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Campus News
     
Your faculty and staff news since 1965
Special Spotlight Issue:  April 22, 2002

Office manager balances work, family life

By Robyn Gleasner

Florence GonzalesFlorence Gonzales is the office manager for Arts and Sciences. She not only balances the budget for the entire college, but also balances her family life with work.

Gonzales has worked for the University for 24 years. She began in the Speech and Hearing Department in administration. “It was very clinical as well as academic and it gave me the background I needed,” she says.

Gonzales stayed with Speech and Hearing for 16 years and then moved to the College of Arts and Sciences where she has been for seven years. She says, “I’m not going anywhere until I retire. I love my job. It challenges me and changes every day. I like seeing it through from beginning to end.”

As office manager, Gonzales assists the academic dean and oversees the college, which has 20 departments and 19 programs. She deals with hiring the staff, staff compensation and getting faculty and teacher assistants for the summer session. She also helps allocate the budget to departments in the college in a short two-week turnaround.

“I do like the budget. I like the global affect of it. Every paper I see is directed to the budget,” says Gonzales. She says that working for a college opens your eyes to new possibilities and ways of doing things.

As a woman bustled into the room and asked for a signature, Gonzales quickly said, “Let me look it up and see how they will get paid.”

“That’s the way it always is around here,” Gonzales apologized. “I don’t have the type of job where my desk stays clean. Once the spring session is over, the summer session is soon to follow and people need to get paid.”

Gonzales emphasized that the work done in Arts and Sciences is all about teamwork.

Communication is an important skill that she strongly demonstrates. She has taken sign language courses to better communicate with staff who are deaf. Phyllis Wilcox, linguistic faculty, inspired her to learn more. Gonzales said, “I love interpreting for her and I would love to learn more if I had time.”

Despite her busy job, Gonzales says that she doesn’t get stressed. “It’s all about my family.”

Sometimes she has to take work home in order to finish it all, but her family is used to it.

“Both my son and daughter are going to UNM,” Gonzales said. This has given her the opportunity to advise them.

She laughed, “I see them more at school than I do at home!”

“When I started 24 years ago, I never envisioned myself retiring. It’s gone by so fast and I’ve enjoyed it.”

Although Gonzales has not received a college degree and insists, “I’ve developed a job and not an education,” her efforts to balance the budget and her life are extraordinary.