Professor Spotlight: Dr. Elizabeth Metcalf

In Episode 70, Confluence talks with Dr. Elizabeth Metcalf, the Joel Meier Distinguished Professor of Wildland Management and Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Affairs at UM. Dr. Metcalf shares about her past research in recreation conflict, her current work in developing recreation plans with rural Montana communities, and how UM has changed over the past decade.

Story Transcript

Ashby Kinch: This is Confluence where great ideas flow together, a podcast of the Graduate School of the University of Montana. On Confluence, we travel down the tributaries of wisdom and beauty that enrich the soil of knowledge on our beautiful mountain campus.

Student Voices:

Ada Smith: Libby has an incredibly big heart. She cares about her students in all aspects of their life and I really admire that. I'd love to cultivate a lab family like that someday for myself.

Michelle Terwilliger: Libby has a unique way of kind of seeing where her students are, where they need to go. On top of it all, she's really fun and if it's not fun, it's not really worth doing. And she'd be the first one to say that.

You just heard the voices of Ada Smith and Chelle Terwilliger, graduate students in UM’s program in Natural Resource Conservation, talking about our guest on this week’s episode, Dr. Elizabeth Metcalf, whom we all call Libby.

I'm your host, Ashby Kinch, Dean of the Graduate School, and I’ll be guiding your sonic float.

We’re delighted to share our conversation with Libby, who is Joel Meier Distinguished Professor of Wildland Management, and faculty in the programs in Society and Conservation and Wildlife Biology. She was also recently named Senior Associate Dean for undergraduate affairs, and has made a big impact on the University of Montana in a number of areas since joining us at UM in 2010.

Every episode, we ask our guests to read a poem, or a short passage from literature, about rivers. Libby loves Jane Austen, the towering figure of the early 19th century novel, so we’ve asked her to read a landscape description from Emma. But listeners will also get to hear us discuss a passage from Pride and Prejudice, which helps launch our conversation about her research interests in the social values people attribute to landscape, and the emergence of leisure and travel as anchors of modern ideas about the good life. Listeners will hear her Montana story, as well as her thoughts on graduate education, including the important role she plays as a mentor to female graduate students.

Welcome to Confluence, where conversation follows “the close and handsome curve” of the river.

PASSAGE:

LIBBY METCALF:

This passage is from Jane Austen’s Emma:

"It was a sweet view sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive…[leading to] a view at the end over a low stone wall with high pillars, which seemed intended, in their erection, to give the appearance of an approach to the house, which had never been there. Disputable, however, as might be the taste of such a termination, it was in itself a charming walk, and the view which closed it extremely pretty. The considerable slope, at nearly the foot of which the Abbey stood, gradually acquired a steeper form beyond its grounds; and at half a mile distant was a bank of considerable abruptness and grandeur, well clothed with wood; and at the bottom of this bank, favorably placed and sheltered, rose the Abbey-Mill Farm, with meadows in front, and the river making a close and handsome curve around it.” (EMMA, 3, 6)

Welcome to Confluence, Libby.

Thank you.

I'm super excited you chose the Jane Austen passage. She's incredible, right? An amazing novelist. Not exactly of the taste today. So that says something, that you're interested in it. And I've wasted this passage from Emma on you because it has the river there at the end, and we talk about rivers here, but the two are related and that they're kind of quintessential examples of this 19th century obsession and British culture with landscape, which I think we should talk about in the picturesque. And she's pretty restrained. Normally. Jane Austen. There's not a lot of nature. She's talking mostly about human psychology and relationships, and so it's kind of neat to think about her a little bit like a landscape writer, which wasn't her main thing. But there's this way in which her experience of that landscape at Pemberley plays this role in her conversion to Darcy. That got me thinking in a different way about that novel in terms of landscape and the connection to place. So would you mind kind of reading that passage and then talk about why you chose it?

This is a passage from Pride and Prejudice:

"Oh, my dear, dear aunt," she rapturously cried, "what delight! what felicity! You give me fresh life and vigor. Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are young men to rocks and mountains? Oh! what hours of transport we shall spend! And when we DO return, it shall not be like other travelers, without being able to give one accurate idea of anything. We WILL know where we have gone--we WILL recollect what we have seen. Lakes, mountains, and rivers shall not be jumbled together in our imaginations; nor when we attempt to describe any particular scene, will we begin quarreling about its relative situation.” (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 27)

I chose it because I think it does a really good job of kind of summarizing the things that I think about every day, which is how people travel, how people connect with the landscape. And it's done in a place that I think is just beautiful. I've never been to England. Just full disclosure. If you talk that's interesting.

