Lessons Learned Moving Between Higher Education and Industry

Jack Suess: Welcome to the EDUCAUSE Integrative CIO Podcast. I'm Jack Suess, vice president of IT and CIO at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Cynthia Golden: And I'm Cynthia Golden. Each episode, we welcome a guest from in or around higher education technology as we talk about repositioning or reinforcing the role of IT leadership as an integral strategic partner in support of the institutional mission.

Cynthia Golden: Hello, I'm Cynthia Golden. And I'm Jack Seuss. And we would like to welcome you to The Integrative CIO podcast today. Today we're talking to our colleagues, Jennifer Sparrow and Liv Gjestvang. Jennifer is Associate Vice President for Research and Instructional Technology and Chief Academic Technology Officer at New York University and leave as Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Denison University. Welcome.

Jennifer Sparrow: Thank you. Thanks. So glad to be here.

Cynthia Golden: Yes,

Jack Suess: We can't wait.

Cynthia Golden: We're really glad to have you and glad to have this conversation because today on the podcast we wanted to spend a little time talking about careers and many of us have come to leadership roles in higher ed from various backgrounds and various kinds of jobs. And for some time now we have been in roles where we're helping other people develop their careers too. So we thought it might be fun today to talk about where you both have been and where you see things going. So it would be really great if we could hear a little bit from each one of you about the path you followed to your current role. So Jennifer, can we start with you?

Jennifer Sparrow: Sure. I'm happy to get started and there's a nice little intertwining of Lev's story at some point in this journey, so you'll get to hear that today as well, which is fun. Great. I started in higher ed in what I thought was my dream job forever. It was emerging technologies at Virginia Tech. It was the place where I got to try new technologies. I got to play with new toys as they came out and figure out the best way to match those into the work that we were doing in teaching and learning and research. From there, got to go on to Penn State where I was working as the associate vice president for teaching and learning with technology. So taking more of that work and expanding it to a larger setting, twenty-four campuses, geographically diverse in 2021 after leave had gone to a WSI followed her in, I called her my canary in the coal mine where I got the pleasure of serving two years as an executive education advisor. So I call it my higher ed adjacent role because we were working with institutions from Boston to LA and everything in between. And it was a really interesting and great role, but I realized I was missing the mission work that we get to do in higher education. So in January of this year, I got the opportunity to come work for NYU. So I'm joining you today from my office on 10 Astor Place and if you're lucky, you'll get to hear somebody honking or yelling outside my window.

Jack Suess: Liv, could you talk a little bit about your journey?

Liv Gjestvang: Yeah, absolutely. So I actually, I'm at a liberal arts institution right now, which has been a really fun place for me to work for the last couple of years. And my own educational journey started in the liberal arts. I was at Pomona College and then University of Chicago where I have a degree in English and did a lot of work with film. So my early career started actually in documentary film and with a PBS affiliate. And then I worked with really kind of networking and computer consulting in really the big art galleries, all of New York City. So that was an exciting and fun time of my career. And I would say throughout my career I've really done work that has combined technology, education and creativity and it's shown up in different kind of with each of those different elements at the four at different parts of my career.

So I moved into higher education with my time at Ohio State, which started in about 2006 and I spent fifteen years there working with a really wonderful team. I think we grew up together in a lot of ways and in that the last half of that time I was serving as associate vice president for learning technology. And interestingly, a lot of the really exciting work that we were doing was happening in partnership with vendors. So I worked with Apple to do the biggest deployment of one free one-to-one technology for undergraduate students. We were willing out about 14,000 iPads for students per year. We also worked with Apple in their enterprise design lab as their first higher ed partner to build to collaborate on an app. So we built an app for mental health and wellness. That was something I'm really proud of and did a lot of work around affordability that was happening in partnership with Top Hat and with our library teams. There was national partnerships with the Unison consortium that Jennifer and I worked on. So that was, I think that work, that kind of integration of industry and education was happening for me earlier in my career. And then I also, as Jennifer said, after Covid in 2021, I stepped away into a higher ed strategy role at AWS and just loved that time. I learned so much and I brought a lot of that back to my work now as vice president and Chief information officer at Denison.

