On a recent afternoon, Angela Jeon was stopped by friends no less than four times as she walked out of the Duderstadt Center. She warmly asked them questions, effortlessly recalling personal details.
Her friends joke, “She knows half the campus.” In keeping with her extraordinary outreach, her mission as student administration assistant for the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is to provide support and counsel to the students she works with and “make them feel loved and cared for” as best as she can.
Jeon has worked in the College of Engineering for three years. She provides administrative support for graduate and undergraduate students in the program, and recruits for the department. After graduating with a history degree in 2012, she was thrilled to accept this position. “I’m thankful for the mentors I had as an undergraduate and to be able to give that to others.”
One-on-one interaction comes naturally to Jeon, a self-described social butterfly. She knows her calling lies in working with students in a university setting, where she aims to positively influence and build relationships with the students she meets. A mission trip to Detroit this summer brought this knowledge and made it clear to Jeon that this was her path.
“I was so excited to talk to students and hear their stories. That’s when I learned that I love college campuses and thought I wouldn’t mind working with students on college campuses in the long term,” Jeon says.
She says her trip taught her to find purpose in her work and to be intentional about building relationships. She also became confident that student administration was her preferred field of work. Jeon also works with graduate students and appreciates that they’re around her age, which enables her to relate with them better because of the similar struggles they share in the same life stage.
During the mission trip, a 24-person team from Jeon’s church partnered with the César Chávez Academy and Wayne State University. At the academy, a charter school located in southwest Detroit, her group tutored students and facilitated extracurricular activities in performing arts, engineering, cooking and community service. Jeon’s responsibility was a cooking class.
“This trip … was an opportunity for me to be able to instill hope in the lives of people that I serve, and be sure that I leave a greater thing for people to hold onto,” she says.
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Jeon enjoyed the opportunity to experience Detroit’s “melting pot” of cultures. At Wayne State, the team focused on building ties between the church and international students. She appreciates the chance to interact with people of other cultures and religions. A poignant moment occurred when one Muslim student invited her and a few other team members to break fast with him during Ramadan.
Jeon has a years-long history of international mission trips. She took her first overseas mission trip to Indonesia and Singapore the summer after graduating with her bachelor’s degree. In March 2014, she went to Honduras to serve an orphanage there. On these trips, she built relationships with the local villagers and provided mentorship to teenagers.
Jeon hopes to have the opportunity to participate in similar mission trips in the future. In the meantime, her primary goal is simply to mentor and encourage students.
“It can be hard,” she says of working in student advising. “Not everyone is easy to love and relate to. But if love is missing, building a relationship is impossible, which is why I actively choose to love and care for people around me as best as I can. I don’t always succeed but that’s OK as long as I keep trying.”
Ann Jackson
“LOVE” IS the answer! Positive Mentoring could help all Faculty & Staff at the U. Why is it so hard to find Mentoring groups?