So you say it's beautiful, but it's, like, beautiful in your literary imagination rather than in reality. That's interesting.

All I want to do is go on hikes across the English countryside, so I'm always taking –

In Victorian dress?

Any dress, really. My husband thinks this is maybe not the most optimal vacation for us, but it is a dream that I have. And just the idea of the landscape was so much part of how that moment in time was connected with people, was connected with what they did in their free time. It also happens to coincide with kind of the rise of kind of leisure in society. And so if you know anything about me, I study parks, tours and recreation management. And so we can talk about the leisure class. And there was some really exceptional literature and science that came out around the leisure class. And so I've had this fascination with how people spend their free time and when they're spending their free time outdoors. What does that look like? I think Jane Austen paints the picture of how that leisure class was kind of idling around outside.

It's such rich content and everything you just said, let's unpack a little bit of that one being the passage in particular. She's excited to go on a voyage to leave behind things that are vexing her. So that psychological dimension. But then you're adding this class dimension, which is the leisure class. People who are able to make that kind of trip in early 19th century England are, of course, wealthy, but they're in this particular this group is in this particular middle class zone where they're not traditional aristocratic families, but they've made their money. More recently, some of them made that money off of the rising industrial economy. As I've been thinking about this back and forth in your work and leisure and tourism. It's the rise of leisure tourism. It's the rise of travel on the continent where the English families will kind of do a tour of the continent. But it's also the rise of industrialization which is ruining some of these exact landscapes. So that same motif is showing up in Wordsworth, his poems about the river Y and the cataract view of a waterfall being destroyed by industrialization in the background. So there's a kind of an interesting tension there between the desire to kind of be outdoors in these picturesque spots, but then the push away is pushing away from this rising industrial world.

Yeah, it's kind of interesting. I like that kind of that tension that you just described. During these times, we saw the fight for free time with industrial workers. We saw an advocacy for human rights and workers rights. And so I think for me, when I think about recreation, when I think about leisure and I think about Jane Austen and how she describes it, they all kind of mix together for me. And to me, it's one of these first kind of modern stakes in the ground that we deserve and we demand time for ourselves and time to experience these outdoor places.

Let's talk a little bit more about leisure because that's what a pregnant concept. Historically, I was trained as a classicist, so we always do etymology. The Latin word for leisure is OTM, otium, and it's opposite is negotiam. That's the word that gives us negotiation. And so there's this in Roman thinking about leisure. It's the thing that people who have wealth and can afford not to be in negotiating business world get to have. But then Roman writers are always talking also about how leisure is a corrupting influence that could tell us the great Roman poet will talk about how Odium is destroying him because in his downtime, when he's not busy, all he does is think about his terrible personal life and how it's going straight. Right. So do some of those tensions play out in kind of the way people think about leisure and the more modern world, about kind of moralizing problems around leisure and downtime?

Yes, it's kind of funny. It's like, we need enough leisure time, but not too much leisure time, I think about your children, right. How much downtime do you really need and what kind of trouble we've been doing?

Well, COVID has put that really right in front and center.

And so there is a tension there, and then there are folks who turn towards kind of more deviant forms of leisure, whether that be things like gambling, drug use. And so there are some tensions there around how much free time is too much free time. Right. But for me, the basic principle is that we as a society, we deserve our free time, and we deserve to figure out the right and healthiest ways to get outside. And I orient all my research towards outdoor spaces. Other leisure theorists across the nation don't. They might be thinking about more built environments, but for me, I think it really starts with spending time outdoors.

Yeah, let's pivot to that. How did you kind of come into that interest in that sort of research interest? Where does it come from in your background, and how is it evolved for you?

Oh, wow, Ashby. This is like we're going to go down, like, the road.

That's what we're here. It's what we do on Confluence. We go down the road, the river.

The river. Really? Well, it started on a role.

We're going upstream, I guess. Yeah.

Well, when I was in high school and my mother and father really wanted me to spend my free time productively.

Well, see, now that's another one, though, right? Productive free time. Isn't that a contradiction in terms?

