Welcome back Baylor Bears! At the end of last semester, we conducted an “exit interview” with our previous Associate Dean of Professional Development, Dr. Beth Allison Barr, which you can read here. To welcome in our new Associate Dean of Professional Development, Dr. Sara Dolan, we thought we’d give her an entrance interview so that the graduate student community can get to know her a bit. Dr. Sara Dolan is the Associate Dean for Professional Development, where she supports graduate student and faculty success. She is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, and she served as the Graduate Program Director for the Clinical Psychology doctoral program (Psy.D.) for 5 years. Her research focuses on neuropsychological factors that impact life functioning in individuals with substance use disorders and trauma. She has received more than $3 million in federal funding for work with military personnel and veterans, mental health service providers, and families of individuals affected by trauma. Dr. Dolan graduated from the University of Iowa with a Ph.D. in psychology. She completed her clinical internship at the Yale University School of Medicine, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the National institutes for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at the Alpert School of Medicine at Brown university. She has been at Baylor since 2007. Welcome Dr. Dolan! We are so excited to have you on our team of Graduate School deans!
BearTracks
Okay, so a little background. Let’s start with how many years have you been at Baylor?
Dr. Sara Dolan
This is my 15th year. So I just got my email from HR that said, “Happy 15th year!”
BT
Nice, that’s great! What drew you to this position, coming over to the admin side of things?
SD
Well, I was a graduate program director for the Clinical Psychology doctoral program, and I really enjoyed that work. And I came over originally to be Associate Dean for Research. And I really enjoyed the environment here. This is a great group of people, a really fantastic staff, and the Graduate School at Baylor is very highly respected by the Provost and the President, and there are lots and lots of opportunities now to make a really positive impact. My background in psychology, my background as a program director kind of led naturally to to this position when it opened up.
BT
Awesome. What are you most excited about with this position, and then what are the parts, like, every job has the parts where we feel like, I’m going to do it but it’s not going to be the most fun. So what are going to be the really fun parts of this job and what are the parts where it’s just going to be checking a box?
SD
I am really excited to try to help faculty and program directors, who are open to it, to engage in better mentoring for our graduate students. And I understand we have lots of great mentors on campus – not everybody needs that kind of help or training – but for those who are open to it, we’ve got lots of great ideas for how to help people help their graduate students get through. I’m probably less excited about when those mentoring relationships go bad and the Graduate School has to get involved to advocate and try to figure things out. Our ultimate goal is success for those relationships. But we know that pairs of people don’t always work out the way they want. I’m optimistic, but I’m less excited about having to wade through some of those problems.
BT
That makes a lot of sense. What has surprised you about this job so far, just in the few months since starting this position?
SD
I’m gonna say this in a way that I hope is not insulting to anyone else! I am extraordinarily impressed by the competence of the staff, especially the graduate assistants. I am blown away by how competent and conscientious and motivated and organized the graduate assistants are.
BT
Oh my gosh, yes, it’s been such a fun summer. I was in and out last year, but I wasn’t in the office consistently. And so just being here this summer, and getting to know more people and seeing what their roles are and just how good everyone is? You know that, but until you see it on a more daily basis it doesn’t quite register in the degree of excellence that has to be constantly sustained day to day. I think is a really impressive aspect: they’re good and they’re good like this every day.
SD
Everybody here likes their jobs – that is unusual. Having fun. It’s just different from being in an academic department.
BT
You might have fewer funny polls on a break room whiteboard in an academic department.
SD
Or someone’s door covered with memes. You don’t really have that in an academic department.
BT
That was the highlight of my year! Okay, so how does the prospect of working administration change your views of how you are as a faculty member and vice versa? How do you think the fact that you have been on faculty and are moving into this position impact what you bring to the administrative side of things?
SD
It’s actually something that I thought about a lot before accepting my current position. I never ever considered administration really, until our graduate program director position came open in our department. And then I thought, Oh, this could be a good challenge, and kind of give me an opportunity to to do some different things – and I really liked it! And that was not a hard transition, identity-wise, to go from being a faculty member with a little bit of admin over to Associate Dean for Research because that’s 25% of your time. That was not a hard transition at all. But the transition to full time and thinking about not being in the classroom consistently anymore, thinking about what to do with my research program, and the graduate students that I have in my research lab… I thought more about that professional transition than anything else in my career that I’ve ever thought about. And it was really hard. But coming over here has been a blessing because everybody’s so good. And the Dean is a person who tries to put people in positions of success. So there’s not a whole lot of chance of blowing up. And I think having been a faculty member and especially a graduate program director is going to help with my credibility with the faculty in this position. So when I knock on people’s door and say, Hey, do you want to learn more about being a good mentor? Please understand that it’s coming from a place of: I’ve had to go through some stuff and learn some of stuff, and yeah, I know how much better it can be when you have positive relationships with students when you set expectations and everybody follows those expectations.
BT
I feel like a lot of times the impression on the faculty side is that administration is out of touch with faculty experience, but you get to say: Well, no, because you were just in the same role, you know what the struggles are. But also vice versa. I’m sure admin can feel sometimes feel like faculty can be a little estranged from big concerns on the university level, like the Board of Regents, alumni, donors, trustees, and all the people who you have to please and keep happy.
