#facultystaff

For some the years have gone by quickly. Others can recount the many changes that have occurred over the last 25 years. But for all, 25 years reflects a significant degree of dedication, accomplishment, and serious work. This week we held the Buffalo State luncheon to recognize this year’s especially large group of 32 employees. 

It was a totally enjoyable experience to attend the 19th annual Faculty and Staff Research and Creativity Fall Forum on Thursday. As I made the rounds in Houston Gym to appreciate the research displayed on posters and to engage in conversations with faculty members about their research projects, I was amazed at the diversity of research being explored on campus.

Hibajene Shandomo presented on “The Impact of Internationally Trained Educators on Youth at Risk, including Refugee Population in the U.S.A. classrooms”

▬▬ FC: GILLIAN ANDERSON ▬ TAKEN ▬▬

❝ My reason for being here is the same as everyone else’s; I’m just the only one who will admit it. We all got caught.❞

Personality:

✔ Shrewd, Enterprising, Direct ✘  Icy, Insensitive, Aloof

Karen is nothing if not intelligent. Her ambition has died off with time and circumstance, significantly limited by her surroundings and curtailed by a life at Elswood, and it has left her bitter and angry, frustrated at her lack of opportunity to capitalize on her skills and abilities. She does not have the proper demeanor for a teacher or a mentor, too aloof, cold, and impatient to connect with students and foster them and has a tendency to be incredibly direct and condescending, even when interacting with her peers in the faculty, making it nigh impossible for her to find friends and companionship outside of the reliable comfort of a glass of wine.

Backstory:

TW: drugs, alcohol

Born to a single, absentee mother and raised in the Midwest, Karen spent the majority of her childhood years considering her ability to be a useless curse, envying and idolizing the figures in literature and comic books and on the television, people with more useful superpowers than she, using them to gain fame and fortune. The motivation to work towards the greater good never crossed her mind, seeing only the attention they gained from saving the day. In the mean time, she made the trees and flowers in the park bigger and smaller and made bulbs sprout out of season, wondering why no one walking by ever noticed.

As she got older, growing into an ambitious and enterprising teenager, she honed her skills, able to grow plants at will, even without soil or seeds in the area. After falling in with a certain disreputable crowd, she began to provide a steady stream of weed to drug dealers, making ever more money as her connections expanded, making more in a week than her mother had made in three months. Most of the money went into savings, and the absentee parent had absolutely no idea that her daughter was partaking in activities of questionable legality.

 The business expanded, and she branched out into poppy based opiates, drawn further and further into that world, not only dealing with amateurs, but becoming directly linked to big time adult dealers and several gangs. After several threats on her life, at age 20 she liquidated her assets and planned to go into hiding somewhere out of the country, and found herself at Elswood.

▬▬ FC: MEGHAN MARKLE ▬ TAKEN ▬▬

❝ That’s a bit of a two-part answer, y’see. Firstly, I’m here because Anya Elswood is my stepsibling, and, gracious soul that she is — note the sarcasm — she offered me a job here that I would’ve been an idiot to refuse, which brings us to part two of our answer: it’s disgustingly hard to find a job in this economy with a classics degree and a give-em-hell attitude. I guess this really could’ve been shortened to one word instead of two parts: necessity. I needed a job, Anya needed a receptionist who wouldn’t tell anyone what went on within these walls. Everyone wins. Plus, the healthcare benefits are great.❞

Personality:

✔ perceptive, eclectic, perfectionist  ✘ restless, cunning, overemotional

Charlene, known to her closest friends as ‘Charlie’ or ‘Chuck’, is a firm believer in the phrase “never let them see you break a sweat”. She always wears a smile on her face no matter how she’s feeling, and in truth, the smile is usually quite contrary to her actual mood. Always witty and quick on her feet, Chuck has learned how to channel her cunning nature and use it in order to keep the secret of the school as safe as possible. Because of her restless nature and her penchant for perfectionism, however, Charlie can be labeled as a complete and utter workaholic. She throws herself headfirst into any job she’s assigned to do, and doesn’t give up on any seemingly futile task. Between this and her tendency to mask her emotions, Charlene is incredibly in touch with her emotions, to the point where she could be deemed as overemotional. Though, despite all of that, Charlene Lancaster is an excellent person to have in your corner.

Backstory:

TW: death

At the heart of this backstory lies an unspeakable tragedy — one that may have been a bit more tragic had Charlene actually been able to remember it. Her father passed at an early age due to a hiking incident or a biking incident: one of those two; her mother had told her the story so much as a child that the details had begun to run together. Despite that, the fact remained that Charlene grew up fatherless, with her mother working two jobs to keep food on the table. Because of countless nights spent home alone, Charlie was forced to grow up more quickly than the children around her, but this did not bother the young girl one bit. She acted like an adult, and so her mother treated her like one. It was a flawed dynamic at best, but it was a comfortable one, and Charlene wouldn’t have traded it for the world.

Not much changed as Chuck blossomed into a teenager: though her mother gave her the kind of freedom that most teenagers could only dream of, Charlene preferred the safety of her home over anything else. Like most, her wild years took place while she was away at college, majoring in classics and minoring in English literature — and when she returned home after graduating, she’d found that everything had changed. Her mother had gotten remarried without telling her, and suddenly her last name was Elswood and Charlene had a step-sister. She didn’t like it, not one bit, but as she did with everything else, she made the best of a terrible situation.

Things didn’t look up for years after that. She couldn’t find a decent job, her mother had no time for her anymore and there was something off about her stepsister: something almost supernatural, had Charlene believed in that kind of thing. It wasn’t until, sick of having too many questions and virtually no answers, she’d followed her one day, and had experienced firsthand the events that transpired within the school. Anya, seemingly within a panic, offered Charlene a job at the school in exchange for her continued silence. Though this didn’t appeal to Charlie, with the repayment of student loans looming in the distance, she had no choice but to accept.