.

Now, thanks to a gift from Malin and Roberta Burnham through the Burnham Foundation, the door is open for additional nonprofits that may not have had the means to participate in the past.

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Cal State San Marcos’ Senior Experience Program has helped regional businesses and nonprofits for a quarter of a century.

Now, thanks to a gift from Malin and Roberta Burnham through the Burnham Foundation, the door is open for additional nonprofits that may not have had the means to participate in the past.

“Philanthropy provides satisfaction in seeing something done that might not otherwise have been accomplished,” Malin Burnham said. “But it takes teamwork to get it done. Cal State San Marcos has a great tradition of collaborating with leaders, businesses and community members to make our region better for all. I’m pleased that the Burnham Leadership Experience will help CSUSM continue to fulfill that mission.”

The Burnhams donated $225,000 to establish the Burnham Leadership Experience, which is under the umbrella of the Senior Experience Program in CSUSM’s College of Business Administration.

Organizations pay $1,500 to participate in the Senior Experience Program. Nearly 2,000 organizations have been positively impacted in the 25 years of the Senior Experience Program’s existence, and nearly half of the projects completed by CSUSM students have been for nonprofit organizations.

However, the Burnham Leadership Experience is helping additional nonprofits with limited funds by underwriting the cost for three nonprofits to participate every semester in perpetuity.

The DLH Foundation, whose mission is to create a community and help find a cure for gastro-esophageal cancers, has been a longtime participant in the Senior Experience Program. But the opportunity to participate this fall through the Burnham Leadership Experience means the foundation has more funds available for the annual scholarships it provides to college students affected by gastro-esophageal cancers in their families.

“We’re just so tickled to be part of this Burnham project,” said Denise Ross, the DLH Foundation’s director of marketing and communications. “It was the best surprise. The Senior Experience Program is beyond valuable.”

The DLH Foundation team was an intercollege group that included two students from the College of Business Administration – Danielle Arnold and Stephanie Lee – and three human development students – Maria Arca, Julio Mena and Kimberly Zuniga.

“We’re really excited to be one of the first groups to help a local nonprofit and grow their business,” Danielle said.

Another Burnham Leadership Experience team worked with North County San Diego Veterans Stand Down, which aims to raise awareness of the plight of homeless veterans and connect them with service providers. The CSUSM team working with the organization included five College of Business Administration students – Kyle Bearce, Hunter Kupka, Brooke Leong, Kimberlin Moore and Greg Santiago.

The team’s goal was to help North County San Diego Veterans Stand Down improve its pipeline of donors and volunteers.

“While the $1,500 to participate in Senior Experience may not seem like a lot of money, it can be a lifesaver for nonprofits like the North County San Diego Veterans Stand Down,” Hunter said.

Malin and Roberta Burnham have been supporters of CSUSM since its founding.

“Roberta and I continue to be impressed by the caliber of CSUSM’s students, their commitment to community and their responsiveness to industry,” Malin Burnham said. “It’s exciting to be part of a future-focused university that is positively impacting our region.”

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Thu, 14 Dec 2017 12:00:00 -0800 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_burnhamleadershipexp-20.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/burnhamleadershipexp-20.jpg?10000
How Two Mothers Inspired a Gift https://news.csusm.edu/endowed-scholarship-spanish/ https://news.csusm.edu/endowed-scholarship-spanish/251038By Eric BreierStella Clark once had a student who was forced to sneak into his grandmother’s nursing home at night to sleep on the floor because he had nowhere else to go.

Clark, who founded the Modern Language Studies department at Cal State San Marcos, recalls many students who struggled to make ends meet while they attended college.

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Stella Clark once had a student who was forced to sneak into his grandmother’s nursing home at night to sleep on the floor because he had nowhere else to go.

Clark, who founded the Modern Language Studies department at Cal State San Marcos, recalls many students who struggled to make ends meet while they attended college.

“The Cal State schools have a lot of students who work incredibly hard just to stay afloat,” she said. “A lot of them have no support system, they’re the first people in their families to go to college. They have a need through no fault of their own.”

