After a tenure of more than 16 years as a Longwood University employee, Ellen Masters, associate director of the Academic and Career Advising Center (ACAC), will depart from the university on Sept. 24. Masters is set to assume the role of Director of Career Education and Vocational Reflection at Hampden-Sydney College (H-SC) on Oct. 1.
According to Mary Meade Saunders, director of the ACAC, the individual who will take over Masters’ position has not yet been hired. Saunders is currently looking over the position’s job description to see if she needs to adjust any of the duties before finding a new associate director.
Saunders said the department will most likely begin advertising the open position by the end of the month or early October with the new associate director projected to start on Jan. 1, 2014.
“I’ve got the whole range of emotions going on,” Masters said of her decision to take the position at H-SC. “I’m sad to leave such an awesome place, but at the same time I can’t help but get excited about this new opportunity and to be part of a community just right down the road. Hopefully, we can build some partnerships between the two campuses.”
Masters earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Longwood. She began working at the university as a part-time volunteer service learning coordinator in the former GIVE Office in July 1997 before she started her graduate level courses. In 1999, she began working for the university full time.
After a series of position changes and department restructuring, the ACAC was born in 2008. Masters filled the position of associate director of the center at that time with Kate Morgan and Sarah Hobgood coming on board as assistant directors.
Three people approached Masters about the Director of Career Education and Vocational Reflection position before she looked into it and applied. She believed her “skill set would match up” with the office’s requirements and that the position would be a new challenge for her.
According to the Career Education and Vocational Reflection website, the office’s purpose is to educate “Hampden-Sydney men in all aspects of their career and professional development process in order to achieve success in life after College.”
“I think there’s so much potential out there, and I feel like it’s a nice, supportive community,” Masters said of H-SC. She added that the office has “come a long way in the past few years, and I hope I can continue to lead them in a positive direction.”
Masters said she will miss Longwood’s students, faculty, staff and alumni, as well as “the history and traditions here.” She will also look back fondly on her relationships with the departments and the Compass Community, a program primarily designed to help undeclared students explore different majors.
In addition to Masters’ work in the ACAC and her unofficial role as one of the “go-to” people on campus, she serves as a co-adviser for CHI, the university’s secret service society, and Princeps, the secret honorary society. Her husband Pee Wee Baldwin, operations manager of Longwood’s Mail Services, currently co-advises Princeps with her. Masters said she hopes to continue working with the societies.
Saunders, who has worked with Masters since 2002, supported her decision and noted that she “has the personality to just draw people in. So, I think that that’s going to be very helpful for her in the future.”
In order to prepare for Masters’ departure,Saunders,Morgan and Hobgood now teach her Longwood Seminar (LSEM) classes for undeclared students. The three ACAC staff members have also split her career advising areas of business and economics, art, theatre, music, math and computer science among themselves.
Come January, when it is time for the new associate director to assume his or her role, Saunders would like for this individual to have at least five years of experience in a career center.
The future associate director would also ideally have already worked with employers and career counseled students.
Saunders said working for the ACAC will certainly be a different experience without Masters.
Saunders added that Masters “already knows that I’m going to still be here and that I will be able to talk with her, and we can work with anything she’s dealing with [at H-SC] that she hasn’t dealt with [at Longwood].”
As for her own hopes for the future, Masters said, “I’ve learned so much [at Longwood], and I just hope that my drive and my willingness to learn, my willingness to partner with people across campus and my passion for helping students will just be a good fit [at H-SC].”
