Transitions

By Alyssa Siegel

 After spending close to four years in the Math Department, it was becoming clear that my time there had run its course.  While my work was valued and appreciated by Math Faculty and the School of Arts and Sciences (in 2019 I was recipient of their inaugural Distinguished Staff Excellence award), there was a systemic inability to create a job role and position for me that accurately recognized and reflected what I brought to the table.  As such, my professional growth was stymied. 

Now that I had experience building applications for higher education and understanding what was needed, my initial “exit-plan” was to build similar tools for other universities and start a new business. I studied other universities’ websites to help me understand how operations varied from Rutgers’ (for example, course-numbering conventions), with an eye towards building tools to provide value more broadly, without being limited to a single department. 

 
While being fully focused towards establishing this new business, I was slowly awakening to the reality that this would not be easy. Decisions to purchase software systems for universities would come from Dean’s Office or higher-level areas. But it would be challenging to get a foot in the door as a standalone woman trying to get a new business off the ground. Another challenge I grew to recognize was the disconnect between what these high-level decision makers perceived as essential requirements for software systems – something enterprise-level that would work for an entire university – versus what I found to be the reality of the needs “in the trenches” – ie the specific needs of the Math Department. 
 
It was around this time when I got a call from my cousin, Devora. Devora was a lab manager at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey and her colleague, Sharda Kohli, was looking to fill a managerial position in the Radiation Oncology Department. According to Devora, Sharda was an out of the box thinker, looking for someone who could bring something different to the table. 
 
While that did describe me, and now I did in fact have management experience, I still did not envision having a position with a predominantly managerial role. Plus, Radiation Oncology at the Cancer Institute? Healthcare was a field that I did not have experience in, and this really felt like a stretch.   Still, Devora was convincing. “Just meet her, it couldn’t hurt”. I agreed to an interview. 


When I met Sharda, she elaborated on her open position. I would be a manager in the Radiation Oncology ("Radonc") Clinic, supervising the Admin team who support the Radiation Oncologists. While this still did not sound like anything remotely like what I saw as my intended career path, I was drawn to Sharda’s enthusiasm and interest in my technical background and what I had done for the Math Department. She said she would look forward to seeing what we might do within Radiation Oncology to improve efficiency and operations. 


While starting to imagine working alongside Sharda in this role, I thought it would behoove me to explore finding a job in IT. After all, I still saw my predominant skillset living in the world of technology. 


As such, I interviewed for an IT job in another department at Rutgers. The position involved generating reports using SQL. My interview was with several members of the team, and I enthusiastically spent a lot of time detailing some of the many projects I had worked on, from Clarity through my time in the Math Department. When it was their turn to ask questions, I was read to from what seemed to be a script: “Please give an example of an SQL statement.” “Please tell me what command in SQL you would use to aggregate data”. And so on. 

This was eye-opening. After leaving this interview and having time to collect my thoughts, it was clear that working with Sharda in Radiation Oncology was, surprisingly, the position that I was drawn to. While the IT job would have confined me to a box, performing a regimented set of specific tasks, working with Sharda would give us the space to be creative together, think outside of the box, and bring Radonc’s operations to a new level. I accepted Sharda's position. 




My adventures working with Sharda were about to begin!


Please read the next chapter of my blog: Cancer Institute of NJ 2019-Present

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