Stella and her husband, José, have found a way to help some of those students in need by establishing the Consuelo Teichert and Celia Pineiro Endowed Scholarship at CSUSM. The scholarship honors the memory of each of their mothers and is awarded each semester to students pursuing a bachelor’s or master’s in Spanish. The first scholarships were awarded this fall to Rocío Flores and Nancy Martínez.

“We wanted to help somebody who may have to quit college because he or she could not afford the books,” Stella said.

Stella was part of the second group of faculty hired at CSUSM, starting in 1990 and retiring in 2008. José worked as a San Diego County librarian before retiring 13 years ago.

They were each inspired by the enterprising spirit of their mothers and wanted to do something that would keep the memories of their mothers alive.

Stella’s mother, Consuelo del Valle Teichert, was the daughter of a Mexican politician. Consuelo eventually immigrated to the U.S. and earned her bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. at the University of Mississippi – all while raising three children. After Consuelo’s children were adults, she moved with her husband to Florida where she taught Spanish and Italian at a community college.

José’s mother, Celia Yániz Pineiro, studied journalism in Cuba and became a columnist for one of Havana’s major newspapers, Presna Libre. When Fidel Castro came into power, Jose was sent to Miami and Celia soon followed. She eventually relocated to Kansas and taught high school Spanish. After retiring from teaching, she returned to her first love of journalism. She worked as an editor for a local Spanish newspaper and later became a local celebrity as the author of “Ask Celia,” a column she wrote for the Dodge City Star newspaper.

Consuelo and Celia became close friends through their children. Stella and José said that though their mothers came from different countries and backgrounds, they had much in common. Both immigrated to the U.S. under difficult circumstances, overcame challenges to improve their lives and had a lifelong passion for education.

“There was no question in our childhood growing up that we were going to go to college,” José said. “It wasn’t even discussed. This is why it’s so important for us to give back and establish this scholarship in their names. If they are up there somewhere watching us, I think they are smiling.”

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Thu, 14 Dec 2017 09:00:00 -0800 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_jose-and-stella-clark-04.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/jose-and-stella-clark-04.jpg?10000
Commitment to Service https://news.csusm.edu/commitment-to-service/ https://news.csusm.edu/commitment-to-service/249941By Eric BreierCatalina Melendez isn’t fazed by a daunting schedule. 

“It’s challenging, but it’s not unbearable,” said Catalina, who will graduate from Cal State San Marcos in May with a bachelor’s in speech-language pathology. 

Being a full-time student is just one aspect of Catalina’s busy life. She is raising three children – 16- and 11-year-old daughters and a 9-year-old son. She is in the Navy Reserves, eligible to be called to active duty any time now that the three-year exemption since her last active tour in Afghanistan ended in 2014. 

Then there is the long list of school-related activities, including the Student Veterans Organization and the National Student Speech Language & Hearing Association (NSSLHA). 

And, for good measure, she’s a PTA member and volunteers every other Wednesday at Tri-City Medical Center. 

Catalina served in the Marines for nearly nine years before stepping away to focus on her family. Missing the military, Catalina eventually joined the Navy Reserves. It was while serving in Afghanistan that she learned about speech therapy from a co-worker and began giving serious thought to earning her bachelor’s. 

Catalina enrolled at MiraCosta College upon her return from deployment and is part of the first cohort in CSUSM’s speech-language pathology bachelor’s program. 

Throughout her undergraduate studies in speech-language pathology at CSUSM, Cat has contributed to the overall excellence of both the department and its students,” said Rachel Nortz, a lecturer in CSUSM’s speech-language pathology department and the chapter adviser for NSSLHA. 

Cat holds the position of undergraduate student liaison for the NSSLHA chapter at CSUSM and through this position she has encouraged new membership involvement from the student body. Being a veteran herself, she has already given back to her country and she now wants to continue that journey by becoming a speech-language pathologist.” 

Catalina plans to continue her education after receiving her bachelor’s, setting her sights on obtaining a doctorate in audiology, which focuses on hearing, balance and related disorders. 

