Oral History Program Yasmen Simonian Interviewed by Ruby Licona 29 June 2015 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Yasmen Simonian Interviewed by Ruby Licona 29 June 2015 Copyright © 2015 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Weber State University Oral History Project began conducting interviews with key Weber State University faculty, administrators, staff and students, in Fall 2007. The program focuses primarily on obtaining a historical record of the school along with important developments since the school gained university status in 1990. The interviews explore the process of achieving university status, as well as major issues including accreditation, diversity, faculty governance, changes in leadership, curricular developments, etc. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Simonian, Yasmen, an oral history by Ruby Licona, 29 June 2015, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Yasmen Simonian June 29, 2015 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Dr. Yasmen Simonian, conducted by Ruby Licona on June 29, 2015. During the interview, Dr. Simonian discusses her education and background, her time at Weber State as faculty and as Dean of the Dumke College of Health Professions, and her teaching philosophies and plans for her college. RL: We’re meeting today with Dr. Yasmen Simonian who is the Dean of the Dr. Ezekiel R. Dumke College of Health Professions, and she’s also Presidential Distinguished Professor of Medical Laboratory Sciences, which is the reason we’re speaking with her today. Normally we interview people as they are retiring and leaving the campus, but I have a feeling you’re going to be with us for a while yet. Welcome and thank you for taking the time to come meet with us. YS: Thank you. My pleasure and honor. RL: We’re going to start out talking a little bit about background information and so forth. I know that you came here in 1981 and that you had just finished your bachelor’s and master’s at the University of Utah, and then later, in 1998, also did your doctorate there. Were you living in Utah before you went to school, or did you come to Utah specifically to go to school? YS: My family moved and came to Utah so we could get a better education. When I was living in Utah, I went to the University of Utah; I couldn’t afford to go anywhere else. I was a chemistry major. RL: Is that what your bachelor’s was in? 2 YS: No, I changed it. I was a chemistry major, but then I decided that I wanted to do research in medicine because my grandmother died of colon cancer. I wanted to do something to make a difference. So I said, “Okay, I can go into medical technology and see what happens after that.” I specialized in hematology oncology, which is cancer. At my graduation from the master’s program, Gary Nielsen, who was a faculty in clinical laboratory sciences (it’s called medical laboratory sciences now), said, “We have an opening, do you have a job?” I said, “Yes, I have a job.” He said, “Well we need someone who knows hematology to come and teach.” That’s how I came to Weber. RL: You said your family moved to Utah so you could get a better education. They moved here from where? YS: From Iran. We’re Armenians from Iran and our ancestors were moved from Armenia to Iran four hundred years ago. The Shah of Iran, Shah Abbas, went to Armenia and brought a lot of Armenians to Iran. He brought all these people and they were Christians and he said, “You can practice your Christianity, your religion, if you come and help and build the city.” It was a southern city, and the capital then. It was called Isfahan, and there were about thirteen churches and a cathedral, where my mom was born. They gave them an area, the “Julfa” Armenian area. Then my grandfather moved to Tehran, which is the current capital, and that’s how my mom and dad met. When my brother was born, my mom signed us up for immigration to the United States. My uncle, my mom’s brother, was going to Utah State. He graduated from Utah State University and he married a lady from Brigham and stayed. 3 RL: Well that’s the way it often happens, isn’t it? YS: Yes. RL: I know that in my dealings with you in the past, I know you speak several languages. You grew up with what, Farsi? YS: I grew up with Armenian at home, Farsi outside, and I went to a private school where they taught Arabic, so I had three years of Arabic. When I came to the United States I was in the tenth grade, so I didn’t know English grammar. In order for me to learn English I took Spanish. And what a beautiful language. RL: You’re quite adept at it. I know I’ve had discussions with you in the past. YS: And then we went to the Greek Orthodox Church because there isn’t an Armenian church, and I didn’t know what they were saying, so I took Greek. RL: I know you recently spent time in China. Did you pick up some Chinese also? YS: I can say “I don’t know what you’re talking about” and “Where’s the bathroom?” and “Feed me eggplant.” I love eggplant the way they make it. It’s really good. And I can imitate them really well. If somebody says something I can be a parrot and say it. RL: Well once you learn