Hayley Keene - Greek life Graduate Assistant at Tufts University

Hayley Denea Keene’s title and role at Tufts University is in some ways hard to explain. She has worked in the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life (OFSL) for the past two years, but up until recently she was the “Graduate Assistant” to the Director of Fraternity and Sorority Life, Su McGlone.

What changed?

McGlone went on maternity leave early in September and has been absent from the university since. Leading up to that point, McGlone was essentially training Keene to become the temporary replacement.

McGlone (left) and Keene (right) at the 2012 Northeast Greek Leadership Association Conference in Hartford, CT, one of the first big events the two participated in as part of Keene’s development.

I saw the “grooming” process firsthand.

I started work in the OFSL as an assistant at the same time as Keene began her employment. We office assistants (there are four of us) handle various aspects of Greek life that the Director delegates due to her vigorous and demanding schedule.

Last year, I saw Keene in her first year at Tufts, getting her feet wet and working closely to learn the ropes from McGlone. Now that she is largely on her own, I have seen her make strides as a burgeoning, young college administrator.

Keene, a native of Arkansas, is currently attending the same program at Northeastern University which McGlone had attended: the MS/CAGS in Student Development and Counseling.

According to their website, the program strives to provide its graduates with “the academic and experiential background that will allow them to be able to design, create, and administer student personnel programs that teach leadership, foster development, value diversity, and compliment the academic experience of college students.”

Because the Tufts campus (pictured below) sits just a short five-mile drive from Northeastern, Keene can split her time between class and work pretty seamlessly.

Photo courtesy of Flickr

This is not to say that she has a whole lot of free time, however. In addition to her courses and her job at Tufts, Keene is also the Graduate Intern for Student Activities at MIT, the President of Northeastern’s Student Development and Counseling Association (CSDA) and a volunteer for Northeastern’s Opportunity Scholarships and Outreach Programs (OSOP).

Keene was not always an avid proponent for Greek life, or even thinking of going into a field related to college administration. Believe it or not, as an undergraduate, she was a horticulture major at the University of Arkansas.

The closest she had gotten to her current profession was her membership in her campus’s Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc.

She was also a resident assistant for one of the on-campus residence halls. Her supervisor, the then Coordinator of Residence Education Kristina Bethea, told Keene she would one day be working in the field of student life at a college campus, but despite high honors for her efforts, Keene was skeptical.

“I thought, ‘I’m gonna be a horticulturist; let’s be real,’” Keene said.

Her passion for horticulture culminated in her going to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Scotland during the summer between her sophomore and junior years. After returning from her time abroad, Keene reflected that she was missing something.

“By the time I had come back from Scotland, I realized that I benefited from the energy of others and needed human interaction,” Keene said. “Horticulture just wouldn’t fulfill that.”

So when Keene walked back into Bethea’s office in her junior year to ask about switching career paths, Bethea looked at her and said “It’s about time.”

In the summer between her junior senior years Keene interned at Marymount College as a member of the Residential Life staff.

Keene first entered graduate school (a program analogous to the one she is currently in at Northeastern) at her undergrad Alma mater, the University of Arkansas, but quickly realized she “needed a change.”

She began applying for schools in being accepted to Northeastern’s program, began looking for assistantships in the area. She interviewed at over 10 schools until finding a spot at MIT. Her MIT position is for academic credit, but her job at Tufts is just that…a job. She is an employee at Tufts.

When she first began as McGlone’s prodigy (as I playfully call her), Keene’s main responsibilities included improving office efforts, structuring the Panhellnic and Intergreek Councils, improving Rho Gamma training and setting up a Multicultural Greek Council.

This year, she has taken on more supervisory skills, like overseeing us office assistants and dealing with pretty much any issue involving fraternity and sorority life. Half-jokingly, half-seriously, Keene mentioned that she is performing “a person-and-a-half job when I’m here only 20 hours a week.”

Keene also snickered that she should really update her resume to include “finances” under key skills because much of what she handles on a daily basis are monetary. She also organized this year’s Fall Greek Retreat.

View from the OFSL towards downtown Boston.

One thing Keene stressed was the importance of the new changes being implemented in Tufts Greek life. However, one thing McGlone and herself did not want to change was the student’s trust in the OFSL.

“She [McGlone] told me about her pregnancy in January [of 2013] before the spring semester even began for students,” Keene remembered. “We had a discussion about perhaps bringing in an interim Director, but concluded that it would be hard to implement and keep the recent changes for Greek life we were making.”

Consistency had not been a paradigm of the OFSL until McGlone arrived and they wanted to change that. Keeping Keene as the part-time Director, then, made the most sense for stability purposes. Keene had already been there for a full year, knew how the community worked and knew all the right people.

“We had a lot of dialogue in regards to my stepping in while she would be on leave,” Keene said. “It has certainly been a learning experience for me, especially now that I see everything and not just what my supervisor wants me to see.”

Towards the end of our discussion, Keene disclosed that Tufts was her last interview when she came to Boston for graduate school at Northeastern. She saved the best for last.

“I just knew I was supposed to work for Su [McGlone],” Keene said. “Walking away from the interview, I knew I was supposed to be here. To this day we are both convinced it was a case of mutual selection. It was the right match for the two of us and the university.”