Jack Suess: Well, both of you just have had amazing careers and what I think sort of centers all of us is this fact that I still look at the fact that I started in the academic computing organization when they were separate and as the thing that changes the way I look at technology altogether because I have a more faculty centric view of how are they going to use it, how are they going to be able to apply it. And I think getting that filter is just a really helpful thing for people. You learn to be really appreciative of what it's like to be a faculty member. Now going a little deeper, the other thing that's really interesting in our conversations is, so the one job I didn't take that in hindsight I should have taken was I got offered a job to go to AWS in 1999. I said, well, I don't know, it was still being run out of the basement. And I was like, I'm not sure. But the AWS culture is a very intense culture. We have some alums that are there that I stay in contact with. And I'm curious how the move from higher ed, which is a very different culture, how that worked and how you're also bringing back though that use of data and accountability that AWS sort of forces everyone who's a part of the organization to be able to do. So maybe we could talk a little bit about how those experiences have impacted the way you're trying to work now as you've come back, Jennifer.

Jennifer Sparrow: Oh sure. I'll get started. So I have started three things that I took away and I likely I learned so much in my AWS experience because I didn't have industry experience before, went to this role in 2021. And so you're right Jack, there are these amazing leadership principles, which I have never seen an organization that not only states those leadership principles, but they are a part of almost every single meeting that you go to. So there's a lovely shared language around the kinds of things and the way we work. And so that was really a joyful thing to see because everyone is saying, okay, let's think big, let's get toward results. Let's use data to make our decisions. So these are all things that we were like, okay, let's do that. I think our least favorite one was be frugal, right? It's like, okay, what does frugal mean when we're trying to ensure that customers are having a good experience?

So I think some of the things that I was amazed at and is taking time to adjust back to higher ed is that you may have a really good idea at AWS, but there are also maybe ten or twelve other teams working on the same idea. And this idea that everybody sort of works on their own little, they call it a two pizza team, the five to eight people that could consume two pizzas in a single meeting and how each of those teams are working to bring a solution to the table. And sometimes one wins and sometimes there are four winning in higher ed. I think we would never say we're going to have four different groups working on the same problem and let them go. It would be let's bring everybody together, let's build consensus. Let's understand whose feelings are going to be hurt if we don't include them in this meeting.

And so there's an interesting balance of driving towards innovation in very quick and agile ways versus how are we ensuring that we're getting all of the right perspectives at the table. So I think that was sort of number one. The other thing is this really interesting process at AWS called Think the Think Big process. And this is really anybody at any level of the organization can bring forward an idea that they have. So if they see a customer pain point or they see an opportunity, you can write up a document and it goes through several iterations. And then if your document has the legs, it actually gets forwarded up through the organization for funding opportunities and for support from the organization to get the work done. And so I love that because I think oftentimes when we're in these silos and hierarchical organizations that it's often hard to surface those ideas of the people that are at the very frontline. And so I'm definitely bringing that back into the work here at NYU. And Liv and I have talked about this and what makes sense coming back. So Liv, I'm curious to hear what you're using as well.

Liv Gjestvang: Yeah, Jennifer and I actually were co-authors of a think big proposal actually, which when we were at AWS, which was designed to help bring some of the best practices that we were seeing in that environment into a higher education context with cohorts of leaders from institutions who would have opportunities to learn. So I mean, I think that was a fun project, Jennifer. And part of what I would say, the first thing I noticed when I went to AWS is that I was concerned about making that shift from the bulk of my career, which had been in education into a completely different context. And the thing that struck me first is that as a person who is very much a learner and is interested in and really motivated and inspired by learning new things, I found it incredibly invigorating to be in an environment where I was getting to learn so many new things and so many new ways of working.