one or two languages you do develop an ear and your comment about learning English through Spanish, I know that I’ve found in the past that the more languages you study, the more grammar you study, the better you get to know your own. You just make those exchanges and translations and that makes a big difference. YS: Except now that I’m taking Greek, the language and the music sound like Spanish. So I’m getting them mixed up. I do half Spanish half Greek, and 4 everybody’s confused, plus me. Like quemar in Spanish means “burning,” but in Greek koimámai means “I’m sleeping,” so you don’t know if you’re burning or you’re sleeping. RL: Sometimes it may be both especially with the weather we’ve had recently. YS: That’s true, or hot flashes. So there’s lots of things like each other. RL: That’s quite a background for you. You came here as a sophomore in high school and of course were here long enough to go directly into the University. Did you just live at home to go to school? YS: I lived at home to get my bachelor’s degree. I worked all the way through my schooling. I worked in the biology department doing amino acid protein sequences, and I loved it. RL: Well that could only support your studies at the same time. YS: And I worked in the blood bank at University Hospital as a student. They offered me a job. It was a big thing; it was a big feather in my cap to be offered a job while still a student. RL: Did you work as a phlebotomist in the blood bank? YS: No, I was a technician. I did all the testing after the gathering. I did work as a phlebotomist also in the mornings. But I did testing, a type of cross-matching because I was almost finished with my degree. I was almost a technologist, a scientist we call them nowadays. RL: So they were getting a big bang for their money, because you had the experience and the background. 5 YS: They did. And then when I finished, my first love was hematology. And so I got a job in hematology doing research with Hodgkins and Non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I got what I wanted as far as the cancer research goes. We got papers published, went and gave presentations, worked with the physicians, got to work with patients. RL: You were doing undergraduate research before it was in vogue. YS: I loved meeting patients. And, although medical laboratory sciences doesn’t have a lot of patient contact, everything I did had something to do with patients. I wanted that. While I was doing that I was studying for my master’s. I finished my master’s and I was working at the time for the big names in medicine: Max Wintrobe, George Cartwright, and Harmon Eyre who eventually became the president of the American Cancer Society. Wintrobe and Cartwright started a medical school at University of Utah so I did work with them. They taught me hematology so it was like a carte blanche for me to work and be anywhere I wanted in hematology. RL: At Weber, was the School of Allied Health still part of the College of Arts and Sciences? YS: No, it split before I came. It was just School of Allied Health Sciences, and then later on it became College of Health Professions. Dean Reed Stringham was the founding dean. 6 I was always in School of Allied Health Sciences, and we were in building three, in the annex, everywhere. They gave me a little office. It was so little that I couldn’t open my door and the filing cabinet in the same time. It was a closet. RL: The good thing about the closets is they were quite often very well ventilated because if they had chemicals stored in there they had to be vented. YS: It was a little one. I had a desk and two filing drawers and one time I had about seven students in there. They were under the table, sitting on the cabinets, sitting on my table; we were reviewing. I couldn’t find another place because it was too busy and we were just sitting there and studying together. RL: Well when you got here you’d obviously been doing a lot of research at the University of Utah. What was your reaction to Weber, because it must have been quite different? YS: It was, because I had taught, but not in classrooms. I was a clinical faculty. I was teaching hematology fellows, medical students, and medical laboratory science students, and anyone else that wanted to do research in hematology. So I was very overwhelmed. Then I taught hematology and coagulation but I had help. I team-taught with Marie Kotter in coag. Hematology I was fine, I did it on my own and it was great. We had twenty-three students in there. My first class at Weber had about two hundred students in it. This class was under Health Sciences, and it was a general education class called Introduction to Medical Science. It had three different parts: careers in health care, communication and ethics, and medical terminology. I taught that, and the first time I stood there and I looked up and two hundred pair of eyes were looking 7 at me. I said, “What have I gotten myself into? What am I going to do?” Gary Nielsen helped me. We went to the bookstore together to buy things that my office would need; he just got me started. Everybody was wonderful. Kathleen Lukken, we were sharing