My mom put me in, like, we had a youth agency, and she put me in all the outdoor programs. My parents do not like the outdoors. I mean, they appreciate it. They come out to Montana, but they're not hikers. And so there's this whole theory that if your parents do something outdoors, you're more likely to do it outdoors. I didn't have that, but I was in these after school programs where we went caving and hiking, and we did rock climbing, and I just fell in love with it. And through college, I just continued to backpack. I went to a small state school in New Haven, so it was pretty urban, and I found a niche of friends in my major that we all enjoyed going outside. And so I started working with wilderness programs and just working with adjudicated youth and bringing them outdoors. And that love just developed and grew.

Of course, at the time, you would have seen that as lifestyle. You wouldn't have necessarily seen it as a thing to study. Right. But that starts to emerge probably for you, I think. So many professors, one of the things we do on this podcast is talk about the professor's life and how it unfolds. And so many professors, just to be reductive about it, they find the thing that they love and they make a career out they figure out. So in my case, I would be reading books, right? Who wouldn't want to read books for a living? It sounds amazing, right? So you kind of have that naive first sense that if I could just keep doing this, wouldn't that be great? Did you have something like that? It took you to West Virginia? Eventually.

Yeah, I definitely had that. I like being outdoors. I want to do that forever. And my other undergrad degree was in communications and so I really liked people and so if I can mix people in the outdoors.

That's a perfect combo.

It was. And so I thought for certain that I wanted to be an interpretive ranger. I wanted to work for the Park Service and I was looking at grad programs in West Virginia University, had a professor who is working on interpretation and so I went to go study with him. He still remains a close colleague of mine, but I abandoned him really quickly when I got to WVU and worked with another major faculty member and on work related to the national forest and how visitors experience national forests. And I just fell in love with research and collecting data and working outdoors.

Did you have kind of, I don't know, epiphany about research on a particular project where you turn and saw research as the angle as opposed to, I mean, interpretive park ranger would have some research components in it, but it wouldn't be like the central drive. So did you have a kind of research epiphany?

Yeah, I did. My very first winter, I was at Diamond Lake, Oregon. We were collecting data on the intersection of cross country skiing and snowmobiling and it was like conflict study.

Yeah, I would say so.

Actually, I went there with my major professor from Penn State University, it was the first time I met him. I got on this plane with him and we went to Oregon to collect data and we spent five or six days in like 3ft of snow interviewing people about their experiences with recreation conflict up at Diamond Lake. And it was amazing. I loved being talking with people about their recreation experiences. I liked learning how to take the data we were collecting and translating that into findings and analysis. And it was just a different kind of approach to what I had been used to.

Yeah. So in terms of your journey, you had decided somewhere between at Western Virginia maybe the park ranger thing is a thing I want to do further graduate school. So that led you to Penn State? This PhD program. And that's so interesting that I grew up in the west, but it was Texas before I moved to Montana. I didn't realize I had never encountered the cultural divide around the outdoors like you encounter here. And it's coded. But I started seeing the residents in that early study that you did.

Yeah. It's funny because I don't really study recreation conflict anymore, but I teach it in my classes. And so we just went over this section and it's essentially goal interference attributed to another person. And I always tell my students, recreation conflict isn't about like, throwing punches on the trail. That's not what it is. It tends to be a social values differentiation. What you are doing on the landscape, I just fundamentally don't agree with. And that's where we see those tensions and those value structures are against each other.

But as a skier, you're a skier too. I was out at Lolo Peak on Sunday with my son. We climbed it, and on our way at Lolo, we stopped to get gas and there's two guys in a snowmobile, and I went over and had a 15 minutes talk with them about snow conditions. It was awesome. They gave me a report from the high country. So I think there are places where people can find that commonality. Right. I don't have to see their use of that space as an invasion of my space, even though I'm doing it differently.

That's exactly right. And I think one of my kind of basic premises and fundamental values that I have in all my classes and the research I do is that everyone should have access to the outdoors regardless of your mode, regardless of your abilities. And so there are commonalities and there are ways to actually reduce conflict. It's simply trailheads. It's actually keeping people away from each other.

Right. Separate entrances.

That's right.

And you see that like in the Bob Marshall, the horses come up one side of the lake, the hikers on the other side.

