|
Credit: Nick Romanenko
|
Position: Undergraduate registrar, New Brunswick
Length of Service: In her current position since 1999, she’s been working at Rutgers since 1994
Residence: Jackson
Her usual duties:Klau supervises and directs registration for the New Brunswick undergraduate population, approximately 20,000 students a year. Her encyclopedic knowledge of each college’s rules and regulations positions her as the perfect intermediary between students and the academic deans. Klau guides undergraduates through the university’s degree requirements, answering as many as 50 e-mails a day from students and meeting with them face to face. In spring 2005, she introduced an online diploma application, which streamlines the once time-consuming process of hand delivering or mailing in paperwork to the undergraduate registrar’s office. This convenience, introduced as a pilot program at Cook College, will be offered to all New Brunswick undergraduates this fall.
Beyond the call of duty: A social worker by training, Klau aided and counseled student victims of Hurricane Katrina, after administration officials created an emergency program for New Jersey residents who were attending Louisiana universities and had been forced to flee north. Working 10-hour days, Klau found an academic home for more than 40 Jersey natives and a handful of nonresidents who had sought shelter with relatives in the state. “There were no appointments. They just kept coming in, and some of them looked shellshocked,” Klau recalls. One student had traveled from Louisiana to live with his cousins in New Jersey but worried about immediate family still stranded in the New Orleans Superdome. “I wanted to make students comfortable and assure them that they’d be okay here,” Klau said. “And I also made certain that they chose courses that would allow them to return to their sending school after a semester without losing any credit.” Consulting a Web site that can download college catalogues from across the nation; Klau figured out exactly what classes students had been taking at their Louisiana schools and then matched them with equivalent courses at the New Brunswick campus. In a few days’ time, she created an individualized schedule for each hurricane victim. She also teamed with the Housing Office to find students accommodations.
An academic journey: Klau’s long road from wife and mother to undergraduate registrar began in fall 1991. At age 50, she decided to complete her undergraduate education and enrolled in Douglass College’s Mary I. Bunting program, designed for mature students. Klau chose “Popular Culture and Music” as one of her classes and found herself listening to the British punk rock band The Sex Pistols for her first homework assignment. Eventually, Klau found her niche in the art history department. She graduated from Douglass phi beta kappa in 1995, winning the Mary Weissberger Award for Scholastic Achievement and the Flora Eisenberg Award for Service to Douglass College.
Special thanks: “I’ve enjoyed a rewarding career on this campus thanks to administrators who were real leaders and always gave me a chance,” Klau says. She is especially grateful to her supervisor, Kenneth J. Iuso, university registrar, who “has created a work environment that has allowed me to both grow professionally and enjoy coming to work each day.”
Future plans: Klau plans to retire in about a year and spend more time with her husband, Howard, and their six grandchildren. She’d love to dust off her art history books and travel to Florence, Italy, where this registrar and renaissance woman will find rebirth in yet another phase of her life.
Know someone who deserves to be in the spotlight? Contact Focus editor Carla Cantor at ccantor@ur.rutgers.edu
|
