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Jill Conant joined The Graduate School as a staff specialist in academic affairs. She graduated from the University of Maine with dual degrees in marketing and media studies. In this Q&A, learn more about Jill and how she came to join The Graduate School.
Could you explain what you do and your role as a staff specialist at the Graduate School?
I'm the inaugural staff specialist in academic affairs. This position was just created this past year, and the main reason it was created was to provide assistance in the three major areas of academic affairs: student records and registration, co-curricular programming, and data evaluation and assessment. My responsibilities change as the academic calendar goes on, but my main responsibility is monitoring master’s students and their milestone progress. This means performing thesis format reviews as a ProQuest administrator and making sure I know whether they are defending a thesis or maybe completing a master’s project for a non-thesis defense.
What skills have you acquired in those previous roles that you're bringing into this one? What has that transition been like?
When it came to my job search, I was looking for jobs that were very similar in the aspect of graduation, because that was my main specialist role at my last job.
And so, I've taken on many familiar roles in this position, like assisting TGS Registrar Helene McAdams with degree auditing—making sure that students are checking all their requirements for degree completion, the graduation application timeline, and all the right deadlines.
But then the more technical side of my job hunt was that the institution I came from uses all the same software that Duke does, so I had at least five years of experience in PeopleSoft, as well as Perceptive Content, also known as Image Now, Qualtrics, and Tableau. A lot of the software that we use in academic affairs, I've also used in my previous roles. So, it was really a smooth transition from one to another.
What is it about this kind of role that you particularly enjoy? Do you enjoy the technical side of it more, or working with students?
As much as it was really nice to have the smooth transition of knowing the technical aspects, I think the real reason I've stuck in this career as a higher ed administrator is because I love helping students get to the finish line, because I was once that student.
When I graduated with my bachelor's degrees, I had no idea what I was doing.
In my previous role, I was working with undergraduate students primarily, so seeing students at this different step in life has been eye-opening, compared to the student experience that I have previously assisted with over the past six years that I've been in higher ed.
I've been told that you grew up on a dairy farm, and I would like to hear a little bit about that!
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I grew up on a road in a very small town with less than 1,000 people, and this road had a lot of family on it, from my nuclear family to aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins. We all lived right on the same road that is on our dairy farm, which is called Conant Acres. Five generations have worked there so far. Obviously, I didn't step into that role, but I grew up bailing hay, hauling hay, and helping out with selling corn. They recently started a farm stand that sells corn, milk, and a lot of cheese products and also works with small, local companies.
Living around agriculture, I also spent most of my time as a 4-H member. That was a big part of my childhood, from my cousins showing cows to making my own arts and crafts. But being at fairs for most of the summer—that was one of the best parts of growing up on a dairy farm. You spend all your time at the county fairs, running around and playing with all the other farm kids.
You’ve done a cappella, and you were in an auditioned choir. What was that like?
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When I was going to college, I didn't really know what I wanted to do or what my major would be. I changed it a bunch of times. I knew one thing though: I'm going to keep music in my life no matter what. Even if it's not my major, even if it's not something I want to do for a career, I know it's something that I have to keep close to my heart.
I definitely thrived in music, so in college I was like, I’ve got to do this. And the first week I heard their auditions for this choir, University Singers, so I signed up for auditions. And in less than a week, I had members of the choir showing up to my dorm room, knocking on the door, being like, “Oh, my gosh, you made it!” And I was like, “Who are you people?” [laughs]
I went from the auditioned choir into the a cappella group, UMaine Renaissance. I started off as their wardrobe manager and social media manager. I was doing all of their postings, making sure people knew about our gigs and that we were coordinated when we went places.
I went from that position to business manager to assistant director, and then to co-director. I co-directed my last year with someone who was a music major, which was very helpful.
After I graduated, I found a choir that was local up in Maine called Euphony, and we focused on more advanced classical pieces.
Are there any specific projects or things that you have done in your role so far that you are proud of?
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A big takeaway from my previous job that I have implemented here is understanding PeopleSoft from a student’s perspective. Oracle PeopleSoft has done some updates over the years, shifting to a new, 2.0 version of their student information system, Campus Solutions. When this transition was made, many campuses didn't consider the customized patches or add-ons created in their previous version, resulting in unknown navigations and inaccessible pages when the new version was released. So, every semester, TGS academic affairs would have to go back and manually apply hundreds of students that could not easily access one of TGS’ patches: the graduation application.
A similar scenario happened at my last institution, and I helped to fix it there. So, when I came here and saw the same problem, I was like, “We're going to nip this right in the bud. This will be one of the first things I do." The graduation application is such a big signifier to know who's going to, or who thinks that they might even be able to, graduate in a semester. As soon as we get that application, we can generate a degree progress report where we can determine if it is possible for a student to finish this term or not. So, when students were experiencing issues consistently with accessing the application, I took a deep dive into the technical parts of PeopleSoft.
That was quite the long-term project over the past seven months. But it came to fruition at the beginning of July, and so students will be able to apply for the fall semester, which is an awesome feeling.
What work are you looking forward to doing going forward?
Currently, we're working with programs and departments throughout The Graduate School to create a degree progress tracking system rather than using a combination of spreadsheets and PeopleSoft. The proposed degree-management tool is called Stellic. It will help standardize the degree tracking progress of students, even before they apply for graduation; wherever they're at during their academic journey in The Graduate School, they will be able to check with this software.