So that actually it was a good reminder for me after fifteen years at my institution, just the kind of energy that comes from getting to learn in a new context. I also think that AWS did a tremendous job of investing in that learner space for employees. So when I came on, I had a three month onboarding time and the person who hired me was really committed to me having that space. So we had a learning management system, I had a collection of individuals that I was expected to meet with and I had goals for my first week, my first month, my second month, my third month, there was a lot of video and interactive educational content, some of it gamified to help me learn what those core principles were that Jennifer was describing, which you can look up online. They actually, as she said, really do shake the entire culture at how people interact.

I found that investment in ensuring that people have the skills they need to be effective, really powerful. And it's something I'm thinking about in the onboarding and continuing education of our team here at Denison two. The other thing that I will say is there's something about the scalability of resources that really struck me. And what I mean by that is in my experience in higher education and I am very committed to diversity and in recruitment and hiring and retention on my team and in the field, I really had kind of free reign I would say at the institutions I've been at, to identify what are the kinds of strategies that could help us here? What are the trainings and resources I want my team members to have so we can be a better and more inclusive organization In terms of hiring at AWS, there were teams of professionals who worked in diversity, equity and inclusion, educators, researchers who built those modules.

So when I showed up and I wanted to learn about how to bring equity to hiring practice at AWS, all of that content was there. So there is a process to teach me exactly what implicit bias looked like, how we were expected to overcome it in the hiring process. Once I had gone through all of that training, I had to shadow five interviews with a certified interviewer. I then had to be shadowed for five interviews that I did with somebody observing and providing feedback. And then after those 10, I could interview someone on my own. And so it was a really well executed educational model and it's something that I think about how can we build some of those scalable, repeatable models that we can then use in our context and someone that I think we could share across institutions. I've been thinking about that a lot too.

And then the other thing that I think that for me, there's a real focus on the customer or the user I would say. So thinking about how do you really start from understanding the needs of those that you're trying to serve? And at AWS in the early days, they kept an empty chair at the table in all meetings to represent the users so that when they were getting wound up with where they were headed and why they would come back to say, but what does our customer need? And one thing I want to point a strength in education too, that we, in addition to thinking about the importance of the customer, I think there's also, oh God, I totally lost my train of thought. Jerry, you're going to have to snap. You're going to have to cut this.

Jennifer Sparrow: So Liv, can I jump in for a second? I want to touch on something you talked about, which is that ninety-day onboarding process, right? So think about the times you started a new role and you have to hit the ground running day one and without maybe context of the organization or who are the important folks that you should be meeting with. And so I do love not only the learning piece of it, but you touched on this Liv. There was a set of people, your team you met with the first week and then people on the sort of your ring one team and ring two. And I definitely took that advantage of that as I was thinking about what does my first ninety days at NYU look like because didn't, obviously you hit the ground in higher ed and you're like, okay, you have this leadership meeting and you have this strategy meeting and you have this team, and so you're sort of involved in that.

But taking time to be very thoughtful about that, not only for yourself as you're starting a new role, but also for people that you're onboarding, who are the people that they should be meeting with? How do we help them understand, as Liv mentioned, this is all on a portal. You could see these are the folks you're meeting with, here's their titles, here's what part of the organization they're in. And then it was up to you to schedule that thirty-minute meeting. And part of that is culturally people were expecting those meetings from new employees. And so I think that's a really interesting way to onboard people. And Liv and I joined AWS as they were doing an incredible expansion. And so there was lots of opportunity, lots of new people coming on board, lots of opportunity to do hiring and be a part of that hiring process pretty soon after you got there. But I think she's right. Those mechanisms that are repeatable across were really impressive and we should be thinking about some of those things in higher education. Again, I think the shared piece is really lovely, Liv, how do we do that across?

