Since the beginning of last semester, students in the Raleigh Building who had questions regarding the School of Social Work housed there probably had to wait a little longer than usual to find an answer.
After all, they didn’t have a director of student services – one of the key positions in providing student assistance.
That is, until Nicole Footen filled the position Jan. 3.
Whether supplying them with information about admissions to the Master of Social Work (M.SW) Program or securing a meeting place for one of their student associations, now social work majors have someone devoted entirely to helping them again.
Footen, who earned her bachelor’s degree in anthropology as well as her M.SW from West Virginia University, was the coordinator of student services for VCU’s School of Mass Communications from 2001 until the end of last semester. While helping VCU students, she has also been working towards a Ph.D. in public policy.
“I do know that they haven’t had a person in that position for (fall) semester, which has probably made things pretty difficult for the students,” Footen said. “My guess is that efforts are going to really have to be stepped up.”
Footen said her new position in VCU’s School of Social Work will help her move closer to what she eventually wants to do.
“The director of student services position for the School of Social Work is probably a little better fit for me (than my previous position) for my future plans and goals,” Footen said.
“Eventually, I want to go into teaching at the university level, and I’m also interested in administration. This position gives me the opportunity to get some teaching experience,” said Footen, who worked as a program administrator at the Embassy of United Arab Emirates in Washington, D.C., before coming to VCU.
Frank Baskind, dean of the School of Social Work, said some of Footen’s main duties include working with students to bring them together; providing support and guidance to the leaders of the different student organizations, assisting with admissions, recruitment and retention of students and identifying services that students require from the school and the university.
Footen acts as “the point of contact for students,” Baskind said.
Baskind also said that now with Footen working for the School of Social Work, “we have someone in the school who will understand their needs and issues and will be able to articulate and advocate for them.”
Second-year M.SW student Allison Rothschild is one of the co-chairpersons for the M.SW Student Organization. This group organized many different events last semester ranging from brown-bag lunch sessions for faculty and students to fundraisers for various service projects.
“Although we lost a valuable asset in former Director of Student Services Randi Buerlein,” said Rothschild in an e-mail interview, “we are excited to work alongside Ms. Footen. We are hopeful that we will work together to develop more ideas and to achieve even more (this) semester.”
Ann Nichols-Casebolt, the associate dean of social work and the person to whom Footen reports, assumed some of the student service responsibilities when Buerlein left.
Footen, she said, “will assume the day-to-day work involved directly with students, primarily our undergraduate students and our master students, not so much our doctoral students.”
Last semester, Nichols-Casebolt and Baskind, along with other faculty members, worked together to provide the student organizations with staff support.
“I pretty much acted as the interim director of student services,” Nichols-Casebolt said, “and then myself and the director of the M.SW program helped the students whose advisers weren’t around. We (are) glad to have Nicole here to be able to help us out, particularly now that we’re entering the busy season with admissions.”
Footen said many of her new responsibilities parallel those she had in the School of Mass Communications. For instance, she works again with prospective students, has an advising load and handles graduation applications. She even uses much of the same software that she did before.
“A lot of it’s going to be the same but in a different place,” Footen said. “Any time you have to learn a new job, there’s always a learning curve so it takes like a year to learn a new job, and it’s going to be a completely different student population, so the students are going to be different from the mass communications students.”
Nichols-Casebolt said she will work with Footen to familiarize her with the particular social work programs here, “but she’s got a master’s in social work and the curriculum for a M.SW is pretty much the same across the country, so that will be helpful to us.
“The advantage of having someone like Nicole come here is that she’s already very familiar with VCU,” Nichols-Casebolt said. “She’s familiar with accessing student records on the student information system. She’s familiar with how students register, and the scheduling and that kind of stuff.”
Footen said that while she will miss those in the School of Mass Communications, she looks forward to meeting new people – both faculty and students.
“I’m going to be representing the School of Social Work, which I feel has a lot of value,” she said. “Social workers are necessary in our community.”