That's exactly right. And that's literally one of the best management tools we have, is just like separate and then let them join up in the recreation areas. We also know that there's like kind of 10% on either side of each group that maybe might cause more problems for others. And so we traditionally see that with motorized recreation, there's a few bad apples that might ruin it for everybody else. I try to temper against that. It's not that all motorized recreation is bad. There might be a few bad apples in there.

Yeah. So we're in this just because it's fun to talk about, but it isn't your primary research area anymore. So you did your PhD there at Penn State. What's your Montana story? How did you end up here? Aside from it being incredible place to live? I'm sure that's part of the story. But how did that work out for you? How did you end up here?

Yeah, I was a faculty member in the college, was visiting Penn State, and I remember very distinctly I was sitting in this really cool bar at Penn State called Xenos, and it's downstairs and it's like kind of all stone inside and super like almost like a little grotto.

Xenos, as in the famous Greek philosopher, the arrow that never reaches a target because it's 50% reduction. What a great bar. No, when you drink there, do you never get drunk because you're 50% less impact on your inebriation. What a great bar. So you're down in Xenos. What a scene. This is awesome.

I know. And his name was Bill Bori. Some of you might know him. He went back to Australia and he just sat next to me. And I remember talking to him and he said, would you apply for a job at University of Montana? And I said, Well, Bill? Yeah. And when the announcement came out, he sent it to me and I immediately applied. And it's kind of a wild story because there was one other person who was granted an on-campus interview and it happened to be my best friend.

Oh, wow.

I know. And he's a fantastic professor at Utah State.

So it worked out for him.

It did work out.

Might not have, but it did.

It did. And he wasn't the nicest and kindest humans, but yeah, I interviewed and it was actually a teaching position. I hadn't finished my PhD. I was writing my dissertation, and I remember asking my major advisor if I should apply for the job. And he says, well, yeah, Libby, I don't have any more funding for you.

Good idea. Yeah.

So I got the job and I haven't looked back.

So from that teaching position, when you were done, you're able to kind of roll that into a tenure track position and then here you are. And since you've been here, how has that shaped describing West Virginia? Maybe West Virginia is a big outdoor recreation area. There are a lot of places in Pennsylvania where that's the case as well. But compared to Montana, where the landscape is large and this is such a huge part of our lifestyle that must have impacted your research and the kinds of questions and issues that you are going to address.

Yeah, that's a great question because I learned really quickly that to study recreation in an isolated way was not viable. In Montana, everything is connected. So recreation is connected to the ecological and biological resources around us. It's connected to the small and rural communities that are in Montana. It's connected to issues around what I study on the Clark Fork River, around legacy mining and super funds. I just learned that my kind of view and lens was too small and I needed to expand how I thought about issues and thought about recreation within those issues.

Yeah. And one more I'll add to your list, I guess, which is again, new for me to think about, is the way in which the forestry industry reshaped this landscape so much. And you can kind of view that through the negative lens of the forestry practices that may have been contributing to larger fires, but they also build all these roads. And these roads are we're using them every day for our recreation? I'm riding my bike on them literally almost every day in the summer. So there's that paradox where and I remember it's been a while since we've had a flare up around roadless rules. But the roadless rules debates get pretty heated around here about who you build them, who gets access to them.

Yeah, it's so connected. Forestry industry is a great example. You can't talk about forestry and not talk about recreation and vice versa. Those things are intimately tied. Whether it's be roads, whether it be just view sheds, whether it be the places that Montana's love to recreate at and what the condition of those places are. Have they been restored? Is there a fire that's come through them? So they're all connected?

Yeah. What do you think when you sort of look at your career so far and kind of where you are going ahead, what do you see right now as having been your biggest contribution?

You asked me this question ahead of time and I think I had a really bad example. It's such a funny it's so hard to reflect on your career and say, what are my big contributions?

What are you proudest of? It wouldn't even necessarily have to be impact, but what are you proudest of in terms of what you think you did, what you accomplished in it?

Yeah, when I think about what I'm doing around recreation right now, it's what I love. I'm currently working with two small communities, Columbia Falls and White Sulfur Springs, on how they become a more resilient recreation landscape. How do they plan for recreation for the future? And it pairs together the things I love, which is working with rural communities, working with people and helping them reconceptualize themselves for a better future. And it's just fulfilling work. It's impactful work and it helps them stay connected and get the resources they need to plan.