the same building. So we had everybody. We had the dental hygienists and radiologic sciences and medical laboratory. Nursing was an annex so we didn’t deal with nursing, but I got to know the dental hygienists pretty well. We got so we could talk and brush and floss at the same time, and they got me in a really good habit. RL: Well now, two hundred students in a class, that’s quite different from the tradition here at Weber. YS: Yes, well it was, because it was general education and it was a foundation, or a beginning course for all of our majors. The students would decide if they wanted to go into emergency care and rescue, dental hygiene, medical records, all of the different things we had. It was the beginning foundation course for that. RL: Now are there still courses that size in the school? YS: Well we do have big ones in health sciences with our anatomy and physiology courses, the biomedical core that’s changed its name to anatomy, physiology. We have a lot of students in those courses, but then they get funneled into their majors. RL: Well I guess that’s the most efficient way of teaching the courses. YS: Yes, and then the smallest are the ones when they get into the programs. Nursing has the largest, but right now I teach one class in Master of Radiologic 8 Sciences on how to interpret laboratory values. It’s called clinical correlations and I have about twenty-three students in that one. RL: That’s more the size of traditional size classes on campus. You mentioned Kathleen Lukken and Marie Kotter as colleagues. They came at about the same time, didn’t they? YS: They were there before me. Marie was there in 1974 and Kathleen came right around that time because they were there a few years before I got there. Marie did a guest lecture at University of Utah when I was still a student. I met her there, and then she helped me with the coagulation course because my specialty was more hematology, not so much coag. But I got coag down and it’s wonderful. It’s easy to teach coag. RL: And you mentioned Nielsen as a mentor. YS: Gary Nielsen helped me. The best mentor I had was Kathleen Lukken. She helped me through all the processes and procedures here because I was hired in the tenure track. I got my tenure, I got my promotion, I did everything at the right time at the right moment, watching her. RL: She did a lot of that through the years. I think until she left WSU she was still holding the workshops teaching new faculty on how to set up their tenure files and so forth. YS: She did. She was there for me. She still is. RL: She’s there for a lot of us. Now, you’re speaking three women in allied health, but in the regular sciences there weren’t that many women, other than Helen James and Gloria Wurst. 9 YS: We had Geri Hansen in nursing, Joyce Wanta in respiratory therapy, and Ann Hackleman. RL: Other than the health sciences, I’m thinking that the campus was possibly still a little more patriarchal and that you might have women in education or in health sciences but as far as the other areas it was mostly men. YS: Yes, except for medical laboratory sciences they were a little bit more women, now they’re equal. We have equal numbers. RL: Things were still changing in the eighties from what I’ve seen of the faculty. As far as diversity, what was the campus like when you first got here? YS: The Seshacharis, Candadai and Neila, and Dr. Reddy were here. Priti Kumar came later I think. And that’s the closest. RL: What about the student body? YS: We had some more Japanese students from the Japan Airlines contract in the early nineties. RL: But there wasn’t the presence that there is now. YS: There were some Iranian students, more than there are now. RL: Did they seek you out? YS: Yes. In my whole entire thirty-four years of career here at Weber State, I had only two Armenians, several Iranians, I think I had maybe a couple African- Americans, and they were great. Then I’ve had second-generation; I’ve had kids of my students. RL: That one always brings you up short, doesn’t it? YS: Yes, that was really nice. 10 RL: I think I’ve even got one grandchild. That was startling. YS: I haven’t gotten there yet. I think I was going to get one but I haven’t gotten one yet. RL: I’ve had a few non-traditional students whose children then came along not too much after. Now in the late seventies and early eighties was when there was a push to start more faculty governance, and the faculty senate and so forth. Were you involved with the programs there, or did you stick mostly to your own program and stay out of politics? YS: No, I was on as many committees I could be on. I was very active. I remember going to the senate and listening to Dick Austin. I kind of admired him, but then I said, “Why is he talking so much?” But I knew where he was coming from and I learned a lot just listening. I was involved. But sometimes when we have the senate, people like to hear themselves. RL: When you came, as you said Dean Stringham was in your area. Was it still President Brady when you came? YS: In 1981? Yes. I had President Brady, Nadauld, Thompson, Millner, and now Chuck. That’s a lot of presidents. Ann Millner understood us immensely. RL: Well, of course, she came from that college. YS: She was a med tech. We have similar backgrounds, so she understood and she had a lot of expectations. She helped us be on the map with online. RL: Well her background was outreach and distance education and so forth. 