“My command is really good about working with me, especially knowing that I’m a full-time student,” she said. “One of my senior chiefs really looks out for his people. That’s what I like about the military. You have those people who really stand out and take care of you. That’s how I want to be. That’s what’s kept me in the military – good people.” 

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Tue, 12 Dec 2017 09:00:00 -0800 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_veteran-studentprofile-steps-2.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/veteran-studentprofile-steps-2.jpg?10000
How Diversity Has Led CSUSM from the Beginning https://news.csusm.edu/diversity-csusm/ https://news.csusm.edu/diversity-csusm/249927By Christine VaughanDiversity isn’t a fad.

It’s in our DNA at Cal State San Marcos. More than demographics, diversity at CSUSM represents three core values: inclusion, social justice and equity.

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Diversity isn’t a fad.

It’s in our DNA at Cal State San Marcos. More than demographics, diversity at CSUSM represents three core values: inclusion, social justice and equity.

We are well beyond being an institution that complies with diversity practices for the sake of compliance,” said Dr. Cynthia Chávez Metoyer, political science professor who came to CSUSM in 1994 and has championed several dozen diversity initiatives on campus. “Diversity is embedded into our very fabric. Simply, it’s who we are.

From the University’s early days, founding faculty blazed a path for a new kind of university, one that didn’t shy away from diversity and was intently focused on serving the public good. That meant being truly representative of the region. 

Diversity, in all its dimensions, became the cornerstone of course curriculum. It even anchored the University’s mission statement. Programs like the Faculty Mentoring Program and the Office of Biomedical Research and Training (renamed the Office for Training, Research and Education in the Sciences) made powerful strides in educational equity within retention and graduation rates, and representation in the sciences. 

Diversity efforts ramped up when President Karen Haynes arrived in 2004. A visionary social worker, Haynes’ steadfast commitment to social justice led a new wave of diversity efforts.

In 2008, Cal State San Marcos was among the first institutions in the nation recognized as an Asian American and Pacific Islander-Serving Institution. One year later, the university earned the designation of Hispanic-Serving Institution, with more than 25 percent of its student population being Latino/Hispanic. 

Student social justice centers, research centers and resource offices began to form across campus. Advisory councils and task forces were formed. Hiring practices were modified to attract diverse pools of candidates. CSUSM introduced conferences and seminar series intentionally focused on fueling critical discussions around diversity issues. 

A strategic plan was developed, and educational equity became a pillar of CSUSM. Evaluating university policies and tracking student progress has helped eliminate barriers and combat inequities that result in achievement gaps.

A welcoming environment meant gender inclusive restrooms were added, lactation spaces were provided for nursing mothers, and new policies were adopted, like the preferred name initiative granting students the ability to list a preferred first name on university documents.

When you talk about diversity at CSUSM, you won’t hear the phrase ‘good enough’ because Cal State San Marcos is always striving to be at the forefront of inclusion,” said Chief Diversity Officer Dr. Joe-Joe McManus.

More than a quarter of all course offerings at CSUSM are diversity-related. One such course is Dr. Dreama Moon’s Communication 454: The Communication of Whiteness, which examines race, power and privilege.

“I am hopeful that if we continue to talk about diversity in critical ways that we’ll actually achieve the political and social equality that we affirm as a core American value,” said Moon, who arrived at CSUSM in 1998. “This class is just part of that conversation.”

The collective diversity work of CSUSM can be seen in the demographics of the student body.

One in three CSUSM students falls outside the traditional age range of 18 to 22. The majority must balance responsibilities to families with full- or part-time jobs. Forty-five percent come from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds, including the highest per-capita number—and the only increasing number—of American Indian students in the CSU system. Nearly half are the first in their family earning a four-year college degree. One in 10 are military affiliated. CSUSM serves more former foster youth per capita than any other university in the nation. Nearly 5 percent of students receive help from Disability Support Services, higher than the system-wide average.

“While there is work to be done, there is also work to be celebrated,” said President Haynes. We will continue to be intentional pioneers in moving that needle forward because it’s who we are.” 