Tell me more about how something like that unfolds. Do they reach out to you? You reach out to them. What's the point of contact? What's the kind of entity that you're dealing with?

Yeah, so this is some work I'm doing with the Forest Service and a group in Whitefish called Montana Access Project. And we were sitting around maybe four years ago and we said we need to help communities plan for recreation. And so we worked with the Forest Service to get an initial small grant. We've been using that small grant and we reached out using our contacts to a couple of key communities just to see if they'd be interested in some planning. And we developed a kind of a planning structure for them and it involves getting a core group of community members together, thinking about all the documentation they already have in their communities and then pulling all of these things together in a kind of a multi month process to help them develop a recreation plan. At the end, our hope is that they take these plans and they go after Land and Water conservation funds. We hope that they apply for grants with the EPA. We hope that they're applying for all sorts of funding sources from private agencies to help them realize their outdoor recreation potential.

So you're kind of giving them a process to go through to kind of come out with a model for themselves of what they want to see and then enable them to go off and actually do the work themselves.

Yeah, that's exactly right. It's not the work that is the most theoretically interesting that I do. It's not like the kind of ivory tower academic work.

No. It's the roll up your sleeves and get something done type.

That's right.

Yeah. And I like the way you put that in terms of you can see it work, you can see it work out over an immediate timeline. That kind of impact, I guess, is satisfying.

Yeah, it is.

A key part of our show is thinking about and thinking with faculty members about their ideas about their own experience within their fields and how that contributes to the way they mentor, especially their graduate students because that's our lane right now. You've recently been put in a different position administratively, which I want to hear you talk about a little bit. But at the same time I'm really interested to hear you've talked about kind of some of the struggles you've had as a woman in your field and the difficulty navigating that. For listeners of Confluence, Jackie Moore's episode about a month ago, she talked quite a bit about this as well in the business environment, sort of some of the obstacles she ran into as a woman. Could you talk a little bit about that and sort of how you overcome them and how they have impacted your work?

Well, I appreciate that you've spoken to Jackie because she is my giant and she's the person I have always cherished as a mentor and she has taught me a lot of what I know. And so it's good to get that kind of validation. It's hard, right? Every moment you doubt whether you're pushing hard enough or pushing too much. Perfect. Examples are we know there's a lot of literature around women just negotiating poorly for their own positions. And so thinking a little bit about my past negotiations for myself, knowing that I left stuff on the table and I know that my first negotiation point at the University of Montana, I didn't get what I could have probably got.

Didn't even know maybe what to ask.

Yeah. Didn't even know.

For our listeners who are graduate students, it's an important point right. That you need mentors around you to give you some context because again, you kind of end up you go into the academic job market, especially on your own, and you need people to kind of even just frame what you should be asking for and what you should be seeing as your optimum outcome.

Yeah. And I remember just thinking, oh, they're not going to like me, or they're going to think I'm too pushy or too something if I ask for everything I need. And that's just not the case now, sitting on the other side of it, new faculty are asking for resources. The question that we say in our college is, “Do we have it?” And can we give those resources to those people?

Yeah.

And so I think academia has also changed. Even in the twelve years that I've been here. We've changed quite dramatically here at the University, which is really good to see.

Yeah. What would you say the biggest changes?

I think there's just more of an awareness from our leadership all the way down through our deans and through our faculty that we need to be giving people the fairest chance to succeed here.

Yeah. And I think some of what you're talking about, the corollary part of it, I guess, let's say, is the family context, just how hard it is and as historically has been to raise a family as a professor. It's just an incredibly draining and demanding job. It's not the kind of job people take. It's not a nine to five job. Right. I mean, it's just not like that. We were talking earlier about finding your passion and exploring it. But the downside of that, I guess, is that people do throw themselves so fully into their academic lives and it's kind of hard to find that work life balance sometimes.

Yeah. I think it's like a total myth. I don't even like the word balance. There is no balance. Just like trade offs.

Right, right. What are the right trade offs? Rather than somehow there being a perfect yeah.

It was the craziest thing. I remember sitting with my promotion and tenure committee, I don't know, it was three years into my academic job and saying to them, “I think I want to have a baby. Do you think this is a good idea?” Which is a total batshit way to think about family planning. Right.

