Three Faces of FHL: the Front Office Staff
by Director Megan Dethier
The relative calm of winter quarter at FHL is a great time to tell our readers about more of the essential people who make FHL run so smoothly. Past Tide Bites have celebrated our Dining Hall, Maintenance and Custodial staff members; future ones will discuss finance, waterfront, and other teams. This month I want to talk about the three women who are, for many, the faces of FHL – who arrange visits, greet arrivals, troubleshoot problems, and keep all FHL operations flowing: the Front Office team.
Bernadette Holthuis has been the FHL Operations Manager since 2019. Before moving into this position, she worked in the roles of FHL Visitor Coordinator and FHL Academic Services Manager – and long before that she was a graduate student in UW Biology and has even been an FHL course instructor! She’s worn many “hats” at FHL and has a deep knowledge of its inner workings, which is part of what makes her so good at her job, which she describes as “a little bit of everything”: submitting grant proposals, preparing budgets for courses and the summer internship program, writing hiring letters for instructors, managing the FHL internal database, consulting with me about policies, and supervising campus teams such as Dining, Custodial and Maintenance, making sure that they are communicating and coordinating successfully. She loves her job because of her long and deep connections with the Labs and its missions of research and education, and in her current role she gets to figure out how to weave through University systems to “make things happen” so that those missions can be accomplished. When asked about frustrations with her job, she admitted that the University bureaucracy can be challenging. But she loves the people she works with, loves helping FHL to thrive, and enjoys the diversity of daily tasks which keep her on her toes.
Morgan Johnston is the FHL Visitor Services Coordinator, another core job. Before coming to the Labs she was Recreation Manager at Island Rec, which like her current job is a people-centric position involving many moving parts. Since joining the staff at FHL in 2021 she has taken on more and more responsibility, an indicator of how remarkably efficient she is. Every single visitor to FHL crosses Morgan’s desk: groups, workshops, Whiteley scholars, researchers, and students. She arranges their housing, lab spaces, meeting spaces, and any special needs. To ensure everyone’s visits are successful, she makes sure that custodial, maintenance, dining, IT, and waterfront teams are coordinated and prepared. For first-time visitors, especially groups, she has to overcome their pre-conceived notions – or just lack of understanding – of what FHL does/doesn’t offer, often saying “imagine that you are coming to summer camp” to get visitors’ mindsets in the right place. What she loves about the job is interacting with all the people – on email, on the phone, and then when they finally arrive. She gets to see the way visits come together, and how much people enjoy themselves and accomplish great things, so she gets to feel that she helped to “create the experience”. Her biggest frustration is how poorly many people read their emails; 99% of the time when they call or email with a question, it is about an issue that she covered in a previous communication! But this frustration vanishes when visitors come into the office to express their appreciation for everything. One of the unexpected joys of the job is when researchers and Whiteley scholars come into the office wanting to burble about an exciting discovery or a cool critter or a finished task; so even if some of the discoveries are “greek” to her, she gets to share in their joy.
Jodi VanderYacht, FHL Office Coordinator, is one of our newest staff members but she has incorporated herself into the Labs’ culture and learned her job remarkably quickly. After only 9 months she rarely has to say “hang on, let me find out” in response to queries from live visitors or on the phone, and from my point of view she remains astonishingly cheerful even when talking to grumpy or frustrating people! Her prior job was 7 years as Administrator at Paideia Classical School here in town, where she had diverse tasks to keep the school running effectively. At FHL her job, like Bern’s, is “a little bit of everything”, and she loves the daily variety as well as both the staff and visitors she interacts with – she enjoys not knowing what a given day will bring. She assists Morgan in the many visitor-related tasks, and is in charge of arranging the arrivals and departures of visitors and groups: making key packets, taking payments, and answering myriad questions. She also helps with Advancement efforts, preparing acknowledgement letters and planning Board meetings. She is in charge of FHL events, from small tasks like arranging baked goods for staff meetings, to very large undertakings like organizing our annual Open House. Some of her more amusing job moments have been answering questions from “helicopter parents” worried about their kids coming to take FHL courses, including one whose adult child lives independently in Seattle but the mom worried whether they could travel on the ferry alone. Since Jodi is a long-time islander and mom, she knows that the ferry system causes other worries!
From my seat in the Director’s Office I get to see and hear these office team members interact with each other, with visitors, and with other FHL staff members, and the wonderful tone they set. Morgan loves to keep the office cheerful with seasonal decor and there are almost always treats on the counter. Visitors know they will always see friendly faces and get a warm welcome. Think of all the grumpy receptionists we encounter in our lives, and what a tone that sets for an organization – not here!
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