Assistant Director of event planning and event management at the University of Akron/OH.
Brett Heller, M.S., is the Assistant Director of Scheduling and Events at the University of Akron. He double majored in Psychology and Sociology (Stony Brook University, 2014) and went on to do his Master of Science in College Student Personnel Administration (Illinois State University, 2016). He loves to serve the community around him and believes in getting engaged in as many extracurricular offers as you can. His favorite thing about the University of Akron is how his career allows him to serve the broader community and how motivated the students are when it comes to creating their own positive experiences.
He is available if you want to find out more about him or his career at bheller@uakron.edu.
Daniela Jauk 0:04
Welcome to Why Sociology
Angela Adkins 0:11
a podcast series featuring mini interviews with sociology majors who have taken career pathways beyond academia, in applied and clinical careers. And to show not only tell
Daniela Jauk 0:24
why and how sociology matters in the world
Angela Adkins 0:30
Angela Adkins from Stark State College
Daniela Jauk 0:34
and Daniela Jauk from the University of Akron,
Angela Adkins 0:38
both located in rubber city Akron, Ohio,
Daniela Jauk 0:41
but we feature sociological movers change makers and shakers from all over the US and the globe.
Daniela Jauk 0:55
Welcome in our virtual Why Sociology studio. Today we have a special guest joining in from the University of Akron Student Union. We are welcoming Brett Heller, who is working for the University of Akron, but not a UA graduate right? Tell us what are you doing? What is your job role? And give us a little bit of an elevator pitch of what you're doing?
Brett Heller 1:26
Yeah, so first, thank you both Angela and Dani for having me. I am the Assistant Director of scheduling events here in the Gene Howard Taylor Student Union on Akron's campus. What I do is pretty much if anybody wants to have an in person event, they come to me and my staff, I work with another coordinator scheduling events, anything from you know, just tabling out in front of Starbucks to huge career fairs to everything in the middle is just kind of me and the rest of the student union staff, we make a habit. I also never worked with anything like this before. But I also supervise the student managers over in the bowling alley student lounge here. So had no experience with the bowling alley before I came here, but it's pretty cool. And I've been at University of Akron since June of 2019.
Daniela Jauk 2:13
Awesome. How much stuff are you supervising as an event planning leader?
Brett Heller 2:20
So I supervise one full time staff, the coordinator of scheduling events, and I supervise the game room staff which anywhere from 12 to 15. I think we just we just had 12 at the end of graduation, so a little less right now. But we're, we're looking to hire too
Daniela Jauk 2:37
Wow. Okay. That's also good information for the students out there. How did you get into this career?
Brett Heller 2:46
Yeah, so I guess I can start you know, from the beginning with my undergraduate experience. So I graduated with my bachelor's, dual Bachelor's in both psychology and sociology from Stony Brook University out in Stony Brook, New York, East Coast guy and I actually went to school with the hope of going and getting a master's in social work. I worked for a bit sort of in like a group home with adults with developmental disabilities while I was an undergrad, and a little bit after found out it just it wasn't for me, I loved the work, but I didn't know if I could, you know, do it for the next 3040 50 years. So I was pretty involved student I did a lot of like Alternative Breaks, like service trips and stuff like that I really just loved you know, helping people serving the community. I was around and ended up learning about Master's in higher ed, I ended up pursuing my master's in higher education at Illinois State University. A huge reason I went there was because I could work with their alternative arts program as like a graduate assistant paid for my master's for free. I was there for two years, as I was looking for a full time job, I kind of went more into like a student programming board sort of area. So I spent a few years at Colgate University as a coordinator of over in the center of leadership and student involvement. They're working with undergraduate student government and working with programming boards, working with large special events, you know, for the student body did that for a while. And then my wife and I decided we needed to move to a little bit of a bigger city with more going on as a family up in Cleveland. So job came across the University of Akron doing scheduling events here sort of roundabout way I found out I was good at it, you know, putting events and things together. So started here, June 2019, is the coordinator of scheduled events. And now I am the Assistant Director here at the Student Union excited to be here.
