Congratulations to our March 2023 SPOT Award Recipients
Please join us in celebrating the following recipients of the March SPOT awards!
Sarah Bottger: Events Manager with Events & Space Management. Sarah took her incredible skill and aptitude for designing events and experiences and turned that lens to a deep need for staff connection. This was a volunteer role where she consistently went beyond herself to bring people together and made strides to boost staff morale. It was especially needed to develop connections in a hybrid work environment. Sarah kept a lens to inclusion in providing a wide range of experiences and activities so that all staff could see themselves participating in ways most comfortable to them.
Ida Chithavong: Lead Faculty Support Assistant with the Faculty Support Unit. Ida goes above and beyond to collaborate with her team and share her expertise in navigating central campus systems. Ida has saved the team many hours of time and has improved overall efficiency in her department.
Amanda Gill: Associate Director of the EWMBA Program. Amanda created and leads the newly developed group, Master’s Degree Community of Practice: Strategies for Impactful Advising. The group fosters community by connecting student-facing colleagues across the Master’s programs at Haas in their roles working with students, sharing advising challenges, wins, and strategies with one another. Amanda engaged her high level of knowledge and passion for student services while leading meetings by bringing in and preparing a ‘live’ student re-enactment for a dynamic discussion and important take-aways for her department’s work.
Molly Hernandez: Admissions Event Manager with MBA Programs for Working Professionals Admissions. Along with Rachel York (see below), Molly demonstrated her job mastery and collaboration in managing and marketing the events for the Working Professionals admissions team, most recently for adding and creating the “Saturday At Haas” event. The event was an in-person recruiting day which included coordinating complex logistics. The successful event resulted in an afternoon experience for both the EMBA and Evening and Weekend programs for over 120 students. This event was created in response to the need to maximize applications this cycle and was especially impactful in bringing a diverse, on-target audience to have an amazing experience.
Katrina Koski: Director of Inclusion and Belonging/DEIJB Team. Katrina is the recipient of two Spot awards this month. Katrina strategized and organized the Berkeley Haas Celebrating Trans Joy event for the Haas community, which was created to celebrate the transgender community at Berkeley Haas and throughout the UC Berkeley campus. She galvanized staff members graduate students to escort non-binary and transgender students to the space that she secured for the event. Katrina also found funding to provide food to the community in attendance, located a world-famous transgender speaker to highlight the event, and created a space that was welcoming and affirming to all.
Katrina also supported a team of undergraduate students in preparing for and participating in a National Diversity Case Competition in Indiana over the MLK Jr, weekend. In acting as a staff advisor for this team, she provided exceptional, warm support during and after the event. Katrina supported the students’ learning and growth.
Anna Nichols: Director of Corporate Partnerships of the MBA Career Management Group. Anna has excelled in her role and accomplished more sponsorships and total dollars raised by corporations than anyone in the role previously. In fiscal year ‘22, Anna exceeded her $500K goal by bringing in over $3M (six times her goal) from corporations. This corporate philanthropy supported key faculty research. In addition to bringing in almost all of the sponsors for the Culture Conference, Anna also helped with recruiting students from HBCUs to participate in this challenge over the past two years.
Callum Rutherford: Events Associate with Alumni Relations/DAR. Callum has gone above and beyond to create multiple efficiencies for his department through numerous complicated event builds. Additionally, Callum has shown incredible innovation by creating an Event Registration Dashboard, which now serves as a self-serve resource that the team uses daily to report progress to external stakeholders.
Anthony Whitten: Director of Diversity Admissions with the DEIJB Team. Anthony supported a team of undergraduate students in preparing for and participating in a National Diversity Case Competition in Indiana over MLK Jr. weekend. As a staff advisor for this team, he went above and beyond by spending time coaching the team on their team dynamics and team presentation skills, holding space for them to share their feedback on the selection and training process, and advocating on behalf of the students for changes to the training process. Much of this time was during the Curtailment and Winter Break period, during which he was accessible and present to the students as they prepared for the competition.
Rachel York: Associate Director of Admissions with MBA Programs for Working Professionals. Along with Molly Hernandez (above), Rachel demonstrated her job mastery and collaboration in managing and marketing the events for the Working Professionals admissions team, most recently for adding and creating the “Saturday At Haas” event. The event was an in-person recruiting day which included coordinating complex logistics. The successful event resulted in an afternoon experience for both the EMBA and Evening and Weekend programs for over 120 students. This event was created in response to the need to maximize applications this cycle and was especially impactful in bringing a diverse, on-target audience to have an amazing experience and be especially motivated to join.
Hazel Zambrano: Associate Director of Alumni Communities, DAR. – Hazel leveraged her role with the alumni chapters to support aligning alumni gatherings with admitted student receptions globally. Thanks to Hazel’s partnerships, alumni chapters around the globe are now hosting admitted student welcome receptions. The Chilean alumni backyard BBQ (now in its second year), and other admit receptions are becoming fixtures on the alumni/admitted student calendar.