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Mon, 11 Dec 2017 09:10:00 -0800 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/500_stepscover-winter2017-.jpg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/uploads/1093/stepscover-winter2017-.jpg?10000
Rising Above: Biology Student Aims to Help Others https://news.csusm.edu/francisco-fernandez-biology-student/ https://news.csusm.edu/francisco-fernandez-biology-student/249791By Eric BreierFrancisco Fernandez knows the importance of higher education.  

As he enters the final stretch of a seven-year journey toward his bachelor’s degree, Francisco is determined to help others from his hometown of Zapopan, Mexico, follow a similar path to college. 

Even if it means helping to pay for it himself. 

Francisco, a senior molecular and cellular biology student at Cal State San Marcos, regularly sends money to his mother in Lomas de Tabachinesa community in the northeast part of Zapopan, which is about 1,400 miles south of Tijuana. She then distributes it to children in the community who are doing well in school.  

It is typically just $5 here or $10 there, but the nominal amounts of money aren’t nearly as important as the gesture. Francisco will do whatever he can to inspire people from his hometown to pursue an education. 

“If I get one kid to go to college over there, I’m happy, Francisco said. 

Francisco isn’t just helping financially, he’s setting an example through his actions. In September, his efforts were recognized at the California State University Board of Trustees meeting in Long Beach where he was presented with the CSU Trustees’ Award for Outstanding Achievement. The award is given annually to one student from each of the CSU’s 23 campuses who demonstrates superior academic performance, personal accomplishments, community service and financial need.​​​ 

“Francisco is always eager to learn and has an outstanding work ethic,” said Dr. Matthew Escobar, a CSUSM professor of biological sciences and Francisco’s mentor in the Maximizing Access to Research Careers-Undergraduate Student Training Research (MARC U*STAR) program. 

It’s been a remarkable journey for someone who arrived in the United States a day after his 18th birthday knowing just one word of English – “Hello.”

As a teenager, Francisco said he was constantly told he wasn’t smart enough or wealthy enough to attend college. Rather than discourage him, it fueled a desire to pursue an education and help his family. To do that, he knew he had to leave Zapopan. 

“My high school years in Mexico are just a blur,” he said. “I didn’t know how to be a student. I wasn’t mature enough to be a student and I didn’t do well.” 

Francisco was born in the U.S., but his parents moved back to Mexico when he was an infant. He returned some 18 years later, in September 2011, and moved into the garage of an uncle who lives in Escondido. Almost immediately, Francisco began taking night classes to learn English. He got a job at a car wash – the same business where his parents worked two decades earlier – and eventually settled into a schedule that had him working 16 hours a day three days a week so he could attend community college Monday through Thursday. 

Trying to learn English, not to mention the intricacies of higher education, while taking courses at Palomar proved challenging. Francisco didn’t know what a credit class was, didn’t know about choosing a major and didn’t know the first thing about writing an essay. 

I literally didn’t know anything,” he said. Luckily for me, there’s a lot of people who speak Spanish at Palomar and I got a lot of help. 

Though Francisco was able to get some direction from advisers, he still cringes when thinking about his early struggles in class. As his English slowly improved, Francisco took his first science course at Palomar. It proved to be a life-changing experience. 

It was in Jim Gilardi’s biology class that Francisco learned about the North San Diego County Bridges to the Future Program, a partnership between CSUSM, Palomar and MiraCosta to help prepare underrepresented students for a seamless transition to a four-year university and a career in biomedical sciences. 

The program includes a stipend for students, which allowed Francisco to ease up on the number of hours he was working each week and spend more time focusing on his classes and research. 

Another door opened after he transferred to CSUSM when he learned about the Office for Training, Research & Education in the Sciences (OTRES) and was accepted into MARC U*STAR, which prepares qualified underrepresented undergraduate students majoring in the sciences to enter and succeed in doctoral studies. Only five new scholars are admitted to the program each year. The accompanying program stipend allowed Francisco to quit his outside jobs and focus completely on school. With more time to devote to his studies, his grades skyrocketed. 

“OTRES is like your family,” he said. “They care about you. They help you with your personal problems, they help you with your research problems, they help you look for opportunities. I call them my school family, but they’re my family.” 