Angela Adkins 4:28
I think that is really wonderful. And sounds like such a great adventure and such a journey to get to where you are right those backstories are always really good. Can you tell us how sociology sort of informed your path and how does it inform what you do now? What did you learn as a soce major that kind of helps you most today?
Brett Heller 4:49
Yeah, so I guess it kind of played together with all of that service learning and stuff I was doing, you know, it just made me really aware of the community. I was living in the communities I had moved moved to and really helped me decide that whatever I wanted to do, you know, I wanted to make sure that I was sort of serving the community around me, I really sort of, you know, understood, yeah, I have privileges and things like that. But I kind of want to use my privilege of being able to go and get an undergraduate degree and being able to move around to make sure that I was moving to a community that I really wanted to be a part of it my current job right now, we think we're at that we're from, you know, we're just working in facilities and things like that. But we're actually housed under the vice president of student affairs. So we work pretty closely with, you know, Greek life, and zip assist, and the Dean of Students and all these different areas that were under that umbrella. So we're definitely expected to show a little more care and awareness and our work, we have a lot of student employees, and we really try to offer them more than, you know, just a job, we want them to be able to come here and be more sort of connected to UA and the University of Akron community than if they went and worked, you know, in a restaurant off campus, or if they went work for Amazon or something like that. And you know, during my work here, we we do a lot of work with local nonprofits like Akron public schools, the I Promise school, we've worked with, you know, the American Heart Association in Northeast Ohio, we work with a lot of campus departments that also in accordance work with those nonprofits. And I think that just that extra area of awareness, or that extra feeling of awareness has really helped me in my job to just kind of understand other people's, you know, where they're coming from, what their backgrounds are, how it plays into, you know, what's going on in Northeast Ohio, and sort of what we can, some might think we're just putting tables and chairs and things out, you know, we're also employing the students from Northeast Ohio, and trying to give them real world job skills, sort of given them an opportunity
Daniela Jauk 6:41
Makes a lot of sense. And it is fascinating to learn what is behind the event, the Navigating of different actors in different networks, and basically a needs assessment you were talking about, and then actualizing. Yeah, yeah.
Brett Heller 6:57
We want the event itself to be you know, although that somebody comes to us and has, you know, hey, I want an event. Yeah, the end goal is important. Yeah, making sure that it's a successful event is important. But we're really like process driven, you know, the students are in our, you know, employment, we're really proud to have other than, you know, a handful of full time staff, dozens of undergraduate and even a few graduate student employees, you know, they really run our building, and we're proud of that. So we could be like other areas where it's just, yeah, we just tell them what to do. And, you know, hey, go mop this, Hey, go move some chairs. But ultimately, we have student managers, undergraduates who are supervising their other peers, and really making you know, everything in our building operate successfully. That's fascinating.
Daniela Jauk 7:40
So our podcast is called Why Sociology and that is also the next question. Why did you gravitate towards sociology is a little bit has become an unusual choice for a major How did you slip into this?
