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We interview a woman who used her BCC education as a spring board to come back to the college
and she now severs as an administrator Hi I'm Theresa Romanovitch class of 1971 I had
a wonderful experience at BCC I was pretty involved I was on the student senat I was
very involved I was a work study student so I was working in the office and as I said
helping to kind of build the campus it was pretty new and we knew the facility on a very
personal bases because a lot of them were involved in the student senat and some of
the club's I worked in student activities so I was involved in a lot of the activities
and met a lot of the staff and I can't say anything but praise for all the people that
really took the time out to to really guide me and guide a lot of people that wore really
unsure of who they wanted to be when they grew up and it was kind of a nurturing environment
but it was also a very in powering environment because it was a place were people allowed
you to help them define what they were doing I think it was a really interesting time to
be apart of BCC because they were sort of defining who they were as a college and as
a student I was able to help do that my major at Bristol Community College was child care
and at the time I wasn't sure if I wanted to go on but because I enjoyed working with
that in that field so much and the faculty member who worked with me were so encouraging
in terms of going on and special education was just starting to find it's own witch was
the area that I was interested in so I was very much encouraged my faculty and staff
to continue my education right a way which I did I left Bristol Community College and
went to Umass Amherst where I got a degree in elementary education and a focus in special
education and I was probably one of the pioneers who graduated from the child care program
which was actually designed as a career program and had the chance to take all those credits
with me so I really had to work both on the university level and with the college here
to sort of a sure that the courses that I had taken were actually of the same value
and level that they were taken courses at Umass so I actually didn't lose any credits
which was really admirable for me and for BCC to have you know created that kind of
a pathway even back then for career programs after I graduated from the University of Massachusetts
I got a job in the Fall River school department and worked there for three years teaching
special ed and then came actually back to Bristol Community College as an employee and
started working here under some grants that were working with teaching reading to special
needs individuals and then I felt the need to actually go back and get my masters so
I decided to go back to bridgewater state college and get a masters in administration
I went back to school and got advance degree from Harvard University and decided to really
pursue changing careers into management and doing more of the administrative level and
well I was doing that I was actually hired to work as the director of academics advisement
at Bristol Community College and I worked there for about five years and then moved
over to financial aide and did the director of financial aide for about five six years
there and then left financial aide because I had the opportunity to work at the state
office with all fifteen community college's so I left and worked at the state college
for um the state executive office of community college where I did capacity building for
all fifteen community college's and it was really an exciting job it was an opportunity
to see what different community college's were doing and not just Bristol and also to
build capacity because I just feel like community college's are so under utilized and were so
busy doing that we forget to brag about what we do and we forget to grow to the level that
we really have the ability to do sometime cause were such worker bee's and working on
the state level gave me the opportunity to really work with other state agency's like
the department of transitional assistants the department of apprenticeship training
the department of labor um and doing some statewide building of different programs so
they were system approaches to issues I've been working at the state level for about
seven years and um had always had my heart has always been at Bristol Community College
and they were opening up the New Bedford Campus and a couple of people called me and asked
me if I might be interested in throwing an application in and I thought very long and
hard about it because I really did enjoy my job at the state level and that kind of capacity
building but BCC being near and dear to my heart I decided to apply and was given this
position and came back in September of 2001 to open up this campus operating this campus
has been such a joy and a lot of pain it's been um growing pain's as with everything
else we started out with about 400 student's and we now have 1600 student's and have brought
in million's of dollar's worth of grant as well and so it's really been a formidable
opportunity to be invested in a community like New Bedford that never really had a higher
education commitment to it and to work with employer's and community agency's to sort
of say wow we Bristol Community College can really make a difference in there lives so
I've been really involved in the downtown New Bedford board of director's I've been
involved with the web with the Chamber of Commerce and a lot of other work force in
efforts to sort of see where BCC can grow and the impact it can have I met my husband
Bob Karen who also teaches and work's at Bristol Community College and has spent the majority
of his career here at a BCC event years and years ago and um that's been a great relationship
we spent a long time just sort of living and enjoying our lives and then decided before
it was to late to have a child and I have a beautiful daughter Mackayla who is a senor
at Stang now and has just um been the joy of our lives it's just one of those thing's
that you sort of think you can live without and then it's made a world of difference in
who we are I owe a lot of that to BCC who opened my eye's up to a world beyond my little
world and um I think also the confidence they gave me to be able to think about myself as
someone who could move forward and as an employee I think it's really been staggering to see
the impact on other people's lives and on the impact that has had on the community and
everyday I hear student's come in here and say thank you to ether myself or my staff
for making there live a better place and thank you for giving me this opportunity and I think
it just feel really good just to give back to a place that really help your life start
on it's road and it's journey so it's been a powerful journey for me both from a student
perspective and employee