11 YS: We had clinical laboratory sciences or medical laboratory sciences and we were the first to have totally online programs around the nation, even worldwide. We were also doing distance education. And that was one of Stringham’s big pushes; he had good vision. RL: Were you involved with outreach programs in-state and having to travel to present in your distance classes? YS: No, not as much as the online group when the online came. RL: That was more of a push in the nineties. YS: Yes. Rad sciences were really doing more distance learning. And nursing, we were in Alaska, in Soldotna and Sitka. We were all very proactive then. RL: And there were programs also in Wyoming and Montana? YS: In the four corners, everywhere. We’re everywhere now. Now I can’t even remember where the first place was. I had students in Guam and Hungary and Italy online. Wherever we had American bases, we had students. RL: Military outreach. That’s great. It certainly broadens pupils’ ability to get that education. YS: I know that we were examples for professional arena. We were teaching other people how to do what we do. And when we first started we were all weird according to other people; we were strange. Nobody is going to be educated the same way as we used to do traditionally, but they didn’t accept the way we do it. Now we’ve got people running the gamut. RL: Now we’ve got Western Governors University that has no classroom presence at all, and I know that in library science there are programs that were traditionally 12 classroom programs that now have no campus presence. They’re strictly online programs. YS: We paid for our first graduate to come to graduation. She was graduating and lived in Guam, she was coming to North Carolina. We brought her in, she stayed at my house and she went to graduation. She is on my facebook now. RL: Now these programs, were they part of a strategic development program for the college, or did they just kind of come along and happen? YS: I think Stringham had quite a bit of vision. It was his vision for us to be there and having Ann Millner as a VP for community outreach. RL: Well it was community outreach and later she went from community partnerships to university relations and then to university advancement, but her earlier positions with continuing education had more to do with that. As part of the health sciences, were you involved with any of the strategic planning in the early nineties? YS: Yes. RL: What were your impressions of the directions taken at that time? YS: I think some of the things that they were working on brought us where we are now. And I’m very proud of all our programs in allied health professions for every one of them is at least top ten, if not top three. And we’ve got top three in maybe four or five of them. Nursing is number seven or eight in the nation. And then radiologic sciences was number one a couple of years ago, and Johns Hopkins was second one down. And our medical laboratory sciences is either one or two. And respiratory therapy has a good reputation. Our pass-rates at national exams, 13 national boards for all of them is wonderful. I know all that because I had to do my annual report and that’s fresh in my head. And we have hospitals here that wait for our graduates. They hire our graduates and they wait for them to finish. They know when they will be done. RL: Well I know that there are students who wait to get into the program. YS: Nursing has a waiting list. We used to turn away about five hundred students and then we have our competition across the street that sits there and charges three arms and five legs. We have increased our nursing enrollment since. RL: I was appalled when I saw that starting up because it just seems that the program costs so much money. YS: It’s not necessary. They cost so much and then the students won’t make that much money to pay off their loans. We’ve also got the outreach programs at the ATCs, we are connected there. That has helped to get students through more reasonably. We take about a thousand nursing students a year. We start them at Ogden, Weber, Davis, Bridgerland ATCs and Salt Lake Community College. RL: Do the other programs also have that much of a presence on the ATC campuses, or is it mostly nursing? YS: It’s mostly nursing, but we have MLA (Medical Laboratory Assistant). But we have programs everywhere else. Physically, we’re there. RL: When did you come to be Dean? YS: 2008. Before me was Stringham, Lydia Wingate, Marilyn Harrington, and Shelley Conroy. And we had a couple of interim associate deans, Ken Johnson is my 14 associate dean. Before that I was department chair at medical laboratory sciences for twelve years. And then I was a faculty. RL: The early strategic planning programs I know when I came here there was a big hurrah because we had just reached ten thousand students, and now we’re at