Yeah. Not the right approach.

I remember. The PYT committee. Amazing. As they are saying to me, “Libby, why are you talking to us about it? Of course you should have a kid. You want a kid, have one.” And so I always joke I birthed a kid and was promoted to associate, and then I birth another kid and had tenure. And so it was not easy.

But I don't think there's a third kid for the Regents. Professor, just so you know. I don't think that's necessarily the best plan.

That ship has sailed.

That's amazing, though. There's a kind of funny cliche about if you have a bunch of events happening at once, it's better to cluster them because no one of them will cause you as much stress than they would stretch out. But, I mean, those are two benchmark events in your life. Obviously, child being 1000 times more important than your promotion, but the fact that they happen together is kind of interesting. It gives you a life pattern that's got this intense structure to it.

Yeah, it really does. And thinking, I just went up for full and I was awarded full Professor.

Congratulations.

Thank you. And I had to actually, as part of that was a maternity leave. And I was reflecting on that, my promotion materials. I'm like, I had a maternity leave in there and I had Covid in there and oh my gosh, this is like just a bonkers portfolio.

Yeah, but you did it right. Looking back, you can have this incredible pride and having accomplished it. Yeah. It's so good that you're articulating this, too, within the context of the work you do, which is so grounded in value, too. In other words, we all have a right to leisure, we all have a right to family. We should have a right to having, again, not a balanced life, but a life that has components facets to it that allow us to explore our full human life.

Yeah, absolutely.

The Academy is not always super friendly to that.

No.

Yeah. So that's something we as a collective need to do better. And part of the message for the podcast is also about what are those tools of resilience? And so when you think about the way you mentor your graduate students, how do you convey that? What do you do to kind of set your graduate students up for not just successful research careers, but life?

Yeah, we talk a lot about it. I have a cadre of female PhD students and they are all juggling a lot of different things in their lives. And so we talk a lot about that juggle and we talk a lot about we try to encourage each other and boost each other's self-esteem in our individual meetings. I'm a big proponent that sometimes you need to cry a little bit. My role is you cry in my office. We never cry out there. Giving all of my students and any other woman or male that comes into my office, just the tips and tools I have learned along the way. Here's what you can negotiate for. Here's what you might not want to negotiate for. I can often get the question, when do I know when it's the right time to have a child? And I say the same thing there's never a right time, I said, but there are some better times. You might not want to do it in your first two years of a tenure track job, but after year three, you should know. And so there's just some kind of little tips and tricks that I try to offer to my students, and it seems to help.

And how does this relate to kind of your broader philosophy, let's say, of mentoring graduate students? What are you trying to when you, of course, are getting applications, how are you vetting? What are you looking for in those students when they apply? And then how are you cultivating what you find?

Yeah, I'm less worried about their research experience. I'm looking for students who have certain basic skills. Writing is one of them. I'm not going to teach students how to write.

Makes my heart go pitter patter to hear that you're not going to teach them how to write. But not every professor cares that they can write, right?

And I just don't have those skills. And I love the writing center for those skills. And so I hope that they come with basic writing skills. I'm also looking for them to have demonstrated that they worked hard on something, and that comes out in a lot of different ways. It could be experienced in a job. It could be through different things they did through their undergraduate or master's experiences. And so that work hard paired with writing or kind of some of those two basics. And of course, a love and a passion for the things that I study. If they're not interested in really the things I'm interested in, it's hard to kind of make that fit. And so they need to have some basic understanding of what my research is and my expertise, because I can't be an advisor to all people. You need to have some kind of complimentary miss with me.

Yes. I'm going to dig in a little bit about that work hard thing, because what you're putting in is really interesting. You often hear it said as work ethic, but what you're saying is that something is slightly different, which is you can see in the record where someone has thrown themselves into something. You're kind of looking for someone who's kind of immersed themselves in difficult work. Because, of course, that's part of our world. There's a lot of failure in our world, right? I mean, in the world of academia, there's just as much failure as success. And so you have to have an ethic that allows you to kind of push through that a little bit.

Absolutely. You need that grit, right? Like, you need to be able to demonstrate and I don't care if that grit comes in a job where you're working in manual labor or a job that you're working in an office in a difficult situation. I don't even care where it comes from. It's intangible, but tangible at the same time. So you don't really know what you're looking for, but you can kind of see evidence of it in CVS and resumes.

