About

The work has always been about students. The scale keeps changing.

Twelve years at the University of South Carolina, in four roles that only look like different jobs. I started as coordinator of early intervention, reaching out to students who had been flagged for missing class. I now lead the enterprise advising platforms used by 140+ advisors across 11 colleges and schools. In between I trained peer leaders, carried a centralized advising operation through a 200% expansion, and strengthened the career structure that kept its advisors from leaving.

What changes a student's trajectory is someone taking them seriously as a whole person. No staff, however talented, can deliver that in every appointment to every student at a university this size. But you can build systems that surface the students who need it most, cut the administrative friction that eats appointment time and advisor energy, and make the relational work sustainable rather than something advisors manage in spite of the system. That is the whole reason I moved toward the platforms.

The role that results has no clean name on an org chart. Functional staff know what would fix a problem but not how to ask IT for it; IT knows the architecture but not why the request matters. Someone has to stand in that gap and be credible on both sides.

The current version of the job is less visible than calling a student who missed class, but it is the same job. Implementation projects rarely fail on the technology. They fail on governance: without a decision-rights matrix, an executive sponsor, a product owner, and a data steward, a multi-million-dollar platform degrades into a patchwork of workarounds. Most of what I do now is make sure those pieces exist and hold, so the platforms advisors depend on keep working the way the advising operation actually needs them to.

And when a platform cannot do what advisors need, I build it rather than wait for a vendor roadmap. That instinct is the through line across all four roles: start with the person in front of you, then go build whatever it takes to reach the next thousand of them.

Start by trusting students.

The operating assumption in “On Cruelty-Free Advising,” Academic Advising Today, 2023

The path here

Four roles, one institution, and the same problem at four different scales.

Dec 2024 – present

Senior Program Manager, Advising Technology Innovation and Assessment

Lead for CRM Advise and the broader advising platform portfolio. Enterprise implementation, vendor escalation, assessment infrastructure, and the governance that holds it together.

Mar 2019 – Dec 2024

Associate Director of Undergraduate Academic Advising

Guided the centralized advising program through a 200% staff and program expansion. Authored the USC Model of Comprehensive Academic Advising, supported and enhanced the four-tier advising career ladder that reduced turnover, and built the integrated advising database that has processed 103,000+ formerly paper forms.

Aug 2016 – Mar 2019

Assistant Director for Peer Leadership, University 101 Programs

Recruited, trained, and supervised 230+ peer leaders co-teaching the first-year seminar for 4,500+ students. Grew nominations 166%. Earned the 2018 NASPA Gold Award.

Dec 2014 – Jul 2016

Coordinator of Early Intervention, Student Success Center

Managed Success Connect, USC's flagship early-alert initiative and an early institutional adopter of EAB Navigate 360. Rebuilt it from a red-flag referral service into an appreciative Success Consultation, on the premise that a flagged student should be invited in rather than reprimanded. Students reached were retained at a rate 16 points higher; faculty referrals grew 39% in one year.

A working philosophy

Funky tech data humanist

The phrase I use for myself is funky tech data humanist, and both halves carry weight. A funky tech sits at the bridge between functional practice and technical implementation, closer to the functional side than to IT, translating between two worlds without fully belonging to either. Data humanist comes from a different tradition, articulated most clearly by the designer Giorgia Lupi, which insists that data is not the opposite of human experience but a representation of it.

I came to this work through people, not platforms. Before higher education I worked in parks and recreation, a field that took whole-person development seriously long before it had language for what that meant. Still being worked out, mostly in public, at mtdial.substack.com.

Mentorship is the decisive developmental variable

The right information at the right moment matters. A well-maintained CRM matters. But the mentors who shaped me were not primarily information sources; they were people who showed up. I believe this partly from the literature and mostly from my own life.

Growth happens in the margin

In unstructured time, in the uncomfortable space between what someone can do and what they are being asked to do. I was a mediocre student for years, until the challenge finally matched the skill and someone was paying attention to the match. I have never fully gotten over it.

Data is a lantern, not a verdict

Every data point represents a person. A student who didn't register. An advisor who logged fourteen appointments in a day. A retention gap that follows a demographic line. The numbers are real and the patterns matter, but the numbers are not the thing.

Governance is stewardship

Systems like CRM Advise and DegreeWorks are not neutral infrastructure. They encode assumptions about what counts as a meaningful advising interaction and what success looks like. The job is to interrogate those assumptions so the answers serve advisors and students rather than the platform, the vendor, or the reporting requirement.

It also means being honest about what technology cannot do. A well-configured system can tell you which students haven't met with an advisor. It cannot tell you why. That gap is where the human work lives, and no dashboard closes it.

What I want is for the systems and the learning and the advising to add up to the same thing: more students reaching something they didn't know was possible for them. The rest is infrastructure.

Outside the org chart

I write, and the writing has tracked the same widening problem: early alert, then advisor-facilitated intervention, then academic recovery, then the staff conditions underneath all of it, and now governance and the translator roles that hold a platform together. Two edited volumes, thirteen book chapters, three refereed articles, and a running trade column.

I teach. Eleven semesters of the first-year seminar, four years of the peer leader training course, and a national continuing-education course on academic recovery. I am a practitioner-scholar, which means holding theory and practice in the same hand and trying not to let either one go: the research informs how I build things, and the building generates questions the research hasn't answered yet.

Credentials

M.Ed., Higher Education and Student Affairs

University of South Carolina

B.S., Recreation Administration

Eastern Illinois University

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