Krista Malley, Ph.D.
Director
Office of Student Success
What are the experiences that have most influenced you, and why?
There were several experiences that have influenced me. My parents separated when I was 12 and at that point we had lived in seven different states. I have an older sister and identical twin sister and we were all born in Germany as my father was in the military and stationed there. So at this time, we’ve got my mom who has two 12 year olds and a 14-year-old, who moves to Michigan to be with her parents. She is smart, but doesn't have a degree yet so decides to go to school.
We lived with her parents for a short period of time and then we moved into low income apartments. I can empathize with people who have a hard time and struggled financially. If one were to look at me, they would think I've never had that problem, making a general assumption, which is not wise to do. I know what government cheese tastes like, I know what powdered milk tastes like, to put water into it, to drink it. And I know what it's like to experience the threat of having utilities turned off. I have an empathy for our students that are struggling with some basic needs. And that's why I strive to help other people as best I can and treat them with respect, dignity, and compassion, no matter what the case.
Then I think of my mom too, going back to school to be a nurse and to get her associate's degree. The first school that she went to, near the end of the program she didn't pass the math class, so she didn’t graduate. That was really hard to have happen over one class, which is why I have a strong passion for doing things with our developmental math classes today, and trying to figure out how can we help those students? She didn't give up, she went to another school, and then graduated from Delta college, I'm proud to say. This is a photo of her at her graduation with myself and my twin sister. Fifty-two years old and she graduated.
Mom's graduation
I was so proud of her for all of the hardships that she was able to overcome and be stubborn and say, “this isn't going to define me, math is not going to be my nemesis anymore.” As a non-traditional student, she did what other people don't think about, she asked for help. There’s a high likelihood a non-traditional won’t ask and think that they are fine. She got help from other people in the class. She asked for help from her professor and he took the time to assist her and said, “Rosita, okay, if you see this, or this, just add a zero. I don't know why. But that’s how it works”. So he gave her some tips and showed compassion and that helped her pass the class and then she graduated.
That's a huge story of where I get my passion for being in higher education, helping the underdog because I think my mom was an underdog that became a mighty dog. She’s done some great things in nursing. Her specialty was hospice and nursing homes. She had an opportunity to help people with dignity, at the end stages of life. She has since retired and she'll be 70 this year, but for 18 years, that's what she did. That's pretty powerful stuff, to see somebody else be so compassionate, but also stubborn to focus on a goal. That's a big one.
Other experiences are my career journey; I've had quick rises in position. My very first position out of grad school, I was the Pacific Information Coordinator at Pacific University, and within the first semester, my boss's wife’s cancer came back and she became terminally ill. So here I am, in my early 20s, and now I'm the coordinator plus the director, very wet behind the ears, still trying to figure things out. My negotiation tactics were terrible, because they offered me $23,000 and I thought “Yes, this is awesome!” If a grad student now were to hear $23,000 they'd say are you kidding me? But I learned a lot in that time.
When I was at another institution, the director left to get their Master's and I became the interim director for residential life. I negotiated $100 more in salary. Knowing what I know now, I could have negotiated more but didn’t see that at the time and I didn't have anybody advocating for me on how to negotiate or know my value. There have been several other situations like that in my career path of quick rises and what I've learned from those experiences is the importance of getting a mentor, but also the importance of getting a sponsor. A sponsor would be somebody different, who is going to come alongside you and say, “Krista, you could have negotiated more than $100 for that, here's what I would recommend, here's what you need to go to the table when you negotiate.”
That's why I volunteer my time to be a mentor, or helper, for other people at Oakland. Through our Ph.D. program, I've been a formal mentor and I've been an unofficial mentor for different people. In the last two years, I've had 16 different interns in my office from either the Master of Arts higher education leadership, communications program for undergrads, or just students interested in higher education that other people have referred to me. I won't turn anybody down who wants to learn more about higher education. I tell them, “come on in, I'll meet with you and I'll treat you just like you're a staff member. We’ll do walk talks, we’ll do development, we’ll do all kinds of things that will help you towards your next step.”
I think that's really important to do that. And I do that because as I've gotten older, other people have done that for me. Not in the beginning of my career, but as I got a little bit older, I got a little wiser at saying, “I think I need somebody to help me. I don't know what, but I need it”. So I started looking for people who have different skill sets that I may or may not have yet and their wisdom. It's important for us to take that time to glean wisdom from other people. I've got mentors around campus that are in so many different areas. There's a couple different women right now in my life that are very different from myself. I know this is important and beneficial for me, to help refine and make me the best version of myself.
