Near the end of our debrief for this episode of Higher Ed Icons, I tried to name the things that I admire most about Claire Machamer. I landed on four words: art, science, resilience, and grit.
The art came first. As a student at Auburn, Claire couldn’t decide on a major, so she went around asking people what they saw her becoming. Her mom told her to take a class in anything that interested her. She graduated with a year’s worth of electives and a BFA in graphic design, and she describes that time as “finding belonging in the arts.”
The science came later, and on purpose. A master’s in IT management, with a concentration in business analytics. She learned Tableau, which nobody needs her to run day to day. “Now that I understand how the system works, I can work better with our analyst.” Recently she sat down with her husband, a developer, and spent an hour building an app in Claude. It pulls ticket counts from two or three systems and emails her every day at 1 AM.
Resilience is the spring of 2020. Claire, her chancellor, and her provost huddled over a single laptop, passing it back and forth to write the message telling UNCSA students they weren’t coming back from spring break. That fall brought plastic stanchions in the orchestra rehearsal rooms, six-foot squares taped onto dance floors, and a play performed through a panel of windows, each actor in a separate room and the audience distanced outside. “When challenged, artists will find creative solutions.”
Grit, evidenced by her eleventh website redesign. This time, at Berklee. Six entities, two logos that couldn’t agree on red or blue, and 90,000 alumni, each with a version they love. When my co-host Mallory asked what she’d tell the Claire of her first big project, she laughed. “Ask for six more months before launch.”
A mentor once told her that your next opportunity should scare you a little bit. Every move since, she said, has come with a moment of “my gosh, can I really do this?” She keeps choosing the jobs that need a change agent because the others left her bored.
And so what I learned most from Claire in our conversation is that art and science get you into the room. Resilience and grit keep you there. A little fear is how you find the next room to make your own. Let’s go!
Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/higher-ed-icons/id1889996806?i=1000797209870
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Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Kqd70RMklkA?si=l0N6H9QiVSImt7jb