Employees of the Wisconsin Technical College System moved into a new space this summer near the Hilldale Shopping Center. From President Morna Foy’s new fifth-floor office, the view outside features a green tree canopy and the blue waters of Lake Mendota.
—-
Is there anything you’re particularly proud of or something you wish you were able to do?
There’s always more stuff that you would want to do. If I was going to be perfectly honest, I would have liked to have seen us make a little bit more progress on attracting more students into different professions.
For example, our apprenticeship programs are still dominated by white males in this state. We’re just now exploring different professions, and in partnership with the Department of Workforce Development, thinking about apprenticeship more as a learning method, as opposed to an alternative to college. So, that process of getting more men into health care, more women into the trades, more folks from rural areas into some high tech fields.
One of the great pleasures of my time with this system is learning about all the different ways a person can support themselves. We often have pretty narrow options that we think of, that have to do with our parents and communities we live in. Not everybody wanted to be a pro-athlete like me, but whether that was realistic or not isn’t really a part of your thinking when you’re a kid. There just are so many cool things to do in life.