Jack Suess: Agreed. If I could sort of jump in on a thought, one of the things that we've been trying to do here at UMBC and I saw sort of an HBR Harvard Business Review article that also aligned to this is we're living in this world between hybrid remote, almost all of my employees are at least hybrid. And so how do you onboard? And so we started during the pandemic of doing, I didn't know that AWS was doing it this way, but we have thirty, sixty, ninety-six month and then twelve-month and we have distinct goals that people are supposed to be accomplishing. And it was really to be trying to let you know, are you onboarding effectively and are you sort of hitting the spots that we were expecting you to be hitting? We can adjust them, but what we wanted to be able to be making sure is that people had a sense of whether or not they were acceptably doing the job.

Because right now in this hybrid space, you can sort of feel like you're sort of lost in through all of these things. And I think this intentionality is actually going to be fundamental to the future if you're in a hybrid organization that you just can't expect that it's going to end up working. I was at a discussion the other day and someone talked about, well, I just like to walk around offices and stick my head in and it's like it doesn't really work anymore. And so you've got to be rethinking this and that might be a really great opportunity for you two to sort of share because there are very few organizations that have hired a million people. And when you look at the way that AWS has scaled, it probably has built the scaffolding to do it probably best in class right

Cynthia Golden: Now. Yeah, I think the investment in the onboarding, I know that over my time I've watched onboarding more or less develop because in my first job there really wasn't much. And so I think that this idea that you have of really being able to share some of these tools across institutions is really a good one. So I want to come back to this idea about the industry education and customers because one of the things Jack and I have done recently is talked with other colleagues about relationships with corporate partners and vendors. And I was wondering what your thoughts are or maybe what you've learned about how our colleagues in higher education could or should be relating to and talking to our vendor partners.

Liv Gjestvang: Yeah, I will say this is, I think it's an orientation that I've had throughout my higher ed career, but I will say it has significantly grown in the transition I made out and backend, which is really just the importance of thinking of our vendors as partners and looking for those teams and individuals who really want more than a buying and selling relationship. And in some cases we need a buying and selling relationship in a lot of cases. But I do think that there are some really interesting and important strengths and values that we bring from the educational sphere. And there are a different set of values and strengths that come from the industry space. And I really think when we set up those relationships from the very beginning as a meaningful partnership, and I say this in calls with vendors, that we are not just ideally, we're not just looking to buy a product, we are looking to build a partnership where we can, and I'm not a public institution anymore, so I can do this a little more easily, but where I can actually support and speak out about the value of the partnership that we have, but also that they're willing to come in and bring more than just a product.

And I found that to be incredibly valuable.

Jennifer Sparrow: Yeah, I think Liv, you're a hundred percent correct on that, right? Is how do we challenge our vendor partners to be partners and to do more than just an exchange of goods and services for money. But I would also challenge our colleagues to continue to educate vendor partners on who we are, what our values are, how our cycles work, and how to speak higher ed. Because I think we've seen this, right? Lots of vendors will come in and they know their product very well, but they don't understand why is it important that faculty senate has a say in something, right? Why does it take us a year to get a new tool rolled out because of the cycles of how we do business in higher education? So I just met with one of our vendor partners and was able to do a little voice of the customer session for them.

And I said, you think in quarters and you tell us this fall of 24 quarters going to be about X product. It takes me the fall to educate our own teams, the spring to get word out to faculty and help them with curricular redesign. And then the next fall before you see this implemented in the classroom. And for many people, they'll go and run, faculty will go and run and do it on their own, but for the vast majority, there is a timeline that vendor has moved from that fall quarter to another product in the winter quarter, another product to the spring and another product and not circle bat rates. So the why aren't we seeing movement on use of this product? Well, this is why you think in quarters, we think in years. And so I do think that part of this partnership is helping the folks that we work within in those vendor relationships to understand what is higher ed? How do we work? Who are the important players? What do our cycles look like? And what are our problems that you could help us solve? And so I think if we go into that with that problem solving mentality together, then it's a far better relationship.

