I'm not going to explain exactly what prompted this, but I want to remind my readers of one of the absolute essential rules of life in academia:
The most important person in any academic department is the secretary.
Naive outsiders often think that the department chair is the most important person, or possibly the most senior faculty member, or maybe the professor with the most funding. That's wrong, though. If you want to be able to get things done in academia, the person you need on your side is the department secretary.
I didn't really appreciate this until graduate school...
I bombed my qualifying exam when I took it, and in my program, that meant I was required to take an oral exam. I was contacted by the department chair, who said she would set up the oral exam within a few weeks.
A month later, I called her, and she said she would get it together in a week or so.
Three weeks later, I spoke to her on campus, and she said she was working on it.
Two weeks after that, I stopped by the department office because it still hadn't been set up, and mentioned to the secretary that if it couldn't be scheduled before Thanksgiving (one week later), it would need to be after New Year's, because I had exams in my classes to worry about, and I couldn't keep waiting on this oral exam. "You need an oral exam scheduled?" she said.
Eight hours later, she contacted me with the names of the examining committee, and a date, time, and room for the exam.
And so, we return to the lesson: The most important person in any academic department is the secretary, because they're the one who knows how to get things done. So, make sure to stay on the secretary's good side-- always ask for things nicely, always say "thank you," stop and chat when you have free time. A little effort at courtesy will pay off a thousandfold the next time you need to know how to shake something loose from the campus bureaucracy.
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Utterly true about many organizations. Certainly the case here at my high school.
I would, however, also add the custodial staff as people to stay on the good side of. When (not if) you blow your breakers with too many hot plates plugged in, you want someone who will get to it with alacrity...
Amen! The secretary of the biology department at my university is well-known as the person who keeps the wheels turning in the department. She is everyone's go-to person for issues during registration, mid-terms, finals, every time in between . . . and I have never seen her in anything besides a sunny mood, it amazes me!
While I certainly believe that the secretary is the most important person in the department, I don't know if "setting up an oral exam" counts as being very beneficent.
It is not only in academia but any outfit where the secretary is the go to person to get something done. I'll have to agree with magista as well, be nice to the custodians and they will go out of their way to help you. When I started it was difficult to get our bio-hazard trash emptied, but after several years being nice to the custodians they now empty it within an hour of the e-mail.
Funny, I had an isomorphically equivalent conversation with a younger engineer, here, a few months ago, except replace secretary with technician, and department chair with functional manager. (And add program manager for an extra alternative.)
The young engineer opined quite firmly that the most important person to keep happy at all times with the boss. Not so. It's the technician. Your boss will understand the occasional screw-up, and can be reasoned with after the fact. Piss off a technician, and nothing will go right for you ever again as long as that technician is involved.
That link to the English department qualifying exam makes the qualifiers I passed years ago (one in physics, the other in math) seem positively pleasant.
My math shocker was completely and totally failing the algebra test in the math department. This was shocking in that I'd slogged through the graduate algebra class (this was at U. Wash., Seattle), and since then I've been playing with Clifford / geometric algebra. The test exposed my dirty little algebra secret. I could never remember definitions, and instead simply looked them up when I did homework. A closed book test to me was like trying to read alien heiroglyphics.
I also managed to pass a physics qual. There, my dirty little secret was that I didn't have an undergraduate education in physics and had managed to never understand thermodynamics (among others). This was discovered at my orals exam. My professors only passed me cause I managed to rederive some obscure (to me) thermodynamics law from statistical mechanics. At U. Cal., Irvine, orals were for everyone, not punishment for a select few.
But that English exam, that truly sounded horrible.
A corrolary is that if you want to know what is really going on, get friendly with the cleaners. They work odd hours so see who is coming and going at similarly odd hours. They also see what is in peoples wastebins, and may well have a gossip network that goes across departments.
I learned about importance of the secretary back in college. I was dropping a poli sci course and adding a philosophy course (or vice versa). This required the signatures of the two professors involved plus my advisor, who was a philosophy prof. This being a small college, the philosophy and poli sci departments shared offices, with a single secretary. When I went to the office, none of the professors was in, so (as was the custom) the secretary signed for all three professors.
In the Army, it's the Master Sergeant who knows everything.
This may be true for graduate students. For faculty members, the most important person in the department is the departmental business administrator.
In many places the department business administrator
is the department secretary (secretary here taking more the meaning of titles like Secretary of State). Bigger departments split out the roles: one person (or a group) for student services, one person (or a group) handling finance, one person (or a group) for HR, and so on with one person overseeing it administratively.
BTW they can be highly appreciative of flowers, chocolates, or other small gifts or just heartfelt thank you's. Give them plenty of lead time on proposals, be prompt and accurate in reimbursement requests.