Ron Martin

About

Department/School/Division: Graduate and Professional Enrollment Management
Campus: Water Tower Campus
Years at Loyola: 12

What is your favorite thing about working at Loyola?
There are two things: One is the people I work with. I have the best and most supportive boss, awesome colleagues in my office and throughout the Enrollment Management division, and I work with a lot of really great people throughout the University. I mean this sincerely. It feels like every day I have another "favorite person" at Loyola. The second is the unending opportunities for personal and professional development, like taking classes like John Dugan's leadership course at the Rome Center last summer and Hector Garcia's Queer Theory class last semester, participating in HR's Emerge Classes and the LUC & ME mentor program, attending various Library Speaker Series talks. There are so many amazing opportunities and things to experience at Loyola.

What is your most memorable achievement as a Loyola employee?
I feel like my job is one that is made up of many notable achievements, some maybe bigger than others, finishing my PhD was huge, for example, but it's also helping an applicant navigate the application process, improving the admissions systems for faculty and staff, and being a mentor. They are all very personally fulfilling moments and memorable to me.

What does Loyola's mission mean to you?Being kind. Being generous.  Helping others when you can. Being thoughtful. Being respectful, fair, and open. Sharing knowledge. Always teaching, always learning.

What motivates you to succeed each and every day? 
I know that what I do at Loyola can have a big impact on people's lives, particularly our applicants and their academic futures, but also with faculty and staff and their role in admissions. I want to succeed because I want others to succeed, and I don’t want to be a hindrance to their success.

Tell us how you show your Rambler pride. 
I travel back and forth to work with a Loyola travel mug, usually full of coffee. With it I feel like a walking ad for Loyola. I've been in many conversations about Loyola with strangers on CTA over the years. 

Tell us something most people at Loyola would be surprised to know about you. 
Maybe that my job in GPEM was my first professional, full-time job with benefits? "J" is my favorite letter and "komorebi" is my favorite word (look it up), but I don’t have a favorite color or number. I love pop music and still love singing along to ‘Call Me Maybe’ when it comes on the radio. I like to think I have a really great memory, but I think I have Aphantasia, which is the inability to summon up mental images. I can remember seeing things and the "facts" of what I saw, but I can't actually envision those things, including people's faces, in mind.  It's like an html e-mail, most people see it as the image, I see the source code.  I don't know, is any of this surprising?