Jack Suess: So with the two of you here and your backgrounds in academic technology, I want to sort of spend a couple of minutes talking about what I see as an opportunity in this vendor space and sort of begin to get some of your thoughts. And that is, we all know we basically have two years to be dealing with IT accessibility, that now that the new standards have come out, it is going to be a massive sea change, but it's also going to be fundamentally driven by our vendors because so much of our work is really purchased products. And so I think that there's a really interesting opportunity to align our activities if we know that certain products are going to be accessible, but it may be twelve, fifteen months, that's a little bit different. How does AI begin to play a part in supporting this accessibility, especially ongoing as it looks at content that's being developed, et cetera, et cetera.

And I think that this is one of those opportunities where both sets, if we could orient it right, could come to the table around a common element. You're not going to be able to sell if you can't be considered fully accessible. And we need you to be fully accessible because we can't buy your product and deploy it and still be able to say that we're meeting the needs of students. And so I'm curious about your thoughts and how you might want to look at how our community can be trying to engage this so it's not 4,000 CIOs and IT leaders trying to have this discussion, but maybe more of a community discussion.

Liv Gjestvang: One of the things that's a great question, Jack, and I think we have such strong consortia across education, and I really see that as a great opportunity to bring together groups of institutions who can be having these conversations together. So Jennifer and I worked in the Big 10 Academic Alliance. We were part of unison, I'm part of the consortium for liberal Arts colleges now. And I think with these kinds of groups, being able to have a more aggregate level conversation, and a lot of those industry partners I think have spent a bit of time over the last many of them, I think in the last five years to really build out these customer advisory boards, right? Workday has that top hat has it, that there are actually convening leaders who are, I think AWS had that in place who are able to have a more kind of community oriented conversation. And I know EDUCAUSE is for the conference in Autumn 2024 is doing a day long kind of symposium with industry and higher ed leaders to talk about how that collaboration could look. So to me that just seems like a great way to do this at scale and do it in a way that is not, as you said, Jack, all of us having these duplicative individual conversations.

Jennifer Sparrow: Yeah,

Cynthia Golden: I agree. So to switch gears just a little bit, I think that one of the things you both have in common is that you were both recipients of the EDUCAUSE Rising Star Award, right? And now you're in positions where you have the opportunity to cultivate other rising stars in your organizations. And I had the opportunity to edit a book for causal long time ago. It was like in, I don't know, fifteen years ago or something, and we called it Cultivating Careers. And I looked at that in preparation for this discussion. And a lot of the advice in there that our colleagues gave is really still solid today amazingly. But also we're living in a time where we've got different conditions and different tools available to us. And so I was just wondering if you think about some of the cultivation of careers, both from an organizational level and for individuals, what are some of the things that you do to foster innovation in your teams? For example, that one is something you've both kind of touched on a little bit from your time with AWS.

Jennifer Sparrow: Yeah, I think even before my time at AWS Cynthia, I was thinking about how do we start to push to the leading edge, leading edge, if you want to call it that, right? But how do we push to the leading edge? And for me, I think I use two methods in all the work that I've done. One is a, what's next activity, which just really brings a friendly shark tanklike activity to the teams of people that are forward facing. And again, how do we start to surface these great ideas and give opportunity and space for that? It's a ninety-minute activity. It is a little bit. People are like, I needed more time. Of course you needed more time, but this is an opportunity to, you identify a problem, you come up with a bandaid and bubblegum solution, and then you work with somebody else on the team to hone that a little bit.

And then you present it. And we've done it where we've given folks pretend money to spend on it. And so there's some crowdsourcing around which ideas should we move forward. At Penn State, we had some phenomenal ideas come forward. We did a research carnival, which helped researchers come to a room and they could talk with IRB and get all of the questions IRB had answered in a moment as opposed to an exchange of twenty-eight emails. They could talk with IT security, they could talk with privacy. They had the library there. All of those places where you think about the research process slowing down and removing these barriers. And this idea came out of that, it cost us nothing. I think we rented a popcorn machine, so it was almost literally nothing to do this and moved forward several grants that folks really just needed a little bit of support to get it through and not all the hurdles.