Brett Heller 7:54
Yeah, so I was as many folks maybe going into undergrad was gung ho about being pre med, and being a psychology major, and I was gonna go be a psychiatrist. I was a first gen student. So I didn't really understand what that looks like. It took me until about a couple weeks into my first chemistry class to realize that that was going to happen. The my undergraduate school, great, great med school, great health sciences program, but very competitive. You know, I sort of just was looking into alternative you know, paths, I could take psychology at first, you know, I was very passionate about it, I was interested in it. And I didn't really know what sociology was till that was my required intro class or required elective for, you know, the psych major you needed to take, you need to pick another social science to sort of like psychology, political science, linguistics, you know, what have you. So I took sociology, and it's just really interesting class. I think we read jocks and burnouts or something like that. Probably dating myself an older book, you know, as I was taking those three credits, I think it took like a sociology and gender course actually met the person who was going to be my advisor when I studied abroad in Russia later on one of the PhD like, I don't want to call it handlers but she came in and kind of gave like a spiel about how she had been like a doula before and a midwife and like what that looks like and that really kind of dragged me in and I found out that hey, you know, 30 more credits and I can double major. So I ended up double majoring in Psych and sociology and really stuck with it. And I think I use you know, a lot more sociology than I do psych because, you know, while psychology was definitely interesting, while definitely like that thing that like pulled me in, you know, I was more interested in not necessarily just how like one human brain works, but you know, how it works when you form folks into different communities and societies and why things are constructed the way they are, or maybe why it doesn't work, you know, as things are constructed the way they are. So that really got more into it, you know, I started meeting people. That's honestly how I started getting into Alternative Breaks from folks that I had taken classes with. And that had introduced me to that really getting, you know, gung ho in the community service and service learning thing. And it also just translated really well to my master's in College Student Personnel Administration, because that was looking at what might be sociology, but in the context of a college campus, and the students that that arrive on that campus. So
Daniela Jauk 10:25
I have goosebumps as you speak, absolutely fascinating and rich Thank you.
Angela Adkins 10:31
I love that it's such a testament to the importance of a broad based education and that sometimes, you know, because sometimes those Gen Ed's especially as students were like, Oh, why don't you take this thing, someone was just telling me to take it. And you discover the most wonderful things by doing that. And so I think that's such a great example of, I found sociology because I had to take this elective and then sort of sent me down a path finding these other things. I think that is all we can hope for, how important that is.
Brett Heller 11:05
That's wonderful. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. And I really, you know, I was fortunate to be sort of in maybe in a position where double majoring was, you know, something that that I could do to get, and I found two majors that really worked well together. But yeah, I didn't know anybody coming out of like, high school, like, I want to be a sociology major, but I met a whole bunch and folks who lived across me, yeah
Angela Adkins 11:30
I think many of us fell into it that way. Like, I had the same experience, I only took an elective because it fit in my schedule. And it was, you know, taking the class was like, I found my people. And so I really, you know, get excited when I hear those stories. I think that's, that's such a wonderful and important thing, and it really reflects kind of your path to, I'm gonna go where my interests go, or where I think is important. I mean, it sounds like that's how you kind of found your specific field. So if you were to give a student who was interested in maybe doing what you do, or becoming interested in your specific field, what kind of things can you tell them about the nuts and bolts and how they might get into it, and what they really need to know,
Brett Heller 12:19
it's really an I don't want to sound corny, it's really something that, um, you know, a lot of folks in this area are passionate about, you know, I was fortunate enough to go in and in my master's program, I got it, you know, graduated with a bachelor's in sociology and entered a cohort of 30, like minded, fresh out of undergrad people, when I went to Illinois State, both the space for the folks to enter the field and the different things you can do are just so diverse. And there's so many different overarching skills that you can use for so many different things. Like I have folks who took the same classes with me as a Master's student, and worked in the same office as me doing the same thing working with Alternative Break program. One is a Assistant Director of fraternity and sorority life over Creighton in Nebraska. Another is, you know, the director of an area of alumni development down in North Texas another as a title nine coordinator out in Colorado right now, like you can go in, I work with the student union, you know, we all entered with the same skills, and sort of left with the skills that can be leveraged in all these different areas. So, you know, I know, so many folks come in to higher ed and are just like, oh, I have to go into