The alumni newsletter of Antioch College Fall 2004
The alumni newsletter of Antioch College Fall 2004
Virginia Garrette, Lead Co-op Assistant, has worked in the co-op department for 39 years. She describes her duties as “everything,” emphasizing that her primary role is serving Antioch’s students. “There are very few departments on campus where you see all the students,” she points out. “Co-op sees everybody, because they all have to come here for crediting. The average student comes to the office five or six times during a term. I get to know some of them really well.”
Virginia loves her work at Antioch. “It’s not just a job,” she says. “I’ve always had good people to work with and work for. It’s so rewarding to help out the students when they come in the office or when they’re out on co-op, keep in contact with them and see that they’re paid. You do the same things over and over, but to help them work things out, see that their checks are sent to them, see that they get what they want and set up their appointments—I just like working with them.” She will go beyond the call of duty to see that students get what they need, a practice which has earned her the nickname “Everybody’s Grandmother.” “I’d take them to the bus station,” she explains. “If they couldn’t cash their checks in New York, I would cash their checks and take all the money to the post office and get money orders for them. I’d do that for the whole term. I always try to meet their needs.” The hardest part of the job for her is seeing students disappointed, when they don’t get the co-ops they want or when their co-ops don’t go well.
She began working at Antioch when she moved to the area from northern Ohio and her former employer encouraged her to apply for an audio/visual job at Antioch, since she had worked in audio/visual at her previous job. When she arrived, she says, Antioch’s audio/visual department was so small that instead of applying there she just applied for the first open position, which was in the co-op department. Her first impression of Antioch was that “the things the co-op department was doing and the opportunities students had to go where they wanted to go, study, travel—I thought it was just a great college, and different. I’d never seen anything like it.”
When her husband worked in Securities at Antioch, Virginia frequently volunteered as a dispatcher, but currently her family takes up most of her time outside of work. She has raised a grandson and a great-granddaughter during her years at Antioch, and sees her other grandchildren every weekend. However, she can frequently be found in the Caf at lunch time, because “I like to be around the students. I used to be around them more before I became a grandmother. I would come down to the Div dances and hang out. But when you have responsibilities you can’t do as much.”
Virginia is in no hurry to retire, because she enjoys her job too much.