For more than 20 years Jaime Woody has served the student population at Southwestern University through the Office of Student Life. Woody joined the university in 1991 and has held several positions, including associate dean for student life, and dean of students and director of resident life, a position she earned in 2012. As the 2015-16 school year begins, Woody will take over the position of vice president for student life.

In 2008, Woody was awarded the Joe S. Mundy Award for Exemplary Service, and in 2010 she was awarded the Robert D. Bradshaw Small Colleges Student Advocate Award from Region III of the National Association of Student Life Personnel Administrators.

Woody has a bachelor’s degree in English education from Northeastern State University and a master’s degree in educational psychology from Texas A&M University.

What excites you about your job?
[At Southwestern] you have the chance to be the generalist, wear 50 different hats, and dip your fingers in everybody else’s stuff and really get exposed to a broader picture.

I think that initial exposure of being the generalist applied to every single year of my professional work here in that every year my job evolved into something a little different. There has never been stagnation. Every year has afforded me the opportunity to reinvent myself and reinvent my time here, which has been amazingly terrific.

I think that journey is so representative to me of what a liberal arts education is—you just get to do a bunch of different things, explore and navigate your way. That has been the most exciting thing to me about this job.

What does the vice president for student life’s job include?
We will have a relatively new team in student life. …  I’m looking forward to building a new team and figuring out ways that we can continue as a student life division to complement the academic experience and make sure our mission dovetails with not only the academic mission but also the university mission.

What are you looking forward to?
I think it’s the same thing I’ve felt with every new opportunity I’ve had here; the new experiences and interacting with our students, faculty and staff in a different way. I am excited about really taking some of our incredible quality programs to the next level and taking what we already do great and do it even better.

Are there any new programs you are working on?
We haven’t had a dedicated director of residence life in a very long time. We will have that position next [school] year. [We are] taking what has been a housing department and transitioning that into a full-fledged residence life program where we have a lot of programming happening in the halls … complementing the academic experience where the students live. We are a residential campus—77 percent of our students live on campus—so maximizing this opportunity to merge the academic experience with the living experience and bring some intellectual conversations in the residence hall and do it in a way that feels nonintrusive and fun is important.

There are also ways that we as a student life division can continue to complement the academic experience, and perhaps that is through being more intentional with our programming in terms of Paideia (see Page 21) and finding ways to integrate what we are doing with the Paideia experience so we can create this opportunity for the education of the whole student.