housing or academic advising, just work with, you know, if I want to get crazy work with fraternity and sorority life, but there's so many different areas, if you want to work on a college campus, you know, you don't just have to be a professor, you don't just have to do those things. Those things definitely agree with you great experiences, but there's so many cool jobs. And there's so many college campuses, if you're not necessarily tied to like one community to go out and explore, especially in your early and mid 20s. If you have the chance to do that and meet so many cool people and learn so many cool things, and really make a career out of it. What I do is super fulfilling. You know, I know a lot of folks from the outside and I'd be like, wait, you need a master's degree for this. And I don't necessarily need one to move tables and chairs around when we're short staffed or something like that. But it definitely helps. You know, I have opportunities to work with students in an official mentor capacity as well as their supervisor as well as their advisor. In my position, I have opportunity to work with faculty and staff and, you know, everyone from the president's office to the police department to, you know, teachers from the I Promise school that come in and use their facilities. So it's also been a great opportunity for me to get more in tune with Akron, which is like my new home, I don't want to call it my second home. You know, I'm a New York guy, but I've been here three years. I love this place. I don't think just moving here and you know, going to work in an industrial park and an office building, you know, somewhere out in the suburbs would have afforded me the same level of connectivity to my community. So and that's Really, when I came here, that's kind of when I started looking at it like, oh, yeah, you know, like, we're really working like, you know, in Akron and helping the community like we have a Alcoholics Anonymous Founders Day weekend coming, that's not there's gonna be like 20,000 People from all over the world in our building. You know, that's super different, you know, that maybe, you know, doing doing a banquet for, you know, your top 100 donors like that can be important. But, you know, I don't know if that could be if I could, if I if I could do that all the time, you know what I mean? Like, that's very different than sort of giving back to the community through events.
Angela Adkins 15:34
I love that idea of events as creating social value, and not just social value for people who are already at the top of the, the chain, you know, that's, that is super cool.
Brett Heller 15:46
both in and out of the office, it's very fulfilling
Daniela Jauk 15:49
That sounds wonderful. If I think about it, it's really you are providing the physical structure, always successful networking for successful innovation to happen. Events are not just events, the move, there is something coming from it, I feel like you have given already a lot of rich advice for students, what I'm hearing is get out, try stuff, you yourself have explored studies abroad, you have gotten yourself into unfamiliar places, you have followed a hunch with sociology. Yeah. It's really wonderful and made a whole career out of it. Is there any advice you would give students because it's predominantly students listening to this podcast? Is there any other advice you want to give them along? As we conclude our interview,
Brett Heller 16:42
you know, just get out of your comfort zone, you know, if you take a new job, and it's a new city or something like that, they recommend you stick around for a year, it's just one year, in the end seems like a lot, you know, when you're younger, you never know what's going to happen, I think, sort of my path that I took, and all these little like, oh, yeah, you know, there's a job there are, oh, yeah, like, I can afford to live there, you know, as opposed to living in New York City where a lot of my undergraduate friends go, like, you know, I wouldn't have met my wife that way, you know, we wouldn't have adopted our dog, that way, we wouldn't have bought a house here, you know, I wouldn't have this friend or that friend, or have this job or gotten this promotion. Everything, just kind of, you know, I don't want to sound way too overly optimistic and be like, yeah, it's all gonna work out. Because realizing everybody comes from, you know, a different background. And everybody you know, just has opportunities that fall in their lap versus working hard for them. But it's, it's just worth if you have the financial and social and, you know, physical ability to just try something new. First thing that can happen is that you decide you don't like it and go back to doing what you were doing before or try to. So it doesn't even have to be a new job. It can just be you know, taking that extra class that fits in your schedule, joining that club.
Angela Adkins 17:54
What a great example of how sociology can help, right gives you the tools to try out those new things, to understand what you can leverage for yourself. And maybe when it's good to say I'm going to try something else. So I think that's wonderful. What a great adventure it sounds like.
Daniela Jauk 18:12
Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Brett. This was a breath of fresh air you this was delightful and very rich, thank you for your time and have wonderful events today and meet wonderful people.
Brett Heller 18:27
None today actually. It's a little bit of a break right now. So thank you for inviting me out my thanks for the early summer days of it.
Daniela Jauk 18:38
Awesome super. Thank you.
Angela Adkins 18:40
Thank you very much.
Daniela Jauk 18:48
Thank you for tuning into Why Sociology. Stay tuned for more mini interviews with applied and clinical sociology. And see you next time.