Associate Vice President for Administration and Strategy, Office of the Provost and Office of the Executive Vice President for Research
Jennifer Herazy
The Early Years:
“I moved to Atlanta and started working at Tech in 1997. At that time, most women leaders were in management-level roles. I remember hearing the excitement from female faculty when Sue Rosser became dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and the first female academic dean in 1999.
At that time, I also noticed that every department had only one woman who had all of the information, and therefore all of the power. It was unspoken, but we all knew there could only be one woman who had any kind of power in a department, so there could be a lot of tension between women. Around the early 2000s, I recognized that the culture was changing. It happened slowly, but there was a community of professional women in positions of growing influence who were looking out for each other, and we could look to each other for advice.”
Proudest Achievements:
“I think about the decisions that were very difficult, and I am proud to have been part of the team that had to make those decisions. I was here in 2008 and 2009 when Georgia Tech had significant budget cuts, and people were laid off. I was on the furlough committee, and we looked at how to do it in a way that gave people as much dignity and flexibility as possible. Then in 2018 there were some very high-profile terminations, resulting in a lot of questioning of our ethics by the internal and external communities. And in the last couple of years the Institute responded to Covid in a tense political environment, and also responded to Black Lives Matter and other social issues. No matter what we did in those situations, everybody was not going to be happy. And in some cases, no one was happy. But time and time again, we would go back to our Institute values when making tough decisions. Our students and employees were always the top priority.”
Advice for New Women Administrators:
“When I started out, I was told to try to think and act like men to be successful. Let’s stop doing that and just lean into ourselves and trust our natural instincts, which are pretty awesome. Women are compassionate, practical, able to admit fault (and apologize), and are masters of execution. Lead as yourself.”
