The College honored 297 long-term employees at the annual Employee Service Awards banquets on Dec. 11. Associate director of the Office of Visa Immigration Services and international undergraduate advisor Marcia Calloway received the Sheila Culbert Distinguished Employee Service Award.
Executive vice president Rick Mills, who spoke at both the lunch and dinner events, said the event annually recognizes employees for landmark years of service. The employee lunch honored College employees with 10 or 15 years of service, while the dinner honored those who had worked at Dartmouth for 20 years or more.
“There are a whole lot of people in the background [who] are processing invoices, plowing roadways, serving food, cooking food, processing grant applications and just doing a ton of administrative tasks,” Mills said in an interview. “We’re always trying to find ways to tell staff and communicate to staff that we care about them, they’re important to us and they’re important to the mission.”
The Culbert Award was instituted in 2008 by president emeritus James Wright and his wife Susan DeBevoise Wright to honor former senior assistant to the president Sheila Culbert. The award recognizes an employee with at least five years of service who is committed to the mission of the College, performs consistently and excellently, demonstrates leadership and uses resources effectively.
Mills said a committee goes through the nominations for the award and chooses someone who has demonstrated a commitment and made a contribution that is recognized by students, faculty and fellow colleagues.
“[Sheila Culbert] was an extraordinary person who had a lot of gifts and was extremely dedicated,” Calloway said. “It’s particularly humbling, having known [Culbert}, to be put in that class or category.”
Calloway said she and her office staff advise international students regarding different types of visas, work authorizations and other documentation necessary to comply with both Dartmouth’s and the United States’ immigration regulations.
“It’s always challenging, because obviously Dartmouth attracts extremely bright people who are doing extremely interesting things,” she said. “We are constantly looking at what’s going on academically and then trying to foresee what we need to do legally to ensure that people can participate in those kinds of things.”
Calloway added that she brought the five other employees in the OVIS office as her guests to the employee recognition event.
“Without them, it would be difficult to do anything,” she said. “I thought that they deserved to be recognized as well.” Christine Qi ’19, an international student from China, said she meets with Calloway frequently to discuss the technical details of her visa paperwork.
“I work with her when I need to ask about working permissions and the I-20,” Qi said. “She’s been very helpful with all of that.”
Other employees at the event were honored for varying lengths of service, ranging from 10 to 51 years, according to physics department lecture and demo manager Ralph Gibson A&S’73, who was honored at the event.
Gibson, who first came to the College as a graduate student in 1970, said he loves his job and has witnessed many changes both at Dartmouth and in the physics department over his 45 years of service at the College.
“The huge change that happened just after I got here was co-education,” he said. “Dartmouth was originally all men — it’s so much better now.”
Mills said that given the rural nature of Dartmouth, employees tend to work at the College for many years.
“There tend to be a cohort of people who work here who have been here a very long time, and there are people who work here who are third or fourth generation Dartmouth employees,” he said. “Dartmouth really means something to them.”
Rachel is a '21 from Plainsboro, NJ and is currently serving as the editor-in-chief of the 177th directorate. She is pursuing a double major in economics and philosophy.