twenty-five thousand? YS: Twenty-five thousand plus. When I first came it was eighty-seven hundred. And then it was nine and ten thousand and it kept going up and up. And then we developed all those masters; we have three programs in our college (MHA, MSRS, MSN) and respiratory therapy on its way. We have a master’s of nursing, administration education, and now family practice. We have FNP, family nurse practitioner. RL: Oh that’s wonderful. YS: Yes, it’s coming to the Regents end of July. RL: Politically around the state are there problems with developing those programs here? YS: Well we have to talk with them and we have to let them know what we’re doing and communicate. The University of Utah has DNP, the doctorate of nurse practitioner, but ours is a master’s (FNP). RL: I know when I first came here, we only had three masters programs on campus, and there was always the feeling that we were going to be held back because of politics more than anything, but I guess there’s enough call for programs like that then. 15 YS: Our radiologic sciences master’s (MSRS), we’re number six in the nation, the sixth one that was started. We don’t have any competition in Utah for that. Respiratory therapy we’ll be number eight in the nation, there’s nothing west of the Mississippi. RL: Have most of these then started under your direction? YS: Nursing was almost in its place but the family nurse practitioner is when I was here. The master of radiologic sciences was during my time and masters of health administration was already there. So it was health administration, nursing, radsci, and now respiratory therapy. RL: That’s wonderful. And that certainly makes it easier for students to be able to get an education in-state. YS: And our next move, hopefully, is physician’s assistant; that’s what I want to do before I retire. We’ll see how long that will take. If I can get a new building and maybe either partner with the University of Utah physician’s assistant or just start ours because our students want to go into that. RL: Can we do that without a medical school? YS: Yes. All we need is clinical rotation areas and we have that. RL: Well if the hospitals are waiting for our students in existing programs I would imagine there would be some help. YS: They would, they will help us. We have graduates working at all of the hospitals and clinics. RL: The health sciences would be where most of our growth has been. And you’ve been pleased with the direction of which things are going? 16 YS: Yes. I remember when I started, the MLS program had about max twenty-three graduates. And now we have a hundred and seventy-five, just from that department. We graduated I think seventeen hundred in May; it’s about thirty percent of Weber’s graduates. RL: Has the college been able to grow in terms of faculty as well as numbers of students? YS: Yes. We have been supported well. We have had donor funds, endowment money, and we have had administration help us because we need it. So they have been very supportive but it’s not enough. We still need more as we grow. We don’t have enough space, we don’t have enough faculty, and we need equipment because they are very expensive. Those are my three big worries every year. RL: When you first arrived, there wasn’t a whole lot of diversity as far as the faculty, but you said there were a few students going through. Are you seeing greater numbers now? YS: In students yes, in faculty no. I wish we could recruit more. We have help from Intermountain to recruit minority students. In nursing they really want us so they gave us scholarships for that. And we have been talking to Adrienne Gillespie Andrews and we’ve been talking to whomever we can talk about recruiting and doing it soon, going to elementary and middle schools, recruiting them early. RL: Well we’ve certainly got a lot more in student services now going in that direction, so has that helped to funnel more students in your area? 17 YS: That has helped, but in faculty I do not have a lot of variety. As far as the students when I came here, I think we had more diversity when we had international students. We used to have more groups of international students. RL: We had programs like the Japan Airlines and so forth. We had more of those kinds of things happening. But I’m not sure if those were political changes or just money problems that developed. Have you noticed changes over the years in the level of maturity and sophistication of the students? YS: As far as the multimedia, as far as maturity goes, it depends on the age of the students. RL: Well we do have some non-traditional students. YS: I think we have to work very hard to get them to be more passionate, compassionate about patients. We have to work on students so they are able to communicate without using their phones. I would like to check everybody’s iPhones and put them away when they come in. But then they look up things. It’s a good thing and a bad thing in the same time. It’s a blessing and a curse because they can look things up. They can find things easier. They can do things easier. But we need to work on their communication and interpersonal skills more. RL: As