Francisco was chosen for a summer research program at Marshall University in 2016 and completed a stem cell summer program at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas in 2017. The experience in Dallas led him to put UT Southwestern among his top choices for pursuing his Ph.D. 

“It’s been a long trip from literally knowing nothing to applying to Ph.D. programs,” Francisco said. If you would have told me two years ago that I’d be applying to Ph.D. programs, I would have said you’re joking.”

Francisco doesn’t get back to Zapopan often. It’s a long, expensive trek, so he only visits every two years or so. But he communicates daily with his family via Facebook. His parents tell him about the people in his community who are keeping tabs from afar, invested in Francisco’s success as if he were their own son. 

It’s similar to the reaction he receives when he visits the car wash where he used to work. 

“Now when I go to the car wash people ask if I’m doing my best and say, ‘Show them you can do it,  Francisco said. “I have a lot of people who believe in me, here in the U.S. at the car wash and in Mexico in my community. 

“I’m pretty lucky. I come from humble beginnings, but when I was hungry, I always had food. Even though I struggled a lot, I consider my life as being easy. My parents are alive, I have all my limbs, I can see. I’m lucky. I want to help people who haven’t been as lucky.” 

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Business Student Can’t Be Held Down https://news.csusm.edu/csusm-jeff-mata/ https://news.csusm.edu/csusm-jeff-mata/249640By Eric BreierJeff Mata never planned to attend college. He never thought about competing in judo and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He certainly didn’t expect to speak to audiences about the challenges he has overcome. 

Mata never could have predicted just how much the life he was living in his early 20s would change now that he’s 35. 

If I still had my eyesight and was still doing the whole drinking thing, I could have totally gone off track, maybe gone to jail or even died,” said Mata, who will graduate from Cal State San Marcos with a bachelor’s in business administration next fall. Now I have a new life. I’m living a new, healthy lifestyle and really looking forward to the future. I’m seeing the world in a different way, which I think is a better way. At a certain point in my life, I couldn’t see the big picture that I see now. I was going in a different direction, for sure.” 

Mata transitioned from a standout wrestler at nearby Poway High School to a fledgling boxer after graduation. When he wasn’t training, he was making good living in sales. But Mata’s excessive training took a physical toll. He suffered a retinal detachment in his left eye as well as uveitisan inflammation of the eyeball. 

Mata’s vision loss was gradual and he completely lost his sight in 2008.  

“It was devastating,” he saidI went into a depression and everything was negative – anything and everything was negative. If there was something positive, I’d find something negative about it. 

Mata said he tried filling the emptiness he felt through drinking and drugs, and the downward cycle continued for four years. 

“When I lost my eyesight, my independence was stripped away from me,” he said. “I couldn’t do anything for myself. I couldn’t even choose an outfit for the day by myself. That really takes a lot of your dignity away. It’s a humbling experience.”

The turning point came through his Christian faith. Mata attended two rehabilitation programs where he learned how to live and function without his eyesight. At one of the rehab programs, Mata decided to sit in on a Bible study. He started attending church with his parents. He also witnessed the premature death of multiple friends who had lost their eyesight and endured struggles similar to his own. He didn’t want to follow the same path and knew it was time for change. 

Getting clean opened up opportunities. 

Once a finely tuned athlete, Mata gained weight during his depression. While learning living skills in the rehab center, people told him his athletic background would make him an excellent candidate for judo. It took a couple of years for him to act on the suggestion, but he eventually found a dojo in San Marcos that trains people with visual impairments. 

In addition to judo, Mata started competing in Brazilian jiu-jitsu against sighted athletes. He has thrived in both disciplines, qualifying for the U.S. visually impaired judo team and competing – and winning – against sighted opponents in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He earned his third gold medal in October at the Sport Jiu-Jitsu Federation World Championships. 

Mata’s athletic prowess has earned him a sponsorship with Shoyoroll, a highly regarded manufacturer of the gi garments worn in martial arts. He also has received financial support for training from the Challenged Athletes Foundation. 

