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Saunders helps transforms student services
As interim registrar, Kara Saunders now sees the Student Services Transformation project from the user side. Photo: NANCY J. PARISI
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“Life is about questions, and I guess you could say I’ve always been interested in finding the answers.”
Kara Saunders says her dream in college was to become a professor. But jumping from school to school, and town to town, for what can be a roller-coaster experience in academia would mean moving away from family.
Today, Saunders’ personal and professional passions happily intersect, running the gamut from religion and psychology, to higher education policy and organizational management. “Life is about questions, and I guess you could say I’ve always been interested in finding the answers,” she says.
Saunders is a University of Rochester graduate with a master’s degree in theological studies and a PhD in higher education administration from UB. She first came to UB to work in the Center for Children and Families on the South Campus, then joined staff of the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education in 2002, where she helped develop student services policies as she earned her doctorate.
Saunders went on to put her degree and love of education to good use as assistant vice provost for undergraduate education, a post she still holds. As of Dec. 1, she also began serving as interim university registrar, also part of the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education.
Saunders had served as a project lead for the Student Services Transformation project, an arm of the UB 2020 plan that assessed and revised processes related to a wide range of student services, including freshman applications, class registration and financial aid. In 2006, as UB 2020 initiatives were taking shape, Saunders moved to the SST core project team that is responsible for development, testing and implementation.
In October, SST’s new student information system, called the HUB, went live through MyUB for select undergraduates. In the spring, the system, formerly known as UBSIS, will be expanded to all students and faculty through the same portal. As interim registrar overseeing all processing and policies related to UB student records, Saunders now sees the SST project from the user side. “My office is a primary consumer of the HUB, and so our success is tied directly to its success.”
While working on SST, Saunders says she managed to find time to do some policy writing for the vice provost’s office—work she finds particularly satisfying because it gave her experiences working with disparate groups of faculty and staff, and she knew it helped impact how students succeeded at UB. The demands of that job, along with her graduate degree in theology, she says, have given her a unique outlook on the complexity and impact of the SST work.
“I’m not a terribly religious person, but I am spiritual,” Saunders explains. “And I’ve always been interested in how religion, especially, and other organized social groups legitimize our individual experiences.” On the flip side, she adds, SST has given her a deeper knowledge of how UB’s vast network of departments and units really function, helping her tailor policy to better suit student needs. “The main lesson here is that we have to learn from each other and work together in order to succeed.”
At home, Saunders also knows the satisfaction of building something from the ground up. She and her husband, John, are both Western New York natives and recently gutted an old fixer-upper in the Elmwood Village. They are painstakingly restoring it from floor joists to roof beams, learning as they go while keeping a watchful eye over their 13-month-old daughter, Willa.
Looking back to her days as a graduate student dreaming of the tenure-track job, Saunders has no regrets about her choice to become a university administrator and she feels the same way about balancing the job with motherhood. “I always wanted to be involved with education and to one day become a mom,” she says. “It may sound a little ‘Green Acres,’ but I feel I have all the best things right now,” she says, knowing that, for now, she has found answers to many of her former questions.
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