far as interpersonal interaction? YS: Interpersonal interaction and as far as dealing with patients and compassion. You know they do everything, they can do electronic medical records, and they can do the latest, newest things. They can look up PDR (Physicians’ Desk Reference) and look at medications, they can look at drug interactions just like 18 that. But to hold somebody’s hand and look at their eyes and see their skin and see if it’s dry or sweaty, that makes a big difference in patient care and we have to work hard to remind them of doing that. RL: Well, and then the cultural aspect of it. Teaching them to introduce themselves when they walk into a patient’s room; that goes a long way in creating a certain level of acceptance and comfort. YS: Yes. My mentor at the U Med. Ctr., Dr. Cartwright used to say, “Look at your patient. Look at them. You can get so much from them.” I could look at somebody and see if they have kidney problems. Look at them and see if they have hypothyroidism. I can look and see if they’re anemic or not. Just looking at them, without even having to do any lab tests first. Our generation now doesn’t know that and we have to work hard and the people who are teaching them are all younger too. And what would you do if you don’t know how, and didn’t have imaging, if you didn’t have a laboratory, you didn’t have all this, can you still figure out what your patient has? No. RL: How can that be approached and overcome? YS: Well, clinicals. You know, you give up something but you bring in something. You’ve got all this new technology that nobody had before. But you just have to talk to the students, you just have to remind them about compassion and care of patients. When somebody close to them gets sick, then they see it. RL: This whole technology bent, I was reading something last week about a study that was done on little boys and those that were spending more time in front of a screen had weaker bones, because they were not getting the use and action. 19 YS: Yes, physically it can be like that. But those who played Atari and all these games are better surgeons. They can do robotics, they can move their hands faster, they know what to do, and they’re not afraid of projecting what their hands can do with the robotics. So, it balances. There’s good and there’s bad. RL: You’re receiving the Presidential Distinguished Professor designation. That‘s quite an accomplishment. YS: First woman. I was the first woman here at Weber. RL: Well I know that previously they had had different awards that were separate. They had scholarship, they had service, and there’s been more of an emphasis on campus in the last few years as far as research and publication but as you say you were the first woman to receive that designation? Was it a complete surprise or was it something you were working towards? Was it just an overall picture of your accomplishments? YS: I think it was a little bit of a surprise. I love to teach and I loved to be with my students, and I use a variety of teaching methods. They rewarded me for what I loved to do. If I didn’t get it, it would be okay too, but it was great and it was an honor. RL: But your momma was proud. YS: Oh, she was crying. RL: I know. I remember when we had the reception and she was just so proud. YS: I was crying. RL: As far as what you’ve been able to accomplish since you came here, what are the things that stand out to you? I mean, as dean, helping to develop the 20 master’s programs, that has to be good but are there little successes that stand out in your mind, are there students that stand out? YS: Oh yes. Oh, so many. I have graduates who are department chairs and CEOs of companies and are physicians or PAs or veterinarians, they’re everywhere. RL: Do they come back to see you? YS: Yes. I had a student that emailed me, “Yas, do you have the recipe?” This was like thirty years ago. “Do you have the recipe of that cake you made that had oranges on it? Do you remember how to make that? I would like the recipe.” And she still remembers the taste of it. What is important to me, what I think I did is make a difference in people’s lives and they can still remember. When they run into problems or trouble, they call me. They send me a picture of a cell, “What do you think this is?” No, look at all these instruments. We’ve got a quarter million dollars, half a million, two million dollar instruments that you can run the thing through and figure it out. They ask, “What do you think this is?” Or, “What should I do with this?” Or at night, they know they can call me at night. These are students, they’re graduates, they’re graduated and they’re calling me and asking my opinion. One of my graduates is the CEO of a big company that’s competition to ARUP and he is in charge of the whole thing. And he’s one of the students that had no patience, and I would not take his test until he sat down and read it over again before he’d give it to me. I support my department chairs in the Dumke College of Health Professions, and some of them have better ideas and better vision than I can ever think. Collectively, they are so capable. And my feeling is I’m there, I 