Mata frequently shares his story with others. He’s a speaker for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and also speaks at recovery centers and schools. At CSUSM, he serves as a peer leader in the Tukwut Leadership Circle, which helps students build their leadership skills. 

I want to continue sharing the message that there is still hope and purpose in your life regardless of what disability or ailment you may have, he said.

Before losing his sight, Mata never gave a thought to pursuing higher education. Now, he’s a year away from becoming the first in his family to earn a degree. 

Mata communicates frequently with his professors to ensure that they describe anything that he may not be able to see such as a PowerPoint presentation. Mata said CSUSM’s Office of Disability Support Services has been invaluable in his success, helping him get documents in an accessible format as quickly as possible. 

Mata plans to continue his education after receiving his bachelor’s with a Ph.D. being his ultimate goal. He also will continue to stay busy with judo and jiu-jitsu and wants to expand his work as a motivational speaker. He is even looking into writing a book about his journey. 

“I just want to continue inspiring and motivating people who may be going through a struggle in their life, who may have lost hope and bring some light into their life,” Mata said. It only takes a little bit of light to shine through a whole lot of darkness.” 

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Alumna Finds Renewed Purpose as CFO https://news.csusm.edu/feeding-san-diego-cfo/ https://news.csusm.edu/feeding-san-diego-cfo/249757By Christine VaughanFemale finance chiefs are rising.

While the representation of women in senior financial roles is still less than 15 percent among Fortune 500 companiesthere is progress. Last year, the number of female CFOs doubled. One of those executives joining that C-suite rank is CSUSM alumna Denise Gurulé (’10).

In May 2017, Gurulé was named CFO of Feeding San Diegothe leading hunger-relief organization in San Diego County that provides 25.2 million meals annually to local residents.

Gurulé never imagined herself in the nonprofit arena, having spent nearly 15 years working for Merlin Entertainment’s LEGOLAND California. She worked her way up from junior accountant to assistant controller while earning her BS in Business Administration with an emphasis in accounting at Cal State San Marcos.

From her executive office above Feeding San Diego’s warehouse in Sorrento ValleyGurulé laughs at the irony, recalling a business course in government and nonprofit accounting and how she scoffed at the thought of ever leaving the for-profit industry.

“I remember thinking, ‘Who would do this?” she said.

On her nearly two-decade-long academic journey – one that included an extended hiatus as she took guardianship of her 2-year-old second cousin (who she now calls her daughter) – the single mom found that her love for numbers had a greater purpose to serve people.

U-Turns and Speed Bumps 

Gurulé was 41 when she crossed the commencement stage to shake President Karen Haynes’ hand. The road to her bachelors was long and it included speed bumps and some unexpected detours.

The ’86 San Marcos High School graduate first wanted to be a fashion buyer and even studied at Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising. Though it was a passion, pursuing fashion as a career never quite felt right. So Gurulé turned to a familiar subject that always clicked for her: mathematics. Thinking she might like to own a business one day, accounting seemed like a natural fit.

She enrolled in accounting courses at Palomar College, taking one course at a time and in 1999, she began working in the accounting department at LEGOLAND California. She transferred to CSUSM in 2000.

That first year, Gurulé became a single mother as she took guardianship of Amanda. Adjusting to the new role of mom while balancing work and school was debilitating. Gurulé took a step back from her studies and put her degree on hold.

Seven years passed, and then one night during a family dinner, her dad spoke up.

I remember him telling me, ‘Mija, I want you to finish your degree. Move back home, we’ll help with Amanda, and we’ll make this work.

Moving home in her mid-thirties didn’t feel like progress, but Gurulé knew she would need the support of her family. She also knew that this time around, she needed a mentor.

Gurulé was matched with then-business professor Dr. Jim Hamerly as part of the University’s Faculty Mentoring Program. Focused on her studies, working part time and armed with a mentor, Gurulé thrived. She was promoted to assistant controller a few months before she earned her bachelors.

When Gurulé was ready for the next challenge, she once again turned to her mentor, Dr. Hamerly, who suggested she consider TGG Accounting to give her more opportunity to grow in her career. A competitive recruiter for CSUSM alumni, TGG is a managerial accounting firm that works with small businesses to help owners make better informed financial decisions for their companies.

