Women’s History Month Spotlight: Five NOVA Employees Who Began at Community College
As we wrap up Women’s History Month and usher in Community College Month, we spotlight these five incredible NOVA employees who are also community college alumna and let them tell their story in their own words! To see a few of these testimonials come to life, watch our Instagram Reel here.
Dr. Ruma Salhi: I teach history at the Annandale Campus. I graduated from Moorpark Community College in California and then transferred to UCLA to finish my bachelor’s degree. I loved community college! I loved being able to commute and live at home. A lot of my friends from high school ended up at the local community college, and it was very nice to have a bunch of friends there I liked. I also appreciated the fact that I could work and attend college simultaneously. I went to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I worked in an office Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, so community college gave me a lot of experience doing that.
My experience was so meaningful. After I got my bachelor’s degree, I went on to get a master’s and then my Ph.D. in History. I love NOVA the best of all the colleges that I’ve taught at. I’ve been here for about thirteen years now and it has just been really good to give back [to community college] the way I benefitted from it. Happy Women’s History Month!
Kathy Thompson: I am the associate director of internal communications for the college. I attended College of Lake County in the far north suburbs of Chicago. Raised in Northern Virginia, I attended Fairfax County Public Schools and was branded as not really being “college material.” So, I worked at jobs I thought were cool and moved around a bit. I lived in Southern California for a time and someone I respected told me they thought I should consider pursuing writing. I ended up in Chicago and decided to pursue my college education. I signed up at CLC and loved it from the start! I decided that I really was interested in writing as a career.
I was working full time and started taking a class at night, then two, then three, and I realized that I really enjoyed school and schoolwork, which was a brand-new thought for me. I had never enjoyed school before. I made the most of my time, with the goal in mind to transfer and to write in some capacity. Since I had done well in community college, when it was time to transfer, I was offered grants and scholarships that made a private, four-year university possible. I went on to American University for my bachelor’s in journalism and master’s in public communication. That simply would not have been possible without having started at community college. I am a believer in the community college experience and know first-hand what community colleges offer. Happy Women’s History Month!
Sana Hilmi: I teach Arabic at NOVA and am an assistant professor at the Annandale Campus. I also graduated from NOVA’s Annandale Campus, so this is my hometown. I took liberal arts and focused on foreign languages—at that time, French and now, world languages.
As a student, I liked the fact that the NOVA instructors were very open and available. I also enjoyed the campus! We have so many places to hang out, study and relax. As a staff member, my colleagues were really nice and helpful. I came in young, so they were always supportive. They encouraged me to take my master’s degree, and so I got it through the Chancellor’s Fellowship Award. When I came back as faculty, they were all there to celebrate – staff, deans, associate deans, even the provost! It’s a nice community and there’s nothing that I can say that I would change. NOVA gave me a lot of chances to grow, from student to staff to getting my master’s degree and teaching full time.
Happy Women’s History Month! I’m so happy to have this month that appreciates our work – mothers, sisters, grandmothers, daughters, single-women, children. I believe that a lot of women have done a lot of work across the world. I am from Iraq, and I’m sure a lot of people would appreciate the diversity and opportunity that NOVA has offered to women and to everyone. Thank you!
Hedda Babilonia: I am a financial advisor on the Manassas Campus. I graduated from NOVA! I’ve always been true to NOVA. I’ve never gone out of this area, so it’s really all I’ve known ever since high school. Now, it’s been the highlight of both my academic career and my professional career.
I had a really good experience at NOVA as a student and as a faculty member. You could say I’ve climbed the ladder, starting as a work study student, then working part-time and now as a staff member. I always knew NOVA. I’m social and really outgoing, so I always heard of NOVA and George Mason just by going out to different events in high school. I knew it was there, but I wasn’t really aware of what NOVA offered. My senior year I was going through some things, as we all do. I started doing more research about NOVA and, closer to graduation, we had a few representatives from NOVA go into our high school and talk to us about admission. That’s when it clicked. I was like, okay, this is something that I want to do.
I was fortunate enough that I did get admitted to George Mason and James Madison, but I had already set my mind on going to NOVA. I first went to the Annandale Campus, and I did a one-stop-shop. I went to advising, financial aid and admissions, just to see what I needed, and that’s how my financial aid career started. I’m Puerto Rican, so I’m fluent in Spanish. One of the managers at the financial aid office at the time asked me, “Hey! I see you speak Spanish, are you interested in a position here?” I was taken aback because I knew nothing about financial aid. That was the start, and I was a work study student the whole time I was at NOVA.
Throughout COVID, I had applied to a few jobs, and I did go through a few jobs, but I kept leaving them because it was missing that spark. It was missing that person-to-person, face-to-face interaction, not with just the students, but with my peers as well, you know. You come in, you say good morning. But at NOVA, those interactions turn into so much more.
Something that I really love about NOVA, as a student and as a staff member, is just the care that we all put into our jobs. As a student, you can really see how much the professors care with how much outreach we do. There’s just so much care and passion for helping others. Happy Women’s History Month!
Laura Cooper-Martin: I am a virtual academic advisor here at NOVA. I actually wasn’t planning to go to community college. When I graduated high school, I wanted to get out of this area. At that time, I was in Maryland. I wanted to move to New York, and I tried that, but it didn’t work. Like many students at NOVA, I came back home, and the option for me was the local community college, Montgomery College. It was challenging because it was not what I had planned. It was sort of the last thing that I wanted to do.
I did like it, though! There were a lot of people I went to high school with, and people who I knew in high school but wasn’t necessarily close to who also were there. I got to know them a lot better and I’m still very close with them today. I remember I was blown away that the class sizes were so small. In hindsight, I’m more grateful for it now than I was at the time.
I went to work in higher education shortly after I left community college. I transferred to Universtities of Shady Grove, part of University of Maryland. It’s a commuter campus, which was also fifteen minutes from my house and five minutes from my job, so I felt like I had the commuter student experience all of undergrad.
My parents didn’t know anything about the transfer process. They were both very educated, but they both went to traditional universities and graduate school. So, this community college transfer thing was foreign to them, too. It wasn’t until I got to Universities at Shady Grove that my advisor, Lindsay, told me that I really could graduate, that I could do this, and that changed my entire life. When I was deciding what I should do for a real job, I said, ‘I want to be like Lindsay! I wanted to give students an experience like I had.’
I went to graduate school on the West Coast at the University of Southern California, and while I was at USC, I found myself going back to research and remembering how much community college worked and how hard it was to transfer. I kept thinking, ‘If it was so hard for me – someone who has educated parents, who’s white, who’s cisgender, who doesn’t have financial struggles, it must be hard for everybody to figure it out, and it shouldn’t be. I switched my major at USC to educational counseling and found myself back on the East Coast, at which time I applied for a job at NOVA. I’ve been here now for four-and-a-half years. Happy Women’s History Month!
Submitted by:
Abby Parsons, Social Media Manager, KParsons@nvcc.edu