Corinne began making our office better from the moment she started her job—both literally and in terms of workflow, morale, and relationships. She cleaned up and organized our storage and shared spaces, doing it with a positivity and real enthusiasm for making things better for everyone. She inventoried our supplies and the swag we give out to students and staff and figured out creative and meaningful ways to distribute even small amounts of items. She immediately organized team-building activities a few times a year for the dean’s office staff (web team, student ambassadors, creative team, public relations team) to help work better together. She built relationships across teams, across the college, and across the university that facilitate the work of the McKay School and improve our ability not only to host successful events, but to tell our stories in high-impact ways. Corinne works across the dean’s office teams to help wherever she is needed, and the events she organizes are uniformly well presented and smoothly run. Corinne’s goal is always to help the work of the McKay School and of this university move forward, and she will enthusiastically do whatever is needed to meet those goals, whether it’s handling the logistics of an away-game tailgate/book drive, hauling around a six-foot-tall stand-alone Y in the back of her truck, showing Christlike patience in keeping our shared spaces organized and reorganized, or sending out wellness emails that are engaging and motivational.
Corinne is always looking to make things better at the McKay School, with no ego involved. She loves switching things up from event to event to see if the changes help things run better, and she will adopt any suggestion she thinks might help meet our goals regardless of where it comes from. She is quick to deflect praise to the people around her and quick to take responsibility and change-making action when setbacks occur. Even the most daunting challenges find her reacting with steadfast perseverance and honest work. She genuinely seems to enjoy working with and nurturing students and helping them achieve within our teams, and she is similarly warm and supportive to everyone at the McKay School. She takes our resources extremely seriously, having done the thankless work of inventorying our supplies to help ensure that we do not spend unnecessary money on things we already have, and so that we use our resources to their best advantage. I would say that she goes “above and beyond” her job, except that she seems to see it as her duty to do exactly that exemplary level of service all the time. And she does all this while also demonstrating her love of others, of the mission of this university, and of the core values of the McKay School. When things go wrong, Corinne’s immediate focus is on how to help them go right again. She is a light to those around her and a treasure to our office.