Well, I've done quite a few of these faculty interviews and I mean, very few people are going to say, I look for high GPA or I look for great test scores. It's funny, they either take that for granted or they say, actually, we don't think that tracks as well as these other things, whatever those other things are. So you pointed to skills. I mean, you want to see that people have had whatever it is that they studied as undergrads or wherever they went in the world, that they've grown in a skill that they know how to learn. Right. That in a sense, that's the most important attribute is the ability to learn and grow and to take on a tough challenge and not be knocked down by it.

Yeah, that's well said.

Yeah, well, I don't know if it's well said, but I'm just trying to pull out from what you've said. I think that's really a cool lens to look at your graduate student placement. Like, what are you looking for? And it is a relationship, right. Students. It's slightly different than your undergraduate students in terms of how you work with them. So that relationship has to be strong.

Yeah, absolutely. I try to interview all of my grad students in person if I can. Zoom has made that...

I was going to say. Yeah. But has it felt like a good lens? You didn't need to have them physically here.

Yeah, I haven't actually had to recruit a grad student with Zoom. I brought on all my students kind of pre-Covid, and a lot of them are PhD and so we're in it for the long haul. So, my dance card is full.

Yeah. And it's funny, PhD students are different. I mean, that's one of the things we've noticed in the grad school, that you get these cohorts. You'll see certain programs, you can see the students work through the cohort. They all graduate and for a couple of years, no one's finishing a PhD because you're building back this other cohort. And so you've got a cohort that are in the sort of second, third year. We talked to Ada and Chelle. Recent PEO winners. Of course, we were just nothing but praise for you helping support them in that application. But that's a great kudos to get.

Oh, my gosh, I cannot even believe it. Those two women, they are just exceptional. I did not expect them to get it, but I will tell you what, they are both so deserving of it. They work their tails off on their research, on everything, and they're just present. They're always present. And it just feels so good to have them in the lab.

Yeah. So this new job, you've been working across campus, you and I have known each other for a while. We've kind of intersected around DHC. Presidential leadership, scholarship interviews. You've always had a big stake in undergraduate education, too. In other words, talk about this new role that you're in. Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies. Isn't that the right title?

Yeah, I think it's Senior Associate Dean.

Senior Associate Dean.

Okay, thank you. For Undergraduate Affairs. It is.

Oh, affairs. Affairs, okay, right. Yeah.

What do I say? For me, it's about student experience and it's about placing our undergraduates at the core of what we do in our college. And so I love all of my graduate students and I love working on graduate education, but undergrads are just amazing. They are energetic and they are hopeful and they have an eye towards creating just an amazing future for this world. And so their hope and energy, I don't know, I just feed off of that.

Yeah. So what do you all have in mind? Do you have new initiatives in FCFC that you're kind of thinking about?

Yeah, I love that you have to ask this. We are meeting all of our program directors next week because we're going to be talking about a couple of high impact practices that we want to kind of we want to standardize. Maybe center is not the right word, but we want to enhance in the college and it's everything from first year learning experiences, so those seminars, field trips, and then all the way up through towards internships and our Capstone experiences. And so it's those high impact practices that I'm really interested in for our college.

Yeah. So high impact practices for listeners who are not inside the belly of higher education. It's what it's described, but it's the things you're going to remember when you're 50. In other words, the things you're going to look back on and still they're going to hang around with you, which is not going to be aside from the trauma test that you fail, but it's not going to be your classroom time. It's going to be that thing where you applied what you learned to something important that mattered to you and experienced that kind of elevated it.

Yeah, absolutely. And I know and feel and have read that faculty are critical in that. Right. They're connecting with those students and making those experiences happen for those students is really what's going to make this exceptional.

Yeah. They don't happen by themselves, right? I mean, there's something that requires intentionality. It requires like a focus or something.

Yeah, absolutely.

And does FCFC have any particular new ideas about new kinds of things? You describe capstones. Is it just that you're going to systematize it across all four years so that there's a benchmark, things that everyone is experiencing.

Yeah. We have been in covid for two years. Our capacity to take students into the field has been severely limited, and it's...

Pretty crucial in this field.

Absolutely.

The field work that part of all these displays, not just yours, obviously, but all the fortune displays, you got to be out there doing it.

