Denise Sands Ba�z�s unconventional approach to her education and her career has been a serendipitously perfect preparation for her current roles at Lehman College/CUNY as an Academic Advisor and an Adjunct Lecturer in the English Department. She started at Lehman as a traditional student in the mid-1970s and then returned after a 17-year hiatus to complete her undergraduate work (English B.A.). After a short hiatus, she then earned an M.S.Ed. in English Education. Along the way, she has held a miscellany of paid and volunteer positions that mostly focused on publications and education.
Ms. Ba�z�s experience on both sides of desk as student and teacher makes her especially sympathetic to student aspirations and discontents. �I�ve known all too well the frustration involved in juggling family, work, and school�and feeling guilty because I couldn�t give any of them my best without risking failure at the others,� she says with a rueful grin. �But I also know�thanks to the help of my own professors, family, and friends�how wonderful it feels to march down the baseball field at commencement and then be able to give back what I�ve been given through my work with other students.� Her seventeen years of experience at Lehman make her a wonderful resource for current students because she usually knows where students can go to get a problem taken care of�and even when she doesn�t know the answer, she knows to whom she can put the question. Her experience in publications and education also adds depth to her job description because she has been able to write and edit curriculum materials for long-range academic planning, various brochures and pamphlets for student use, policy manuals for administrative use, and user manuals for software developed for tracking student use of support services. (She also participated in the development of two such systems as the primary beta tester and consultant to the developers.) Thanks to a Title V grant, she has been able to create a curriculum unit on long range academic planning for the freshman seminars. Additionally, the Title V grant has allowed her to train a staff of undergraduate students to assist freshmen with long-range academic planning and entering transfer students with the registration process, thereby frugally extending the work of the Academic Information and Advisement Center in a time of tough budget constraints.
Teaching in the English Department is a source of deep satisfaction for Ms. Ba�z because she so deeply enjoys watching students grow. ENW 204: Report Writing, the course she usually teaches, is particularly satisfying because the primary requirement for passing her course is the writing of a formal proposal that offers proof of the existence of a real-life problem and possible solutions. In order to write this proposal, students must perform primary as well as secondary research and are usually forced to find their solutions someplace other than their textbooks. �The best part of this project is that students learn to become problem solvers instead of complainers. Bosses value people who come to them with solutions, not complaints.�
