As James Gladden concluded his undergraduate career at the University of Washington, little did he realize he was about to encounter a big “detour” sign. He received his psychology degree in 1972, then three years later went to work for his alma mater full time — as an engineering technician in the Chemistry Department.

Now, nearly 28 years after being hired, he is the technical services manager in chemistry, a key player in the department’s administrative team and a recipient of a 2003 UW Distinguished Staff Award.

“It’s just one of those journeys,” he said. “I had a childhood interest in science and technology and electronics. I was an electronics hobbyist as a kid, but that’s when electronics were a lot simpler, in the pre-personal computer days.”

Gladden worked electronics jobs, including a stint with the Physics Department research group of Nobel Prize winner Hans Dehmelt, to help pay his way through college.

“By the time I graduated, it was the path of least resistance and it was something I was interested in doing,” he said.

After graduation, he worked in various electronics jobs around Seattle until he got a call inviting him to work for a chemistry research group. The job was temporary at first, but his value became apparent as he worked on a grant proposal for a large minicomputer, the department’s first large computer. When that proposal succeeded, he took over as computer manager.

In the mid-1990s he worked on another grant, this one for a powerful spectrometer. The magnet alone cost in the neighborhood of $2 million, but Gladden could have put his own brand on the electronic controls. To meet the department’s needs, he devised a console so advanced that a leading vendor of such equipment studied and replicated parts of his design. His work in that instance saved the department about $1 million, said Paul Hopkins, chemistry chairman.

“In his current role as a member of my staff leadership team, Jim now meets weekly with the small group of faculty and staff that oversee the department. The issues we face range from personnel to technical,” Hopkins wrote in a letter supporting Gladden’s nomination for the staff award.

“When Jim speaks, I listen very carefully. He is intensely analytical, he is creative and he is humane.”

Gladden grew up in Pasco, came to Seattle to attend the UW and then stayed. His course-work included more math than he needed for his bachelor of science degree, he said, and he also took courses in physics and computer programming. But now he finds himself in management, supervising more than a half-dozen people.

He says his psychology degree has probably come in handier as a parent than as a manager.

“I never thought of myself as a manager. I’m not a natural manager, but I’m a detail person and that’s what matters in management, to keep track of details,” he said.

“It’s not my first love. I prefer the engineering, but there’s always a natural tension there because if you want to accomplish something very complicated you can’t do it by yourself.”

– Vince Stricherz

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Growing up in rural Montana, Jennifer Mas found that learning doesn’t take place only inside the classroom and that the most important things aren’t learned in a class setting.

Mas came to work at the UW School of Medicine in 1998, while still an undergraduate in environmental studies at Evergreen State College. She started in a part-time clerical position with the Area Health Education Center. Her supervisor, Peter House, quickly realized his good luck, and assigned her to the newly created Student Providers Aspiring to Rural and Underserved Experiences (SPARX) program.

“We asked her to take on the design and creation of a program to attract health sciences students into careers that serve the underserved, poor, homeless, rural, uninsured or otherwise disenfranchised,” House said. “Jennifer turned this idea into a full-fledged program in the space of three years.”

Putting the program in place was a challenge, but Mas soon made it a suitable option for health professional students wanting practical fieldwork experience with disadvantaged people. Mas noted there is often a disconnect between health care providers and their patients on a number of levels, including social class.

“Health professionals can be uncomfortable working with medically underserved populations, such as the homeless,” she said. “Our job as a training institution for the future health workforce is to help students develop the comfort, skill, and insight required to work with these populations. That only comes through experience that needs to start while students are still in training.”

By setting up field trips, forums, volunteer activities and other events, Mas was able to get many students active in both didactic and hands-on experiences. The SPARX program has had participants from many academic disciplines, including dentistry, nursing, medicine, pharmacy, public health, and social work. This multidisciplinary approach involved more than 270 students last year.

The chance to obtain real experience has made the program attractive to students. Three years ago, Mas brought SPARX students on board a mobile medical program called Safe Links. A clinical site of practice for the Schools of Nursing and Medicine, Safe Links allows students and faculty to provide direct clinical services to street youth late at night in locations where youth congregate. Safe Links is a collaborative project with Seattle Children’s Home and Swedish Medical Center, Providence Campus Program. In the past three years, thanks to the infusion of UW student involvement, services for street youth doubled and grew to include dental-care access.

“The people we see as Safe Links patients engage in high-risk behavior and are unlikely to seek care in a traditional health-care setting because they’ve had some negative experiences. We work with street youth where they are at, both geographically and mentally, to focus on prevention and safety while providing a valuable training opportunity for students,” Mas said.

Students who have participated in the program come away with a balanced education that integrates social justice and policy development into a clinical setting. Training outside a traditional setting gives students a better understanding of how the health system looks from the outside, and dispels some of the myths about working with underserved groups. Students appreciate all of Mas’ hard work in making the SPARX program a success.

“These are experiences that have influenced my chosen direction in medicine and career choice,” said fourth-year medical student Steve Crandall. “Without her hard work and dedication, there would be far fewer opportunities available to health-care students seeking to work with underserved populations.”