And then I think the other thing, and this is really interesting because I think different organizations have different culture around this, but allowing space for failure has been a really critical piece for me. And there have been times I've come into an organization where it's clear that failure was not something that was to be embraced and learned from. And so I do think that how do you help the team understand that a good idea that maybe doesn't pan out is better than no idea at all? And so that's been really interesting here at NYU for a variety of reasons and getting people to stretch their failure muscles a little bit has been fun. Liv, I'm curious to hear what you're doing in that space.

Liv Gjestvang: Yeah, no, it's a great question. And I think that working with teams and supporting colleagues and being supported by colleagues is probably what I love most about my work. So I think about this a lot, and I would say that you asked this question in interesting ways, Cynthia, that was both about growing people and about creating space for innovation. And I think they're so closely connected. The first thing that I think a lot about is how to support people's learning and how to do that through coaching explicit coaching and education opportunities. And so one thing that I would highly recommend is the investment in coaching. I actually have used that was part of the negotiation that I made with Denison coming into my first CIO role was to include a transition coach in my compensation package. And I would highly recommend that people, if you're transitioning into a role or you want to grow, it's not a huge investment and it has such great payoff.

So I think that can be a great thing that leaders can invest in and that individuals can advocate for at their institution. I also brought in a coach recently who started at the Gates Foundation and then was at Cleveland Clinic and at Tableau and Salesforce, her name is Carl Wilson, and she came and did a six-month cohort here with all of my people leaders. So it was seventeen of us, and we spent a lot of time developing some shared language and strategies for how we would operate around conflict change management, understanding our ability to coach each other. We did a lot of work building that skill, and then she did individual meetings with us and she did group coaching sessions with us. So that deep intensive engagement was really helped our team level up. So that's one place that I think is really important to invest.

I also really believe in the idea of doing fewer things and doing them well and being able to do them quickly where possible. So often we see a million possibilities and people at our institutions are, they are mission driven, they're innovators. I have really tried to say, and it's hard because people want to get out there and get after things, but to say, let's pick the things where we can have the greatest impact right now and let's really invest in those. And that's meant that our academic technology team has made really significant progress. And we have more than 10 percent of our faculty engaged in affordable content work. This is our first semester out of the gate piloting some bigger initiatives. So we also did a really big redesign of our canvas course shell and a lot of education with faculty. So we picked a couple of things.

We have a one page proposal template where people outline the goal of a project, the intended outcomes, the timelines, and really just build that out and then get after it. And then the last thing I would say is that, and this is, I think the industry time has affected this for me too, is to think less about waiting until we have it, right? And think more about when do we have sort of a V one opportunity where we know enough to have a hypothesis to go out there and test it and really move more quickly that way. And that's really important to me that we don't sit and plan for eighteen or twenty-four months and then by the time we're on our feet, the moment has moved on as it does right now.

Cynthia Golden: Yeah, I think helping people to see, I am back at your idea of picking a few things and being successful and making a big impact on a couple things, it can be challenging because in my experience, I've had staff who were so, they wanted to do everything. They wanted to meet everybody's need. And that's really hard, if not impossible to do. And I think putting the emphasis on a few key projects where you know can be successful or at least you're pretty sure you can help staff in that way to make that adjustment.

Liv Gjestvang: Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly the thing. And it comes from such a good place, but it can give us a bit of a mile wide inch deep, right?

Jack Suess: So both of you have had really long careers, but you've also had this opportunity to be viewing the world from outside of higher ed. What do you think in higher ed we should be thinking about changing or is challenging and how would you like to see the field evolve over the next decade? Because I think that this is going to be probably one of the more challenging decades we've had in the last fifty years. And so I'm sort of curious for your thoughts as to how we should be moving in that direction.

