Although I’ve lived most of my life in the Phoenix, AZ metropolitan area, I’ve also lived in IN, CA, WA, and briefly in Bucharest, Romania. I’ve had the good fortune to travel extensively for work and pleasure.
Some of the organizations I’ve worked for include the Department of Defense, the State Department, Intel Corporation, and co-owned a management consulting firm.
My educational background includes an AAS degree in programming from a community college in Arizona, bachelor’s and master’s (MBA) degrees in business with my MBA from Arizona State University. Finally, I received my Ph.D. from Gonzaga University in Leadership with an emphasis on Economic Justice.
When I was in third grade I’d said I wanted to be a teacher but for several decades my path veered in different directions. After my daughter and son had finished college, however, I began taking community college classes and my youthful desire to teach was rekindled. I’ve discovered that sharing with students what I’ve learned from my education and work experiences in an effort to help them achieve their life goals is more emotionally rewarding than my career in industry.
I’m currently conducting research on a couple of topics. One is on gender and the other is the future of business. The size of corporations has been substantively diminished. Facebook employs less than 10,000 while Ford’s River Rouge plant employed 100,000 in 1940. Research shows that over 40% of the adult population will be freelancers by 2020. The question that compels my business related research is, what jobs are we training our business students for?
I’m thrilled with the initiative both the online and face-to-face students have shown. This term I’m teaching project management, which is inherently a team activity. Completing the team based activities is particularly a challenge for the online students, one of whom is in Vietnam and another is in Alaska. Like project managers in industry, the students have to determine how and when to meet including whose time zone will be dominant and why. Additionally, sharing and revising documents digitally is good training for students since it’s a common practice in business.
Having come from an environment in which employment is fluid, job tenure insecure, and colleagues compete for resources including jobs; it’s a wonderful experience to work with people who genuinely want their colleagues to succeed and are eager to help them flourish.
Contact Rae Rawley
rrawley@pencol.edu
(360) 417-6404
Medical Assisting Program: pencol.edu/bas
