Meet Your Colleagues: Rebecca Coffin

Meet Your Colleagues is a weekly feature highlighting employees who make a positive impact at UAA through their work every day. This week, we're featuring Rebecca Coffin. For questions or to nominate someone for an upcoming feature, please contact University Relations at uaa_news@alaska.edu.

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Rebecca Coffin

Academic & Divisional Support
Humanities Division, College of Arts & Sciences

How do you contribute to student success?
I do a little bit of everything these days. I primarily support student success by supporting our faculty and the administration that keeps everything running. Part of my job is to make sure the class schedules and book orders for my departments are correct and submitted on time. I also help maintain our websites, making sure they are accurate, as well as ADA compliant. I provide student support for our graduate students and am also currently helping to track and ensure the completion of important undergraduate student paperwork.

How long have you worked at UAA? Why did you decide to join UAA?
I started working at UAA as a student worker for Conference Services back in the summer of 2010. I'd been a student at UAA for a couple of years and was living on campus. I wanted to be able to continue living on campus during the summer months, and heard through the grapevine that students working for Conference Services could do so. I was so stoked to get the job! Since then, I've been able to hop around to different areas over the years. UAA has also been very supportive of my education, as I continued to go to school while working. I came for the benefits, but stayed for the supportive people and the academic atmosphere.

What is the most common question you receive at work?
"Can you help me?"

What do you enjoy most about working at UAA?
Above all else, I think the camaraderie is the thing that has stood out to me the most at UAA. Everyone who works here is here to serve in some capacity or another. As such, it's pretty easy to find common goals and interests with people.

What do you consider your greatest accomplishment while working here at UAA?
I've learned and done so much here over the last decade, but if I had to pick one thing, I'd probably say taking on the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing & Literary Arts (CWLA) summer residency program. My first year working for the Division of Humanities, the primary support person for the CWLA program left the university. Her duties were split up among a few other staff members, myself included. We had about one month to put together a full, two-week residency/conference, which involved a lot of logistics and planning. We had to learn a lot on the fly. It was stressful, but we worked as a team and managed to pull it off together. The conference was successful and all the students went home happy.

What is your favorite Alaska activity?
Wild blueberry picking, especially when it's raining!

Tell us a fun fact about yourself.
I am an avid amateur baker and crocheter.

March Archive