Rachael Perry: Creating a welcoming culture

Who would ever have thought that a math major planning to be an actuary would end up leading the recruitment and student affairs activities for a new pharmacy school? Certainly not Rachael Perry.

At least not when she was a math major at Keuka College awhile back, also playing on the women’s volleyball team. She’s now assistant dean for enrollment management and student affairs at Binghamton University’s School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

While on Keuka’s volleyball team, Perry’s coach regularly used her to talk to prospective students — even when the school was starting a men’s team. “It became a little more challenging to recruit male volleyball players because there wasn’t an established program,” Perry said. “I would talk to these high school students and their families about my experience there.”

The parallels with recruiting for a new pharmacy school are apparent, as were Perry’s abilities to connect with prospective students then and now. She was offered a part-time position in admissions at Keuka after graduation. “I said, ‘Sure! I’ll do this and make a little bit of money while I study for my actuary exams,” Perry said. “And then I ended up really liking it and they offered me a full-time job and I thought, ‘You know what? Maybe I’ll just do this. It’s a lot of fun and I really like it — and do I really want to be an actuary?”

After a few years of building relationships with prospective students she would never see again after they matriculated, Perry realized she wanted to do more. She applied for a position as an academic advisor for Harpur College of Arts and Sciences at Binghamton. “I totally loved it because I got to watch students from the time they were at orientation to graduating,” she said. “I started working a lot with pre-health students and I will never forget the very first student I ever advised. His name was Drazen and it was at his orientation session and he was trying to decide if he should take chemistry or a Zombie English class.

“I said, ‘If you want to go to physical therapy school you probably need to take the chemistry class!’” (He took chemistry and continued to seek advice from Perry on a regular basis.)

But, before he graduated, Perry had transitioned to working at the pharmacy school. Even so, Drazen has her to write him a letter of recommendation for his physical therapy program. He got into his first-choice school, and “I got to see the very first student I ever advised go from a freshman at orientation all the way up to getting into a physical therapy program,” Perry said.

“That’s what I really enjoy about my job is getting to watch students move through and grow and evolve and that’s why I love my job now because I get to see them from the first time they say, ‘Hey, I think I want to go to pharmacy school,’” she said. “It’s the best of both worlds getting to help them get into the school they want to go, but also getting to watch them evolve and grow and go out into the world as healthcare providers.”

But the job isn’t always easy.

“Sometimes you are a student’s biggest cheerleader but they don’t do things to help themselves and that’s really frustrating for me,” Perry said. “When you talk to a student about how to best manage their time or what they need to do and you meet with them and they haven’t done anything you’ve talked to them about — I never want to see a student not succeed or fail out but it’s really difficult when you talk to a student over and over about the things they need to do to be successful but they don’t follow through.”

And, it still surprises Perry that she is in a leadership position. “It was certainly an unexpected turn of events that led me to where I am,” she said. “When I was a senior in college if you said this is what I’d be doing by the time I was 30, I would not have believed it. But I feel like my success has been dependent on the people on my team so I just try to work as a team.

“It’s important for me as a leader that I’m not asking my team to do anything that I wouldn’t be willing to do and that I’m really helping to grow them,” she said. “Ultimately, I want everyone on my team to be as successful as possible because that helps all of us achieve our goals.”

She doesn’t know where she might be in five or 10 years, but can see herself staying put for some time.

“There’s still a lot of opportunities for my position to grow and evolve,” she said. “I have lots of ideas for things that we could be doing and I think once we have alumni and the PhD program that there really is a lot of growth potential in what I’m doing.”

Meanwhile, she is about halfway through a Master of Science in Student Affairs Administration at Binghamton, a program that allows her to bring a lot of her experiences to the classroom and apply the things that she learns to actual practice in her job.

Working from home has changed her daily routine now that she can no longer stop by an office, but she still finds herself connecting with her staff each weekday morning, advising prospective students on the application process and reviewing what classes they should register for.

“But then there are also times when we have a student who is facing a crisis and I have to drop everything and deal with that,” she said. Some crises are major; others can be taken care of like in one recent example during the pandemic when a student’s laptop stopped working so Perry had a laptop overnighted to the student to complete final exams.

Most students understand that Perry and her team go the extra mile. “But some of them are really shocked that we answer their emails and we’re overnighting laptops so that this person could take finals,” she said. “I don’t think that’s something that happens everywhere.”

She also works closely with academic affairs to make sure there are enough seats and electives for PharmD students to take classes — and she oversees that students’ background checks and drug screens are completed.

“There have been times when a student has failed a drug test and I have to call and talk to them about what’s going on,” Perry said. “Thankfully, every single time it’s been that they have just forgotten to provide their prescription information!”

Playing her part in establishing an exciting and welcoming culture at a new school has also been important to Perry.

“I feel like I have helped to create that culture; we are all in it together but we have decided that that is what our culture is,” she said.

She is a welcoming kind of person.

That’s just who I am as a person,” she said. “I have experienced in my lifetime times when I’ve felt like an outcast or have been afraid to do something because of the way other people behaved. It was horrible and felt like I didn’t belong, so I would never want to make someone feel like they can’t do something or they aren’t welcomed.

“It’s just like the golden rule,” she said. “I treat people the way I want to be treated, making them feel comfortable. We’re trying to help students become really good healthcare providers and I think that some of the best healthcare providers or people in general that I have been around are the people who make you feel like you are valued as a human being and they want to help you, so that’s the environment that I personally like.”

Perry also thrives due to the female leadership at the school, she said. “It can sometimes be difficult to be respected as a young female in my role. It’s really a good environment to have strong female leaders who support other females.”

And though time doesn’t feel normal for her any longer due to the coronavirus, she maintains a similar work schedule via Zoom as she did pre-pandemic, with the exception of sleeping in a bit. “I love to sleep!” she said. “I need my seven hours or I can’t function!”

In her downtime, she likes to ski and ride her Peloton, as well as spend time with her dog, Wilson (a throwback to her volleyball days because he’s named after the volleyball in Castaway), a 100-pound Newfoundland-Australian Shepherd mix.

He is the “best dog ever,” she said. “He’s a perfect dog. He’ll take up half the couch, but he’s also very cuddly. He even let’s my two-year-old niece walk him on a leash.”

And as for her math skills that she left behind, they also still serve her well on the job. “I have critical thinking skills and I still crunch some numbers behind the scenes like with stats on how our students are doing in the program, and I oversee our budget and things like that,” Perry said. “It also helps in knowing where we are with recruitment at the national and regional levels. I like to categorize students to figure out how likely is any particular student to come here based on their metrics.”

But becoming an actuary is no longer in the cards for her. “NO! I would fail those tests now! It was good that I found my calling!” she said.