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Volume 42
Number 1
September 3, 2009 |
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Pitt's 'All in the Family'
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That’s the running tally — in Pitt-employment years — of the four-member Rosol family: Joanne; her husband Mike, and their sons Jason and Derek. Toss in four Pitt degrees among them and you realize this is a family with a serious case of Blue and Gold.
“Joanne and I have been here forever. When we started, the Cathedral was only seven floors high,” joked Mike Rosol, manager of bulk mailing services, part of Parking, Transportation and Services.
Mike started at Pitt in 1970, delivering mail throughout the Cathedral of Learning. He and a co-worker had a dedicated elevator, complete with a human operator, to take them to every floor.
“We got to know people on every floor. That’s how I met Joanne,” Mike said.
Joanne joined the Pitt staff the same year, working for a couple of months at Falk Library as a secretary before transferring to the then-School of General Studies in the Cathedral.
A colleague of Joanne’s played Cupid for the couple.
Mike said, “One of her friends invited us over to her house — a blind date, I guess — or not really blind, because we did know each other by then.”
Joanne climbed the employment ladder at CGS, moving from secretary to dean’s administrative assistant to her current post as director of enrollment management, while also earning both a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree here. “In my job, I deal with adult, nontraditional students,” she said. “It’s really easy to relate to these students, especially because that’s how I did it: I started and I stopped. Working, having kids and going to school, it took me almost 20 years to finish my undergraduate degree, but then I went right into my master’s program and that went a lot faster,” Joanne said. “I really took advantage of the tuition benefits, including with the kids,” she added.
Jason, 30, is a 2001 Pitt graduate in accounting. He was a student-employee throughout his undergraduate years, working in the Office of Admissions and Financial Aid, among other units. Following graduation, he was hired in Research Accounting and since 2004 has been a projects administrator in the medical school’s Department of Medicine, part of a group of some 20 accountants who monitor federal research grant procedures.
“We’re there to make sure that [researchers] don’t get into trouble if they get audited and that they’re spending on things that are appropriate to the grant. That all has to be documented, especially when it involves federal money,” Jason said.
Brother Derek, 28, also was a student worker during his undergrad days, moving from the Provost’s office to linguistics and then, following in his father’s footsteps, working in the student mailroom in Litchfield Towers. He earned a psychology degree in 2004 and that year was hired at The Book Center, where he is a sales floor coordinator.
When it came time to apply to college, Jason and Derek looked no further than Pitt. Joanne said her sons’ Pitt indoctrination began at a young age, when child care options were scant. “After I had the kids, I came back from pregnancy leave and worked 10 hours a week: two days a week, five-hour shifts,” she said.
“I stayed with the kids during the day and then Mike would come home and I’d go to work. And I had a wonderful boss. If I had to, I would take the kids to work, and that was fine. A lot of us did that. The work still got done.”
Derek said, “I remember both my parents, actually, taking me to work. We’d get out of school and I’d go to my mom’s office and they’d give me little tasks like making copies of something. Or when my dad was working in the Cathedral, we’d hang out there sometimes.”
Mike said, “We brought them to Pitt as kids and it’s like they never left.”
Derek said, “I always knew I’d go to Pitt. As long as I can remember, I’ve been a big Pitt fan. I liked everything about it. I follow football and men’s basketball.”
Jason, also a big Panthers sports booster, concurred. “I never considered any other place than Pitt,” he said. “It just felt right to me.”
Derek commuted all four undergraduate years from the Rosol family’s Penn Hills home, one more year than his brother did.
The brothers agreed that cosmetic improvements in Oakland over the last decade or so have changed the atmosphere on campus.
Derek said, “I think the biggest change is the greening of the campus. It has a much less big-city feel now, with students out studying on Schenley Plaza, for example. We didn’t have too many options like that when I went to Pitt.”
That “greening” of the campus is something that Mike Rosol largely has missed. In his 39 years with Mailing Services, the operation has moved from Henry Street to the Cathedral basement to an Uptown warehouse near Duquesne University to Melwood Avenue to its current Lexington Avenue location. “We haven’t been on campus for maybe 20 years,” Mike said. “It is a different feel. Sometimes I like to come here to Oakland just to walk around and get the feel of the campus again. But it’s quieter where we are and parking’s not a problem.”
Mike said the biggest changes he’s seen at Pitt have come from advances in machinery and technology. “We have machines that do a lot of the stuff we used to do by hand,” he said, adding that in the 1970s and ’80s Mailing Services even had its own temporary pool of 15-20 workers on call for heavy mail sorting and delivering days.
Machines have replaced the need for extra staff, he said. “For example, people used to have to peel off labels and stick them on. Now we have a machine that sprays the addresses on, and machines do the inserting for the business-size envelopes.”
But the biggest change is the revolution in technology with the development of computers and the Internet, he said. The volume of mail handled on campus has been affected by the advent of email and other online services. “For students, we used to mail and insert their grades. We don’t do that anymore. That used to be what, 25,000 pieces a couple times a year? A lot of that’s gone online.”
Mike and Joanne both recalled the Pitt computers of earlier days. “I remember when all Pitt had was the monster computers that took up a whole floor in the Cathedral,” Mike said. “To work on it you had to have punch cards, and you needed about 80 punch cards for a program just to count from 1 to 20,” he quipped.
Joanne remembered taking course registration cards to the Registrar’s office every Tuesday — and not finding out until the following day if there were still openings in a given class. It was a far cry from online registration, which is expected to start University-wide this fall.
The Internet also has changed things dramatically for Pitt staff in search of a job transfer. Joanne remembers when the University Times was the main source for Pitt job openings. “Back in the day, I remember people rushing downstairs to get a copy of the University Times for the job postings,” she said. Now, all open positions are searchable on the Human Resources web site.
Having Internet access at home has changed her own job, Joanne said, because she can perform most of her duties remotely. “I can get right into my desktop from home. It’s just like I’m sitting in my office,” Joanne said.
On the downside, having a laptop and BlackBerry means she can be contacted with work issues virtually 24/7.
Mike’s job is such that no amount of technology would enable him to do it remotely, something that is fine with him. “I have enough trouble with a cell phone,” he admits.
As part of the generation that grew up with computers, their sons use the Internet and related technology in ways that might not occur to their parents. Both Jason and Derek rely on the Internet for their news, for instance. “I never buy a newspaper, except maybe on Sunday for the ads,” Jason said, while his parents use more traditional communication means.
But the technology divide doesn’t really drive a wedge between the generations, the parents maintained. “We all share a love for Pitt and for Pittsburgh, which is a big enough city while keeping its small-town intimacy,” Joanne said.
—Peter Hart
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