21 support them, I try to get funds for them. When it makes sense and we’re doing things, I’m there for them and they know that. We’re the first in the nation to have dental hygiene work with radiologic sciences. They’re working together in a 3D cone beam CT scanner which can produce and print 3D. With dental hygiene, students can work on three dimensions with dentures with crowns and with teeth and reconstructive kind of things and rad science students are teaching them and they’re learning from each other. That is the most ideal thing, and it’s a source of pride to be able to be there and see it the first time. We’re first, and that’s because I have department chairs who think, I have faculty who care, I have people who can look at things and say we can do better. And my role is to support that or to find ways or to talk about them. Those are the kinds of things that are happening now. The other great happening is students who come back and pay it forward. RL: Do you have any students who have come back as faculty members? YS: Yes. Many. Many. RL: That’s also a feather in the cap, isn’t it? YS: Yes. More than half of the MLS faculty department is our graduates. I think maybe just one, I think one of them came from out of state from where one of my friends was the department chair and he came because she said go to WSU. But everyone else is our own graduates. In radsci, some of the department faculty are our own graduates. Another thing we do is when we have faculty that come in with a masters, we help them. We help them with their tuition to get their PhD, their doctorate. 22 RL: Do you get donor help for that? YS: Yes. We have donor funds that help us with that. Each faculty get twenty-thousand for the whole span of their education. RL: Does that help to build the programs? YS: Yes, because if we don’t pay enough and we have to grow our own, it’s hard to attract. You know our reputation is wonderful but our salary isn’t. It’s very difficult to attract faculty from other places to come, because they make more up in the field than what we pay. That’s my biggest problem, not being able to find faculty and we do find them and we tell them how much we’re going to pay, they say, “What?” So we have to do something about this. RL: And they think you’re kidding. YS: Yes. We have to work on our salary. Our reputation keeps us, keeps them, but it’s difficult attracting people from other places. We do have unique programs and our own students know it better, but diversity would be nice too. RL: Dividing your career here at Weber, just as a faculty member and as a dean, as a faculty member what would you rate as your biggest accomplishments? YS: Helping students do undergraduate research and have them present, and present nationally and publish their work. RL: That has been a big thing, getting undergraduate research programs here on campus. YS: Yes, it serves a lot of purpose. It teaches them to be a team. It involves the faculty more outside of what they normally do. It makes the students stretch a 23 little, it makes them feel grown-up, and it makes them different than other undergraduate people in our arena. RL: It certainly adds to their resumes. YS: Not only do they have to do IRBs (Institutional Review Board), but they have to do literature search first and then IRBs and get it approved and then get funding, and then maybe go on with our clinical connections, partners, to see if there’s anything they would like. They help them do research. We’ve partnered with ARUP and Intermountain and Ogden Clinic, Ogden Regional, everywhere. We do research with healthcare partners when they can’t do it, short term research. They have a whole year to do it. They start with their literature search and everything else and then the end product is national acknowledgement. As a faculty, teaching what I know the best way I know and getting the students interested, giving them appetizers so they can go for the full course. That’s what I like. I like helping the students be lifetime learners. RL: Having them digest what they encounter. YS: Yes, they don’t forget. I teach using food analogies and metaphors, because somebody said, “People pay more attention to money, sex and food.” Sex I get in trouble if I talk about it, money nobody’s got, not really, and so we’re stuck with the food. One time we had a party and the students made donuts with all the different inclusion bodies of a red cell. They made different sizes of donuts. One they put jelly in it, it was Howell-Jolly bodies and the other one they sprinkled things and it was RNA (ribonucleic acid) remnants. I teach blasts, the embryonic cells as if it’s smooth like bologna, it’s a new cell. And if you have pepperoni or 24 salami you’ve got parachromatin and chromatin. Or if it’s a lymph it’s a whole new potato, if it’s a monocyte it’s a potato chip. And they would look and they would say, “No it’s a potato.” They would talk to each other like that. “Oh okay, it’s a lymph.” And they still say stuff like that to me. RL: They learn it. YS: Yeah, they have it. So anyway, I love it. RL: And how involved are the classes as far as the community outreach