Crunching the Numbers for Good 

At TGG Gurulé discovered that her knack for accounting enabled nonprofits to serve more people, operate at greater capacity and flourish financially. Gurulé quickly became the go-to nonprofit accountant for her firm.

It was there that Feeding San Diego came on her radar. She began as a consultant, filling gaps in accounting leadership.

In November 2014, Gurulé officially moved over to Feeding San Diego as the director of finance. Last May, CEO Vince Hall named Gurulé the Chief Financial Officer. 

 

It’s a Matter of Green 

Feeding San Diego is part of the 200-member network of Feeding America and a member of the California Association of Food Banks – connections that allow the organization to leverage resources at minimal costs. For example, when local farmer harvests are larger than demand or when produce is deemed aesthetically unsellable because it’s misshapen, farmers donate their product and organizations like Feeding San Diego pay a small pack-and-pick fee to cover farm operation costs. The partnership means healthy food options are made available to families in need at the lowest cost to the organization. It’s a partnership made possible by financial strategy and agreements.

That creative thinking fuels Gurulé and has her focused on the next big challenge. San Diego needs 80 million meals to meet the food insecurity needs of the community. Only about half of that need is being met by area food pantries and nonprofits. 

Accountants are always working in the past, Gurulé said. My goal as a CFO is to work with our executive leadership team and look into the future to talk about how we’re going to meet the need. Being a CFO gives me the freedom to dream, and then crunch the numbers and find fiscally responsible solutions to get us there.

“What we do is so important. Leaving a legacy is what matters. I want to know that I left my world better than it was when I got here, and to accomplish that you need to start with what’s right in front of you.” 

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Crate Expectations: New one-stop Shop for Workouts https://news.csusm.edu/csusm-fitness-crate/ https://news.csusm.edu/csusm-fitness-crate/249781By Jay ParisThe weight was worth it. 

"And it looks good with the blue turf,'' CSUSM basketball player Ethan Alvano said. 

Cal State San Marcos’ newest fitness facility -- powered by Aire-brand equipment, weights and training ropes -- has blossomed behind the M. Gordon Clarke Field House. A converted shipping crate is serving CSUSM students and athletes with a one-stop, outdoor tarp-covered strength and conditioning area that comes with a cushioned surface and a killer view looking west.  

It has quickly become a place to see and be seen. 

"You know how there is a Muscle Beach up in Venice?'' Erik Blekeberg said. "This is our beach.'' 

Well, if it's a beach then Blekeberg is its lifeguard. Blekeberg, who is in his second year as the CSUSM Sports Performance coach, recalls what was used before the center’s arrival. 

"It was this small, little Home Depot storage shed that you would have for a couple lawn mowers in the backyard,'' Blekeberg said. 

CSUSM student-athletes wanting to be a cut above also toiled under an unrelenting sun. But a canopy now shelters them from the elements. 

"It's exciting because you have this space which has everything,'' Alvano said. 

Blekeberg said the ability to organize workouts and have them in a confined, but comfortable, setting is essential when overseeing 13 Cougars squads. 

"It makes for a better way to organize the teams and manage them more efficiently,'' Blekeberg said. There is little transition time from the start of the workout to going to work on turf, or on speed, or on jumping. Everything is just more efficient and you get more work and you get better.'' 

Blekeberg, who also teaches Human Anatomy and Physiology I and IIat CSUSM, tailors workouts to the skill set of the athletes on the particular teams. It's his way of improving their play as he serves as a coach, albeit one who is concentrating on bodies and fitness and not techniques. 

"I can't teach somebody how to pitch or how to shoot a jump shot,'' Blekeberg said. But if a coach comes to me and says, 'We're slow,' I can make them faster. If a coach says, 'My team doesn't jump well,' we can make them more powerful. 

"Then I get a kick out of seeing their improvement. It validates my work.'' 

Blekeberg didn't play sports while a student at nearby San Dieguito Academy. He liked video games and was "a nerd that wasn't necessarily the most gifted athlete.'' 

But he enjoyed the weight room, where he would work on building up different parts of his body. Now he does it for the Cougars' teams. 

"Let's say you want to get better at basketball,'' he said. Well, if you can improve your jumping, then you can improve your basketball. That's how I look at it.'' 

Said Alvano: "It's awesome. And it's just another thing going on with San Marcos athletics. It's an exciting time right now.'' 

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Committed to Inspiring a Diverse Student Body https://news.csusm.edu/csusm-david-bwambok/ https://news.csusm.edu/csusm-david-bwambok/249332By David OgulBorn and raised in the highlands of Kenya, Dr. David Bwambok was mesmerized by the healing powers in traditional medicinal plants often employed to treat villagers in place of modern pharmaceuticals.

He set out to find out why, earning a Ph.D. from Louisiana State University in analytical chemistry and furthering his research as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard along the way. After more than three years as a senior scientist at Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry in Wilmington, Mass., Bwambok in September took what he learned and became an assistant professor in chemistry and biochemistry at Cal State San Marcos – drawn in large part by its commitment to diversity.

“I wanted to broaden the impact I was having, and for me, teaching is the best way to do that,” said Bwambok, whose research emphasizes the interface of chemistry and biology and who is interested in designing task-specific ionic liquid materials for forensic analysis and medical diagnostics. “It’s very fulfilling to see someone who may have a limited background in chemistry discover, ‘Yes, I can do this, I, too, can make a difference.’ ”

Why CSUSM? 

“There is something about this place,” said Bwambok, whose daughter is a CSUSM criminology and justice studies major and who notes the campus setting reminds him of his childhood home in the Kenyan highlands. “There is a collaborative environment, a very inclusive environment with a commitment to diversity. I am the first in my family to go to college, and when I came here, I found so many students who also are the first in their family to go to college and who come from a similar background. It feels like family.” 

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Knocking the ‘Fluff’ Out of Art https://news.csusm.edu/knocking-the-fluff-out-of-art/ https://news.csusm.edu/knocking-the-fluff-out-of-art/195303By Christine VaughanMerryl Goldberg is on a mission to change public perception of the arts.

“I’ve never met a kid who wasn’t capable,” said Goldberg, a music professor in CSUSM’s School of Arts. “I have met a lot of kids who haven’t had opportunities. I was one of those kids for whom the arts opened a world of possibility.”

For Goldberg – an avid boxer with a wicked left hook and longtime professional saxophonist turned renowned leader in arts education – one of the greatest challenges to fully integrating the arts in K-12 education is debunking the notion that arts are fluff or “nice to have” despite what research proves.

“There is now a significant body of research that shows that kids who participate in the arts perform better in school, attain better jobs and become empathetic citizens” said Goldberg, who has been studying how art influences learning for more than two decades. “But what I have found is that the research isn’t enough.”

To break through that stigma of fluff, Goldberg is zeroing in on public awareness as part of her newest endeavor, ARTS=OPPORTUNITY, a research-based initiative backed by a $200,000 grant from the Stuart Foundation and $25,000 grant from the Panta Rhea Foundation. ARTS=OPPORTUNITY focuses on improving K-12 arts literacy and advocates that every child, every day needs to have real opportunities to learn in, and through, the arts.

Led by a team of artists, educators and business leaders, the multifaceted program, which launched late last year, provides leadership training, summits, workshops and anchor events for educators, parents, youth and teens, and arts providers.

Goldberg has her sights set on the big picture. Beyond improving K-12 test scores and attendance rates, which increase significantly when art is integrated in the K-12 curriculum, research shows that participation in the arts can be a precursor to career success and civic involvement.

Not only does art encourage risk taking, flexibility and thinking outside of the box, but a student who participates in art is more likely to pursue and succeed in college. Art-literate students are sought after as employees and set higher career goals.

“Art is essential and it unlocks opportunity,” Goldberg said. “I revel in helping to change the landscape of education so that all kids, especially kids who have not had opportunities, have a chance to have arts fused into their daily lives.”

Learn more at csusm.edu/artopp

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