Freshly appointed MATC president, Dr. Vicki J. Martin is not shortsighted regarding her vision for the institution’s ongoing success. Her multi-pronged set of immediate goals serves to positively affect the school she loves, for many, many years.
“We’ve done a great job for our first 100 years,” Martin avowed during an interview she granted the Times, “and we want to do an even better job for our next 100 years.”
Martin has served MATC in one capacity or another since 1988. It was an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2010 that fully prepared her for the position thanks to additional duties bestowed upon her by the person who was named to the post at that time, Dr. Michael Burke.
“I’ve been here a long time and since the day I’ve gotten here I’ve cared deeply about seeing students succeed,” Martin continued. “That will always be one of our strategic goals,” stated Martin. The goals also include bolstering relationships currently in place with other educational associations, as well as faith-based entities and private companies.
“We have advisory committees that are composed of our business partners,” Martin said. “We need those partners to tell us what jobs are available out there, what the curriculum should look like, what do our students’ skill sets need to be when they do get into the world of work.
“For example,” Martin pointed out, “we heard there was a great demand for truck driver training. We thought there was enough training programs close to us at our sister institutions that it was filling the need. Not even close.”
Martin believes an inward view at the level of engagement of faculty and staff is another valuable goal.
“Is there a lot of innovation involved? Because our employees make sure that we have the right type of environment going on for our students,” Martin added. “We care if our students are satisfied.
“I took over information technology,” Martin stated, “I took over student services. I took over all the regional campuses. I took on a lot more of the college in terms of trying to make sure we were a lot more in alignment and that our services were more integrated.”
It was time well spent, according to Martin, “That helped to prepare me to come here and to understand how all the pieces fit together and how they could even be further strengthened.”
She plans for her tenure as president to be measured by accomplishments as opposed to length.
“I am really committed and dedicated and there’s a couple key strategies and legacy pieces I really want to leave,” Martin explained. “If I leave this a better place than when I came, I’m going to feel pretty good about that.”
Information culled from open forums, surveys, and meetings with Student Senate have emboldened her view of MATC’s impact and her drive to continue it.“What we offer here literally changes people’s lives,” Martin declared. “We see people coming in here with either little hope of changing their lives because they’ve been in poverty or they’ve tried school before but they haven’t been successful. We also have students who have gone to a four-year and say ‘I can’t find a job.’”
“It’s a place where people can come,” Martin asserted, “and get their skill sets up to where our community needs them to be. We want to change the face of poverty in this community and the only way to do that is to work with our partners in the high schools and the grade schools and the middle schools, and make sure we’re working with them so that we have those students who are ready to come take advantage of it.
“And there’s a bunch of adults out there who desperately are underemployed, poverty wages or minimum wage, and they need to come back and get some more skill sets to get their wages up.”
Martin’s work ethic to give students another chance at a good life mirrors her appreciation for reading biographies of those who have faced challenging obstacles.
“I love biographies of people who overcame some sort of hardship and then there was redemption at the end, and that they’ve gotten their lives back together and they’re on a path where they were saved in some way.”
Martin believes the difficult times as president will come when MATC is unable to fulfill its mission to provide students with those chances, something she sees as lost opportunity.
“I really like to keep our promises that we make,” Martin admitted, “and I like to have high-quality service to our students and high-quality instruction. Anytime that doesn’t happen and we get a lot of concerns and complaints from people, that’s not a good day.”
Martin, who has recently taken up golfing and loves cooking shows even without possessing the ability to cook, thinks students can be responsible for their own success by cultivating and maintaining a presence at MATC despite personal, financial and educational hardships.
“Stay here. Ask for help. Be engaged. We’ve got academic support. We’ve got tutoring. We’ve got people here who really want to help and really want to help students stay here,” said Martin.
One of those people is Dr. Vicki J. Martin.