Jennifer Sparrow: Liv and I did a presentation at ELI several years ago, one of the featured sessions that was about how our institutions can help prepare our learners to be ready for what's next, Jack. And I think that those things about what's next are changing. So we went through where were we fifteen years ago, what jobs do we think are going to be in the next fifteen years? Things like an AI ethicist. I think this was like 2019 Liv. So there wasn't this job of AI ethicist or a AI programmer. So there were some really interesting sort of retrospective and a really interesting forward look at this. But we really framed that conversation, that presentation around what are the skills that our learners are going to need to know and do? And it may not be, they're obviously going to need some discipline specific knowledge. I don't want my civil engineer to not know civil engineering, but I also want my civil engineer to have the ability to do creative problem solving, to have a data fluency where they're understanding what the power of the data could be, what questions we could ask.

There's a failure fluency that goes like, okay, if I am not successful this one, how do I pick myself up and dust myself off and move forward? And I think Jack, because these, and we've seen it in the last twenty-four months, the changes with AI, we can't train students quickly enough. We can't help faculty understand these technologies as quickly as they come out, but can we help them be more curious? Can we help give them the skills that allow them to be creative problem solvers, critical thinkers asking the right questions, ethical in how they're doing it? I think for us, that's a really interesting challenge because I think that's maybe at the heart of a liberal arts education, but it's also changing because of those technologies. And one of the things I am posing to my colleagues all the time is how do we redefine what learning is with this new co-creator of knowledge? And that's going to be, I haven't seen an answer to that yet. And so I think that's going to be a really interesting thing for us to take a look at. Leave. I'm curious to hear what you have to say.

Liv Gjestvang: No, well, I couldn't agree with you more about the kind of helping students be prepared to be successful. And it is, as you said, it's no longer about learning skills that they can take out and use that are discreet or platform or system oriented. It has to be about the transfer and the evolution of those skills as the world and the technology change. I think about, I would say there are two things that are really on my mind right now, and one comes back to the evolution of technology, ai ml, this rapid transformation is thinking about the role academic institutions play in bringing insight and critique and guidance and information about how do we navigate these sea changes. And I think there's a really important place right now for how do we as humans guide and the development of technology in ways that lean towards the ethical and lean towards the creating better outcomes for more people.

I mean, the technology is not going to, in and of itself create tend towards good or tend towards evil. It's how we apply it. And I think that the role that we have in institutions, certainly on the academic side, but I think in our roles here too, to be thinking about and really guiding those conversations and that in our culture is really important. And I was invited, and this was actually something I was really delighted about, to join a research. So we have funded research tables through an innovation center on campus, and I was invited by faculty colleagues in computer science and philosophy and communications to join a research table looking at for this coming academic year, looking at this space around academic freedom and concepts of truth, and also creating safe spaces for people to be able to both speak out but also not have it be destructive or threatening.

And so these are conversations we need to be having on campuses and then thinking about how we guide the application of technology in the world. So that's one thing that I think is exciting and a challenge. The other is just around workplaces. I think it is so critical that we create workplaces that are engaging, that are inspiring, where we can connect with each other, that people want to be, where work is a good place to be, and that we are setting up our workloads so that they're sustainable and people can live healthy lives that move back and forth between the professional and the personal responsibilities we have.

Cynthia Golden: I couldn't agree more.

Jack Suess: I was thinking that's where we end. But before we end, what do you do for fun? How do you, both the lax, how are you sort of managing both the stress and the challenges to be able to stay positive in a world where sometimes it feels like I've got more problems than solutions? So thoughts as to how you sort of stay on an even keel because both of you are amazing and have demonstrated this over the year. So I'm just sort of curious. Your secrets, Liv, go ahead.

Liv Gjestvang: I'll just start by normalizing a little bit and saying this is an ongoing struggle for me. And I was talking to a friend recently who had a baby and said, just know that in my experience of being a parent and a partner and a professional, in the best case scenario, I'm doing really great at home and things are going really well and usually work is flagging a little bit or I'm doing really great at work and there's some things that I am not managing at home. And it just to think that it's possible to keep all of that in full and easy flow is just not, hasn't happened for me. I would welcome the podcast where you all could delve into.