SD
There’s burdens on both sides that, depending on which role you’re in, you get to be exempt from. I will say, starting here in the Graduate School at almost at the same time that I started on the Board of Regents, I learned a very, very valuable lesson: You can only make decisions based on the data that you have, and there’s a lot more data out there that you don’t have. So before criticizing the people who are making decisions that impact you, you need to understand that you don’t have all the data. Sure some administrators and boards are out of touch, right? But that doesn’t mean that it’s automatically a bad decision.
BT
That’s very fair. So, obviously you applied for and got this role because you care very deeply about the graduate student experience. I know at the beginning of this, I asked you kind of what you’re excited about, but I would love to hear about your heart for graduate students and the graduate student experience, and what your hopes and vision are for what the graduate experience could evolve into during your tenure in the Graduate School.
SD
So I was a graduate student once upon a time and I had great experiences and I had some not so great experiences. And then as a faculty mentor, I’ve had some great experiences and some not so great experiences. And I think one of the strengths that I bring to this position is being a clinical psychologist and thinking about what individual people bring to different relationships and how those dynamics can go well or not go so well and to help people identify their part in a relationship that may not be working well. I had a really fantastic mentor, and fantastic for me at the time, but I didn’t always see that. So I think, in 20/20 hindsight, that when my graduate career went off the track I thought it would stay on, I was pretty good at saying that it was my mentor’s fault – not my fault. And now that I’m a faculty member and mentor and in this role I can see two people have to communicate really well and set expectations and maintain adherence to those expectations. Be willing to change those expectations as appropriate.
BT
It’s like a contract.
SD
It’s is like a contract, but it’s it’s also a little bit like… it’s not a marriage, but there has to be a willingness to give and take. So I’m hoping that all graduate students can kind of identify their own strengths and weaknesses, and see how a mentors can identify their strengths and weaknesses to see how can we work with all of that together; to make the best relationship possible. I also want to redefine the term “self care” for our graduate students. And I say this as a clinical psychologist who thinks that self care is very important. But self care is not going to the spa or getting a manicure. That’s part of it, sure. But it’s important to me that everyone – faculty, students, program directors, everyone – see that self care is really about figuring out a way that you, that everybody can get the work done that needs to be done in a way that doesn’t end in burn out.
BT
So to find sustainable ways of living and working and resting.
SD
That’s perfect, perfectly said. And sometimes that means going on a vacation. But it also means getting done what you need to get done before you go on that vacation, planning far enough in advance and being flexible enough. Get done what you need to, and then if you need to unplug for two weeks, that’s great. Go ahead, but don’t leave people in the lurch.
BT
Your rest shouldn’t come at the cost of other people’s self care and wellbeing.
SD
Yeah. I think it’s about communication also. If we can identify for ourselves when we’re getting to that burnout place and communicate that to people, other people can help us juggle and balance and reposition what we do. But you can’t just drop everything. That doesn’t make us professional. We’re all professionals in the end. So I do want to spend some time communicating that piece. Self care is physical health, emotional health, spiritual health, intellectual health, all of those matter. And all of them need to be in balance, but they don’t always all need to be in the exact same place. Sometimes you need to prioritize some things.
BT
What do you wish graduate students knew about administrators?
SD
I don’t know that anyone ever goes into administration because they crave power. I think people that I know who are in administration are in those positions because they care about improving other people’s experiences or processes or functions. So you’ve got to be relatively selfless and a servant leader in order to be a good administrator. You can’t just be about power and control and that kind of stuff.
BT
Heading into this role, what was the thing you said to yourself: “The first thing I want to do is…”
SD
I was lucky enough that Dr. Barr teed up the perfect project, which is getting a mentoring agreement in place for students and their faculty mentors. So we’re just launching that this fall. And that was probably what I was most excited about.
BT
As someone who’s now in administration, what is something you would go back and tell your faculty self 15 years ago that might have been a helpful insight as she began her career?
SD
This kind of goes back to something I was saying earlier. So as a graduate student, as a postdoc, and as a young faculty member, I was a person who thought I knew a whole lot more than I did. I also thought that I had better ideas than people who’d been doing this for a really long time. I would go back and tell myself: you don’t have all the data. You can have all sorts of ideas and share those ideas as appropriate. But you don’t have all the data that you need to make the decision. That’s why there are people in these administrative positions: they have more information. It’s not just experience, not just that they’re older, it’s that they have access to information, and we all know you should not make judgments on incomplete data. If I knew that back then, I would have saved myself a lot of heartache and distress over silly decisions. When you’re a junior faculty member, there aren’t a whole lot of decisions – aside from tenure standards – which people above you make that really impact your day to day life, but it feels like every little thing is the most important thing.
BT
And the highest of stakes! Okay. Last question. What are you looking forward to in the short short term – this fall semester? What is something in this new role you’re looking forward to and what are you going to miss about being more fully in your department ?
SD
Well, we’re relaunching the Women in the Academy program, and I’m super excited about that. It’s been a really strong program. COVID kind of knocked it down a little bit, but I’m excited about relaunching it and reconfiguring it to be more interesting for students and the mentors. As for the other thing, I am already having a hard time not being in the thick of some of my department’s day to day activities. And although that’s really good for mental health, to be a little bit distant from that, I miss hearing about what’s going on and who got grants and the water cooler conversations. We have three new faculty and I only know one of them because I helped recruit her. I don’t know the other two and that’s sad.
BT
Good things and hard things. Every change brings gains and losses. Well, thank you. We’re so excited to see what is ahead of you and the Graduate School in the year to come!