You do. You need to be built. There's a skill dimension, and there's just a deep knowledge that happens. We do a really nice job in our college of connecting our students with professionals in the field, and so we want to make sure that we enhance those. And it starts the second a student walks into our college, and so that's day one. And so our first year seminars have been rolling, and they've been doing awesome work, and we have an increased number of students coming into our college, and so we want to make sure we're still providing opportunities that are actually exceptional, given our increase in numbers as well.

Well, congrats on the new position, and of course, we wish you the greatest of luck, and we hope you will still continue to mentor our graduate students deep into your career, because that's our lane, but you're doing an incredible job of that. Now, are you ready for the Quick Hitters? We into every episode with our quick headers.

Yes. Okay. Yes, I'm ready.

Morning or night person?

Morning.

Winter or summer?

Summer.

Sunrise or sunset?

Sunset.

See, I love that morning person. But sunset. Oh, my God.

Sunsets are, like, the best.

Why?

I don't know. It's, like, slightly romantic. It's probably why I like Jane Austin. It's, like, overly romanticized somehow.

Yeah. And sunrise? I don't know. Bleaker somehow. Straighter. Some people like the hope I'm a sunset person, too. Some people like the hope of the morning sunrise. Yellowstone or glacier?

Glacier.

Fast on that. So why?

It is just the most spectacular landscape in the entire United States, in my opinion.

Okay. There you go. Your favorite Montana river.

I love the Clark Fork. I've been studying things on the Clark Fork River for a decade now, and it's just home. It just feels like home.

Okay. Yeah. And it's funny. I've been here slightly longer than you, but we're newbies, really. Right. And you hear people talk about the Clark Fork even 30 years ago. It doesn't have that romantic error. Right. We've cleaned it up so much. The dam removals and all of the you know, it's amazing how much more of a river town it's gotten every year. And the Clark Fork is a crucial part of that, the cleanup of it and the restoration.

I know. And people just love it more. I mean, it's so cool to see everyone tubing down in the summer. Maybe some recreation conflict there.

Little bit of touch. Yeah. They need to make sure they get their 16-ounce cans crushed and put away in a nice bag.

It's not that hard.

What's your favorite mountain range and why?

The Pintlers. We have spent a lot of time up in the Pintlers. We have a house up at Georgetown Lake, and we just love to play up there.

All seasons.

All seasons. We go up, we ski in the winter at disco. We hike around. We're getting ready to go camping up there this weekend.

Fun.

That's great. What's your shadow profession? The one you may be entertained or flirted with or fantasized still?

Oh, my God. This is so funny. I have like a million I don't know if it's a profession, but some days I wish... Okay, Park Ranger. I always thought I'd be a Park Ranger, and I still think that's interesting. I sometimes wish I was just, like a landscape person. Like, I was working on a landscape. I was doing gardening. If I can spend days in gardens, I would feel really good about that.

That's cool. Yeah. And again, talk about something you get to watch practically, and the impact is immediate. You get to see it happen. That's great. What was your best friend say about you if they asked what you were like?

Oh, my gosh. I think irreverent. Nothing is sacred. Right. I make fun of everyone equally. Sometimes it annoys my husband, but everything's on the table with me. But I'm also fun.

So you lighten it up. It's not like there's no edge to it.

No.

What's the one piece of music you'd be willing to listen to for eternity?

Right now I'm totally into Taylor Swift.

One song, though.

One song. Oh, gosh. I'm going to pick one. Maybe Lover.

Okay.

I love that song. I'm not even going to pick one. I'm going to pick multiple: Champagne Problems. I'm totally into. I can listen to that on repeat. And then my daughter is really into 22, and it's really about being the age of 22, and it might be one of my favorite ages I ever had for myself.

Would it be possible for you to sing a chorus of any of those or we just no way.

Oh, my God. Absolutely not.

Ashby what about spoken word? A spoken word? Like husky delivery of 22.

“I'm feeling 22.”

There we go. That's all I took. What's the voice you hear in the back of your head when you go to sleep at night?

I hear my mom I always hear my mom's voice. She's totally alive.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But she always is calming and says, it'll be okay. You'll get through this.

Yeah. Boy, we all need that. We've needed a lot over the last couple of years in particular. Well, thank you so much for joining us on Confluence, Libby.

Thank you.

This has been really great.

Thank you.