The future of SPARX looks bright under Mas’ leadership. She plans to continue to expand the program to include as many students and disciplines as possible. She feels this type of education is an integral part of a health-care education.

“These things just aren’t taught in a standard clinical setting,” Mas said. “You would never get this from a book.”

– Blayne Vixie

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Although she’s being honored as a distinguished staff member, Laurel Sercombe seems to have a foot in the faculty and student worlds as well. During her more than 20 years as Ethnomusicology’s archivist, she’s sat in on faculty meetings, mentored generations of graduate students and even gone through the doctoral program herself.

Asked to describe her role, Sercombe says she’s “getting too old to be a camp counselor now. I think I’m more like the fairy godmother or something. It seems like a lot of my day involves interaction with students, and I really like that.”

Sercombe presides over Ethnomusicology’s archive, a library made up of 6,000 hours of audiotapes, 300 videotapes, 150 films and 500 phonograph records. It also has about 300 musical instruments. A violinist with an undergraduate music degree and a master’s in library and information science, she’s the perfect person to take care of such a treasure trove.

But it isn’t just her academic credentials that endear Sercombe to her colleagues. Ethnomusicology Chair Philip Schuyler says Sercombe “does not just contribute to a positive work environment, she creates it.”

And Andrea Emberly, an Ethnomusicology graduate student who works with Sercombe in the archive, has this to say: “I know that my work with Laurel has been one of my core learning experiences here at the University of Washington and that everything she has taught me, about life, about archiving, about music, will stay with me forever.”

Learning that students consider her a mentor was a surprise to Sercombe. “I don’t think of myself that way,” she says. “Students make my work life so much richer, it didn’t occur to me that there was any mentoring going on. I just find that all the interactions are not only interesting and stimulating, but students continue to give me reason to be excited about this work and this program.”

Ethnomusicology is part music, part anthropology. Faculty typically do field work among some group of musicians and bring back recordings that are deposited in the archive. Sercombe catalogs it all and makes it available for use by anyone who is interested.

That includes the graduate students, who use the materials extensively in doing their own research, then deposit the results of their work in the archive. As a result, the archive — two rooms tucked into the subbasement of the Music Building — is typically crowded with students. Schuyler describes the archive as a classroom and a social hub:

“All of our students eventually find their way to the archive and learn from the experience. There are often three or four students in the cramped space, discussing their seminars, checking through records and exchanging ideas. Laurel contributes to these discussions and listens to everyone’s woes, and still, surrounded by all the hubbub, completes an enormous amount of work.”

Her job is complicated by lack of space and lack of funds. The archive reached capacity five years ago. Since then, Sercombe has been struggling to find places to store the materials that continue to flow in. Never one to wait passively for help, she has sought outside funding for the task. She’s secured two grants to transfer deteriorating film to other media. And a third grant brought a curator from New York to campus this month to evaluate the musical instrument collection.

She also has worked to make the archive’s materials more accessible to the larger community. Thanks to her efforts, the instrument collection will soon be available through a multimedia database on the UW Digital Libraries Portal. The database will show pictures of the instruments with text descriptions and eventually, audio samples.

Sercombe’s love for her subject extends outside her working hours too. After completing a dissertation on local Native American song traditions, she now helps Skagit elder Vi Hilbert with her archive

Ethnomusicology recently celebrated its 40th anniversary with a weekend symposium, largely planned by Sercombe. Asked if she thinks she’ll be around for the 50th, she says it wouldn’t be a bad thing if she were. “But,” she adds with a twinkle, “At some point I should get out of here and let somebody else have some of the fun.”

– Nancy Wick

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For 40 years, David Snyder’s father worked as a UW professor of zoology, while his mother worked in the UW School of Social Work. When it came time for Snyder to begin his own career, he chose the UW School of Social Work too, starting in a support capacity. Soon the administration at the school realized he had a knack for things technical and moved him into operating the in-house media center, where Snyder contributed for 25 years.

Then in 2001, when Snyder heard about an opening in the media center on the newly created UW Bothell/Cascadia Community College campus in Bothell, he decided a change of scenery was in order. What made the job so interesting was that, like many of the services on the campus, the media center is shared by both institutions. Snyder saw the possibilities of working in a unique culture that blended the students, faculties, and staffs of two institutions. He applied for the job of media technician senior and got it.

In his relatively short tenure, Snyder has already been assigned full supervisory duties of the media center’s Technical Services group, which is responsible for classroom technology support.

“I consider this group the ‘paramedics’ of the classroom support environment,” says Brian Fletcher, head of the Campus Media Center and Snyder’s current supervisor.

Notably, this classroom technology support includes all ePodiums, which are permanent, state-of-the-art technology systems installed in each classroom. The ePodiums house an on-board computer and various playback devices linked to a ceiling-mounted projector. The systems are controlled by the faculty via intuitive touch-screen panels. Each ePodium also has a telephone, allowing faculty to quickly summon technical support in the event of a technology glitch. On any given day, Snyder and his team can be seen running into a classroom, no doubt in response to a distress call.

“Customer service is part of the mission that I keep dear to my heart,” says Snyder. “I have to do my best job so that I can enable other people to do their best job.”

