I’m not going to explain exactly what prompted this, but I want to remind my readers of one of the absolute essential rules of life in academia:
The most important person in any academic department is the secretary.
Naive outsiders often think that the department chair is the most important person, or possibly the most senior faculty member, or maybe the professor with the most funding. That’s wrong, though. If you want to be able to get things done in academia, the person you need on your side is the department secretary.
I didn’t really appreciate this until graduate school…
I bombed my qualifying exam when I took it, and in my program, that meant I was required to take an oral exam. I was contacted by the department chair, who said she would set up the oral exam within a few weeks.
A month later, I called her, and she said she would get it together in a week or so.
Three weeks later, I spoke to her on campus, and she said she was working on it.
Two weeks after that, I stopped by the department office because it still hadn’t been set up, and mentioned to the secretary that if it couldn’t be scheduled before Thanksgiving (one week later), it would need to be after New Year’s, because I had exams in my classes to worry about, and I couldn’t keep waiting on this oral exam. “You need an oral exam scheduled?” she said.
Eight hours later, she contacted me with the names of the examining committee, and a date, time, and room for the exam.
And so, we return to the lesson: The most important person in any academic department is the secretary, because they’re the one who knows how to get things done. So, make sure to stay on the secretary’s good side– always ask for things nicely, always say “thank you,” stop and chat when you have free time. A little effort at courtesy will pay off a thousandfold the next time you need to know how to shake something loose from the campus bureaucracy.