Krista and her supervisor, Owen, at Pacific University
What do you want others to understand about your identity?
I want others to understand my faith is very important to me. That guides my decisions as well. If you look at just my career path at Oakland, even at my previous institutions, I don't stay in one position long. I take time to pray on different things to figure out, is this where you want me right now, God? Or is it time for me to move on? If I feel a calling to something different, I reach out for it. And sometimes, you know, the answer is “I don't think it's right now, Krista.” And I think, are you sure, because I'm ready for something different. No, you still have something to learn, you still need some refining in these areas. And then, true to form, it'll pop up and somebody will say, “hey, I want to give you some feedback” and I realize that's why I'm still here.
Or there's other good that I could still do, with my tenacity and dare I say perseverance, like my mom of wanting to do all the good you can, while you can, and in your current position. I'm a faith filled woman, I aim to treat others the way I want to be treated. Even if we disagree on certain things, I still want you to feel like you were heard that I valued your opinion, and that I have compassion for you as a person, and that no matter what people matter. I say that to my staff, it doesn't matter if it's a student, if it's a staff, if it's an administrator, if it's the community, I want everybody that comes in here to feel the same thing. That we communicated with them, that we listened to them, that we served them and that we partnered on purpose with them. It wasn't just what's in it for us in the Office of Student Success, it’s how can we give back to you and make things better for you as an individual. I think that's really, really important.
When I leave Oakland, I hope I will have left a positive mark on people so that I'm not completely forgotten. My hope would be that people would say: she had a strong faith; she was full of integrity; she was good to work with; she had a positive attitude; and she tried to do a little extra special for people that made them feel acknowledged. Which goes into my work with AP Assembly. Who can I acknowledge? Who am I going to nominate for an award? It's about taking time to say, I want to acknowledge this person, because they're amazingly awesome. Maybe they have a supervisor that tells them that and maybe they don't, and I think we live in a society that it's more likely they don't, because we get told what we're not doing versus what we are doing right.
Krista and her recognition crew at the 2018 AP Recognition Breakfast
Describe a story when you felt oppressed or constrained by power structures.
How do you feel you have resisted these constraints?
When I had an opportunity to take a different position, two upper administrators were talking in front of me about my proposed salary and they called me the wrong name. They said, “Well Lisa makes blah, blah, blah.” It was almost like an out of body experience. How do they not see me? We were standing in a triangle formation and they are talking to each other, completely ignoring me, and I'm right there. This is when I was in my early 20s, and the budget person is talking to this VP saying “Lisa will be making blah, blah, blah. And that's the same as this person was making.” At this point, I'm thinking, am I invisible? This is when I finally looked at the one person and I said, “Number one, it's Krista. And number two, I'm making “x” dollars more than that person was. So get your facts straight”. They both looked at me like I was out of bounds or off my rocker.
That came back to bite me to later on, because in that position, I was an interim. And I knew I had the position for a year, until May. Knowing how that area worked and how my employees needed to tell me if they were coming back for the next year, I gave my notice in January. I told them that “Once my interim position is up, I won't be staying. Since the team needs to tell me, I'm giving you the common courtesy and respect to say, this is what's going to happen.”
Shortly after that, I get a letter say that I'd be done sooner than originally contracted. So my contract got cut from being that honest. I learned valuable lessons from that experience. Number one, you don't show your cards so quickly, which is hard as I'm a very upfront individual, but I learned to not do that in the future. Number two, have something else ready to go. Once April came, I was disappointed because I wasn't able to go to the commencement or be there when the semester closed and say goodbye to people. It was disappointing to have somebody trying to show power over me because I didn't do what they wanted. I remember thinking, that's really unfortunate and disheartening especially at that level of leadership. The great thing is that I still got to say goodbye to the staff I cared about and they did throw a lovely going away party for me.
On the upside, because you know, with me, there is always an upside. So from mid-May to mid-June, I took a life sabbatical with a good friend of mine and one of her buddies and we backpacked across Europe. In 30 days, we visited 10 different countries and had I not been let go sooner, like the original date in the contract, I wouldn't have been able to go. The biggest upswing was that, on June 7, I was in Augsburg, Germany, where myself, my twin sister, and my older sister were born. So I was able to celebrate my birthday in my birthplace.
You learn about power structures and people playing on that power. I think sometimes we put ourselves in a corner, or that people expect us to be a certain way. So we better not rock the boat. As I've gotten older, I’ve learned I need to be assertive on certain things and say this is important, this is why it's important and keep pushing. And I've done that in a lot of different ways.