I think for me, I really love, I'm an introvert, so I need time, quiet time, and I like to have that with my family, but I also really love connecting with people. And I've had to, I've been thinking a lot about making sure I'm creating space for that because when I am overwhelmed, I tend to recede and I just know how important it's to have time with people. So I've been thinking I have a thirty-minute commute into work. On my way in, I've just been trying to shift my head. So if I'm thinking about my day, oh, I have these meetings and this I need to prepare, I try to think about what are the things I'm really excited about in my day and how can I shift my mindset from like, oh, I have to have these seven things ready for a conversation with the provost to rather say, I really like our provost and I'm excited to sit down with Kim and hear how she's doing.

And so that's one thing. The other thing is that I'm looking, because I have it on my shelf over here, I have this book called Two Minute Mornings and I have a friend who reminded me that I used to love to do it and that it fell to the side, but I've been getting up in the morning and lighting a candle or having a cup of coffee and this book, it has one page where I write something I'm letting go of today, something I'm grateful for, and then things I'll focus on. So I've just found that trying to frame myself just for a couple of minutes in the morning is really helpful to me.

Jack Suess: Jennifer?

Jennifer Sparrow: Yeah, so I am an extrovert, but Leave knows that we have a group of women that we're lovingly nicknamed the Teaching and Learning and mafia by one of our CIO colleagues. And so I think focusing on, again, those relationships, those places where whether your work life is great and your home life is maybe in need of someone to match all the socks for you in the clean laundry bag or vice versa. The home is great, but there's some minor fires at work burning that need some extinguishing or just some positive words. And so even Cynthia was in New York a couple weeks ago and we got to have dinner together. I think that's incredibly important. And I would agree with Liv. I don't have children at home anymore. I'm, I'm an empty nester. I have one home for the summer. I'm enjoying exploring New York. I have a spouse I've been married to for twenty-nine years, and there's a joy to be able to come back to what that looks like and enjoyed each other's time.

He works here at NYU as well. So I think we do spend, leave a little too much time talking about work at home. And so there are moments where it's like, okay, we have to say what is it that brings us joy and what do we want to be doing more of in our lives? And we're in this really interesting space to be able to do that. And so I think if you can surround yourself with people who take you at your best and your worst and encourage you when you're at your worst and encourage you when you're at your best, I think that's the way that I find balance and joy in the work that we do. And I've been lucky enough to find lots of those people.

Jack Suess: Well, I think that's a great place to probably close, but I want to say that I think that both of you bring just such a positive vibe. I'll use that word, that you're naturally going to be one that is helping to lift up others. And I think frankly, that's part of all of our responsibilities as leaders is to be able to be both accepting when others want to lift guests up and helping them be lifted up when they need it. And so I think that's just sort of a great place to be there. Cynthia, do you have any final thoughts?

Cynthia Golden: No, I just wanted to thank you both for joining us because I think what Jack said is true. You have a huge opportunity here to continue to be a great influence on the community. And I mean, so many good ideas came out of this conversation today that I'm sure people who are listening will think about and maybe try to implement on their own campuses. So thank you so much for joining us.

Liv Gjestvang: Thank you. And I just have to say in celebration of the integrative CIO concept that when I was looking at this role, I was talking to a higher ed colleague and friend because I have never thought that I actually would want to be a CIO. It felt like it combines a lot of the really hard and difficult things about our work and not enough focus on the funding. Great thing. And when I talked to him about this role that I'm in now, I just said I think that if Dennison is looking for someone who's focus is really on being an extremely technical leader who can lead the full breadth of our work and isn't looking for someone who has a deeper focus on relationships and trust building than I don't know that it's the role for me. And he's like, this is the moment to be thinking of the integrative CIO, right? It's the role that in our field as people who are bringing more to the space. So it's a nice call out and I really appreciate the focus you bring to this kind of orientation of a different kind of leader who can maybe lead in a different way.

Jennifer Sparrow: Yeah. I love that, Liv. Thanks.

Cynthia Golden: That's a wonderful way to end our Integrative CIO podcast.