Faculty and staff alike point to his prompt response to requests for help, his first-rate problem-solving abilities, and his cheerful demeanor. As part of his job, Snyder often works one-on-one with faculty to make sure they are comfortable with various technologies before facing students.

“When we have had to adapt a classroom to accommodate the multimedia presentations for myself or other professors, Dave has stood in the space, considered all the technical options, and come up with brilliant ideas on the spot,” says JoLynn Edwards, director of the Interdisciplinary Studies at UW Bothell. “In one class session, it is not unheard of for me to use double slide projectors, computer, video, and/or DVD projection, the CD player, and the document camera projecting onto two television monitors. In other words, I run a kind of three-ring circus through the e-podium.”

She adds, “No matter how pressed he is with the demands to oversee the media center’s technical operations of the co-located campus, Dave is invariably patient, understanding, and a delight to work with.”

Snyder describes his job as one of juggling and contending with the hottest fires, without letting any of the balls drop. He and his team sometimes receive 10 calls a day requesting technical assistance somewhere on the UW Bothell campus. “We are dedicated to classroom support,” he says. “Our goal is to be in a classroom within two minutes of a phone call.”

Rosa Lundborg, counselor for Disabled Student Services, has worked closely with the Campus Media Center to ensure that UW Bothell’s disabled students are well accommodated with tape recorders, four-track tape players, and laptop computers. “In my mind he is the perfect person to turn to for meeting the needs of special populations, such as disabled students, because of his patient, kind, and respectful nature,” says Lundborg.

For Snyder, those qualities are simply part of who he is. “This work is extremely rewarding to me, and I feel so unbelievably fortunate,” he says. “The entire time I have been at the University of Washington, I have worked with tremendous people.”

– Cynthia Scanlon

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Paula Walker and Betty-Jo Kane smile as they think back on the two-year renovation of the Suzzallo Library. It was two years marked with hammering, pounding, dust, crazy work schedules, a major earthquake and complicated scrambling to clear areas that construction workers needed to get to in making the historical structure seismically safer.

And when they talk about it, believe it or not, their smiles almost grow wistful.

“It was a once in a lifetime opportunity,” Walker said.

“Everyone pulled together and made it work,” Kane added. “I actually miss our weekly construction update meetings. Every Tuesday, when it’s time for the meetings, I think we all still feel a bit of a void.”

Most of all, both pointed out, “We finished on time and under budget.”

For what colleagues and contractors describe as “Herculean” efforts in managing logistics and motivating library staff, Walker and Kane are each receiving a 2003 Distinguished Staff Award.

Betsy Wilson, director of University Libraries, said the task that Kane and Walker faced was daunting.

“Their challenge was to coordinate a total renovation of a historically significant building in the center of campus, relocate 70 staff members to temporary off-site offices and ensure that library collections and services were provided to faculty and students without interruption.

That’s why the ‘best of the best’ were tapped,” Wilson said. “Betty-Jo and Paula worked with unbridled energy and exceptional good humor to inspire, motivate and cajole literally hundreds of library staff, the UW Facilities Services staff, and construction partners in the realization of this monumental project.”

Alan Killian, project manager with Turner Construction Co., said that, in 34 years in the construction business, he has never encountered owner’s representatives who showed more professional responsibility and dedication than Walker and Turner.

“No decision was ever postponed,” he said, adding that agreed-upon moves of fixtures and people were done quickly and efficiently to make room for the construction so that no time was lost.

Eleanor Chase, in government publications, said the pair helped ease the staff through a difficult transition.

“They maintained a positive outlook and had a cheerful manner, even when tired,” she said. “Their work made everything seem easy to the rest of the staff.”

Walker and Kane said their job was made easier by staff who understood the necessity of the project and were willing to endure some hardship in return for an updated facility.

“We didn’t have any real complaints,” Kane said.

And the construction workers and craftsmen involved also went the extra mile, simply because of the nature of the building they were working on.

There were, however, some tense moments. The Nisqually earthquake ranked near the top.

“Actually, we were very fortunate that it didn’t come earlier than it did,” Walker said. During the retrofitting, workers had to burrow down into the library foundations in the “octagon” area to reinforce the base of the existing pillars with concrete and steel. During that stage, before the reinforcements were added, the library was vulnerable. “When the quake came we were over six months into the project, and more than 60 percent of the interior seismic work had been done.”

The most noticeable damage was to the finials on the front of the library, where it opens onto Red Square. That portion of the structure hadn’t yet been firmly anchored to the rest, and the movement of the temblor knocked pieces off of a number of the small, turret-like structures, littering the ground with debris.

Fortunately, the company that made the originals, Gladding McBean in California, was still in business. Officials contacted the company about restoring the damaged finial caps.

“They recreated the molds — they didn’t have the ones from the 1920s — and restored the damaged portions, matching the old pieces, which of course had weathered,” said Walker. “Now you can’t tell the difference.”

The project, Kane and Walker agree, exceeded their expectations. And has brought greater peace of mind to those who work in Suzzallo.

“We have an absolutely beautiful building,” said Walker. “And it was wonderful to have been a part of its history.”

– Rob Harrill

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