Q&A with CMU Alumni
Three CMU Alumni talk about their experiences and advice to current students
Experience is an invaluable knowledge. Especially when the knowledge is from the people that sat in your seat and know your community.
Three Central Michigan University alumni, who are not only former students but also former employees, recently discussed their experiences with the campus and community during a student-led Q&A session.
Shanese Ross Pierrie, from the class of 2008, is an award-winning writer who currently is the director of university and community partnerships. Noah Burks, ('20), is the assistant director of student activities/marketing in the office of student activities, and Mary Henley, a graduate of the class of 1986, worked in the University Communication Center before retiring in 2021.
They all reflected on their involvement with CMU at a Coalition of Black Empowerment (C.O.B.E) panel conducted last week as part of the campus' commemoration of Black History Month.
During the Q&A, Henley said her favorite memory was her first dance in 1979, during her freshman year.
“(It was) my first time hearing 'Rapper’s Delight,'” she said. “I was at a house dance, my first dance, and I will always remember that song.”
As an undergraduate student coming in 2016, Burks took an unpopular path.
“I didn’t do the traditional route of what was getting involved in a club or organization similar to C.O.B.E,” Burks said. “I paved a different path of being involved with some offices.”
Through his First Year Experience course, like Leadership Safari and IMPACT, he said he was able to make connections to come back and work with them.
He also reflected on his time with his First Year Experience course.
“Through that program, I was able to really build a sense of belonging on campus,” Burks said. “I also was able to go through the inaugural year of IMPACT.”
Ross Pierrie faced challenges, like family issues, that she said can make students leave college.
“I was more so just trying to get the degree that I came here to get,” she said. “I needed to graduate and go home and take care of my dad.
“I wasn’t that student that had a nice shiny job lined up after graduation.”
By making it through those hardships, she said she was later able to relate to and advise people's struggles as a mentor.
Burks, who graduated during the COVID-19 pandemic, said his expectations were not the reality. After graduating he went down to South Carolina to attend Clemson University to earn his master's degree. He felt a different energy.
“I experienced navigating situations of racism and bias on a college campus,” he said. “They would sit outside of dorms of students of marginalized identities and, like, wait for them to come out.”
Henley said she made her own community on campus by having people work in her office.
“We would have students who come into the pathways program and they would come in as freshman and take FYE, First Year Experience,” she said. “I would hire as many of those students to work in my office.
“I created this workforce. I would play to their strengths.”
Whatever the students major was, she tried to coordinate her training accordingly, she said.
Ross Pierrie said it was important for her to network on campus. Being from Detroit and having most people look like her, she said it was culture shock coming to CMU.
“If I was never involved with the MASS (Multicultural Academic Student Services) office, I would not know about many opportunities,” she said. “A lot of these faculty members, I would’ve never met if I didn’t respond to a simple email.”
Ross Pierrie also mentioned that she joined a sorority.
“That was very pivotal for me because that gave me a platform to really display some things that were passions of mine,” she said. “I had other things that I wanted the student body to know and to experience.”