programs and so forth? YS: Midtown Clinic, it’s us. It’s our students. Our dental hygiene, nursing, medical laboratory sciences and some of the health administrations, we’re all over. RL: I know that I’ve seen figures each year about how many hours students on campus donate to the community and how many millions of dollars that saves the community. YS: It was like three hundred thousand hours of community work. RL: Even if they were having to pay minimum wages for that, which they aren’t, how much have they saved? YS: Yes three or four hundred thousand hours. And then their clinicals they don’t get paid for that either. So between community work, clinical rotations, and volunteering and requirements, we run the place. RL: As a dean, what do you consider your greatest accomplishment? YS: Other than starting new programs and being open and getting money, working well with my chairs. For them to trust me, and knowing that what you see is what you get. I don’t have any hidden agenda except what’s best for us and for the 25 community and for our students. I feel good that they trust me and they support me too. But bringing in money is very important, naming a few things that are in the works. I will be very happy when that happens, and I think it will. RL: Now in either capacity, as a faculty member or as dean, are there things that you would go back and do differently? Are there any regrets or things that you missed? YS: I wish I was a dean a couple years before I became a dean. It’s not my regret, but I wish that it had happened and we would not have lost an opportunity, given my predecessor. But no regrets really. I would do everything the same, maybe do it faster. Maybe be more involved when the rules were coming down from the Regents saying this and that, I would be in the forefront holding a flag and asking questions. I’d be more of a rebel. I am a rebel, but I would show it more. I wasn’t the senior person to do it. I’m not afraid now. Nothing scares me except the way people drive. RL: Salt Lake has shorter commutes than just about any other city in the country. As you said, thirty-four years. That’s a long time on campus. YS: I wouldn’t take anything back. RL: Can you give me a three minute overview encapsulation of your time here at Weber? What you’ve accomplished, what were the near misses, were there slight changes that would have made a big difference? YS: It’s a great place to work. Its wonderful administration supports you for what you want to do. They have rewarded me for all the things I love to do. I would have done it anyway. I would have liked to have the same opportunity as the School of 26 Business when all the faculty salaries were a lot higher than the College of Health Professions. If I was the dean at the time, I would have fought for equity. We’re just as needed outside as the rest. That’s one thing that still to this day bugs me. Our faculty is kept in CUPA (College and University Professional Association for Human Resources), and we’re always eighty-five percent or less, and I think our college is kept less than that. Because CUPA is a generalized way of measuring and if you look at the statistics from our professional organizations, we are all very underpaid. And that is something that I would like to remedy before my retirement if I can to at least bring them up. RL: So you’re saying that you feel that you’ve been rewarded for the things that you’ve accomplished, but the other faculty have not necessarily. YS: I have been rewarded by awards, not by funding. I would like our salaries to be up higher. When the going was good and the salaries were being evaluated, I don’t know how they did it so there’s such a big difference between the faculty salaries in the School of Business versus our college, or other places. I feel like that needs to be fixed. That’s one complaint I have. RL: But other than that you think it’s a pretty darn good place. We’ve covered quite a few things. Any last thoughts that you would like to express? YS: I have been approached by headhunters, by presidents, by other organizations and I’ve been offered many jobs that make a lot more than I do here. And I’ve chosen to stay here because I love it here. I love Utah and I love Weber State. I had the same job offer at University of Utah when I was department chair. And I 27 said no, this is great. I drive ninety miles a day. But I come here and I never said I don’t want to go to work. In thirty-four years. How many people can say that? RL: You get up in the morning and you’re excited about coming. YS: Yes. RL: Then I doubt that it will ever get to the point where you don’t want to come. YS: No, it won’t happen. This is a great place to work. We’re the unsung heroes, no one says enough about us. But we have wonderful programs. We have outstanding products with the seal of approval. We don’t have easy programs. We don’t let them out unless the degrees are earned. RL: Well thank you for taking the time to talk with us. YS: My pleasure. Thanks for the opportunity. I can talk forever. RL: I appreciate all of your service to Weber and everything that you’ve accomplished. YS: Thank you. RL: Thank you.