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Friday Focus: Focus on what you want

March 8, 2024

— By Nettie La Belle-Hamer, vice chancellor for research

“Are you going to try out for the team tomorrow?”
“I don’t think so. I’m not sure I am good enough.”
“Do you want to be on the team?”
“Yes! I really, really do!”
“The only way to get on the team is to go to the tryout. Don’t decide not to try because you are afraid to fail. Try because it is what you want.”

I have thought about that conversation with my then eight-year-old son many times over the years. Fear of failure can be motivating, but it can also be paralyzing if we are not careful. The concept often resurfaces when I least expect it. When I first accepted the job as director of a large NASA project that was struggling to survive over 20 years ago, I bought myself a present that I keep in my office to this day. It is a small metal block with one sentence engraved in simple text. “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” I sometimes need to remind myself of the advice I gave my children.

Taking my own advice, I focus on the end game for me and for UAF. As a university, we have goals to unite our individual efforts and I find this very energizing. I want to recognize that not everyone does. For some, BHAGs - pronounced bee-hags, big hairy audacious goals - such as achieving the R1 status as a research university are scary at best and de-motivating at worst. What if we fail? What if we cannot get there in the time we have challenged ourselves to, or not at all? Wouldn’t that be bad, worse than not trying at all?

“There is nothing either good or bad, only thinking makes it so.” While I hear the unintended audacity in quoting my own advice to my small child and William Shakespeare in the same breath, I will forge ahead to – hopefully – make the connection more clear. Failing is in the eye of the beholder. If we increase our graduate student graduation rates from an average of 40 a year to 60 a year, we ‘fail’ to reach R1 but we succeed in making our university stronger. If we improve the support infrastructure with increased staffing, training, and improved processes to support research, innovation, and creative works for our students, faculty, and staff, we will have succeeded in making our university a better place for all of us even if we miss the self-imposed deadline. Isn’t that success?

Once we decide that achieving R1 is a goal that we want to achieve as a university community, our focus needs to be on that and not on the fear of failing. The real goal, after all, is that together, we create excellence through transformative experiences for our students, our faculty, and our community – and ourselves. So, what do we want and how do we in the VCR’s office keep our focus on that?

As a chronic goal setter, I am driven to connect our vision to our goals and parlay them into action plans for myself and my team. I am not alone in this. All over UAF, leaders at every level are looking at their roles and how they contribute to UAF’s achievements. Focusing on achieving the overarching goals – focusing on what we want to achieve. This alone makes a difference. As part of my action plan, I am pleased to introduce you to two people who have recently joined the VCR Office.

Helena Buurman is the research development officer for the VCR and has already helped several groups write proposals for big ideas, some of which have been awarded! Developing ideas into proposals is a skill set that needs to be developed and honed. Part of my action plan is to help develop more UAF researchers. There are many aspects to this. The provost’s faculty accelerator, the capacity growing programs, the Proposal Development Implementation Team, the R1 Faculty committee, and my office are contributing to the focus on researcher training and professional development. Helena brings a new element of energy and creativity to ambitious projects that need an extra lift to be successful. She will help the connection between UAF research and The Implementation Group (TIG) to lean in on proposal success.

Sara Fisher-Goad is my executive director of operations focused on process improvement for how we support researchers at all levels. Communication with you, our UAF community, about what we have in place to support you and what we are developing needs to be consistent and clear. There are many aspects of that inside our office that have lain dormant due to budget cuts in the past, but as we focus on what we want to achieve we are picking them up, dusting them off, and making them serve you better.

They join a team of dedicated, and sometimes overworked, people who are passionate about research, innovation, and creativity. We take seriously our charge to grow research while maintaining integrity and compliance. We are a service organization and what I want, what I am focused on, is serving the university to reach our goals whether they are individual researchers or BHAG collaborative projects. 

I truly believe that what you focus on grows. Let’s grow UAF together.

Friday Focus is a column written by a different member of UAF's leadership team every week.