University Times

Mike Rick is a little like Janus, the Roman god of gates, for whom January is named. Janus is depicted with two faces: one face looking backward in time, the other looking to the future.

For Rick, his job includes looking back to connect with Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH) alumni; his other “face” looks forward to recruiting GSPH students.

Officially, Rick is the director of external affairs at GSPH, with its attendant duties of coordinating press releases and drafting the dean’s communiqués, fielding media calls, promoting school events and co-editing the alumni magazine. But that’s just half of his job. What isn’t reflected in his title is what he does the other 50 percent of the time: serving as director of student recruitment.

To the untrained eye, the jobs may seem mutually exclusive, requiring different skills. To Rick, now in his third year at GSPH, they’re two parts of a continuum, uniting the school’s storied past as the first and only fully accredited public health school in the commonwealth — with its promising future as a growing entity in an increasingly important field.

With a degree in communications from Susquehanna University and two-plus years of experience in that institution’s admissions and recruitment office, followed by a half-dozen years in public relations at non-profit trade associations in Washington, D.C., Rick’s background fits the double bill.

“The work I’ve done in public relations actually has helped with the student recruitment part of it,” he says. “You need to know the right things to say to people, to strike that chord of interest. It’s really using the same concept as writing a press release: What is the most important thing that you want to say in that first paragraph?”

A communications background, coupled with experience as a stand-up comedian during his college days, has made Rick comfortable talking to people in different environments, whether it’s pitching GSPH to a class of college biology students, talking to a potential student one-on-one at a graduate school fair or schmoozing alums at a lecture reception.

When he started at GSPH, Rick’s first tasks were developing a new strategic marketing plan, upgrading the school’s web site and improving relations with alumni in his one job, and increasing student enrollment in his other.

“There is some overlap, like the web site we helped to re-design” as part of the overall marketing overhaul, he says. Rick was the point person, working with an outside marketing firm to get the site launched. The school’s web site now serves as both an informational, outreach vehicle that touts GSPH’s programs, research and impact and as a recruitment tool, Rick says.

He also has expanded the school’s in-person recruitment efforts by representing the school at more regional graduate student fairs. “We’ve gone to Penn State, Bucknell, we’re doing a lot in Pennsylvania, in part because in-state tuition [rates] are a big advantage to those students,” he says. “We’ve also been trying to do more in places like parts of New York, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, which are not too far from here, but with similarities in terms of cities: If a student has done undergraduate work at Johns Hopkins, for example, coming to a place like Pitt culturally is an easy adjustment.”

GSPH also recruits heavily at Pitt, including at the regional campuses, Rick says, and the school always draws a high number of Pitt undergrads — some serious, some merely curious — at the twice yearly open houses that he organizes.

The efforts have paid off. “I’m happy to say, applications are up pretty well this past term and they were up last year at this time, too,” Rick says. “And we’re seeing an increase in enrollment: We’re now back over 500 students when two or three years ago we were at about 450, which was a decline for us. Now the goal is to keep growing.”

Both at the school’s open houses and at graduate student fairs, Rick faces a dilemma common to recruiters at public health schools. “One of the bigger challenges in student recruitment is that undergraduates may not know what the difference is between a school of public health and a school of medicine,” Rick points out. “When someone says ‘I’m going to medical school,’ you know they’re going to be a doctor, or to dental medicine school, they’ll be a dentist — you can picture those things.”

In public health, career outcomes are not so obvious. “We’ve got seven different departments, ranging from health policy and management, which will train you, hopefully, to some day become a CEO of a health care system, to infectious diseases and microbiology, and human genetics, which are very lab-based, research-based areas,” he says.

Helping to pique students’ interest in the multi-faceted public health arena is part of Rick’s job. “It’s hard to know about the interests of students. But, overall, things like bioterrorism, infectious diseases like SARS and West Nile virus — those are helping students see what this other component, this non-medical school option, is that’s available to them,” he says.

Other recruitment challenges Rick confronts include selling students on GSPH’s home facility, the 50-year-old Parran Hall. “Getting students to an open house is a terrific thing, except sometimes it does work against you,” he says. “They see the facilities and they may not be up to par with some of the other schools that they’re looking at.”

The amount of available funding for graduate students also is a big issue in recruitment, he says. “If some other schools are offering them full or partial funding, especially for out-of-state tuition students, then that’s going to play a part in their decision. But that’s true of every school,” says Rick, who also is responsible for writing some fund-raising appeals to increase the school’s coffers for scholarships and awards.

A prime source of fundraising is the school’s 5,000-plus alumni population, he says. “Another part of my job is to oversee alumni relations for the school. When I came in, the alumni magazine was one of the few things we were doing to help keep alumni informed,” Rick says.

Now he helps produces a newsletter to supplement the twice a year magazine and increase alumni contact.

“A lot of it is reporting on a lecture after the fact. But this way we can put a calendar of the school’s events in front of them and we’ve really stepped up on keeping in contact with them. These people seem to appreciate the interaction, the e-mails, the phone calls. I’ve also gotten to meet some great people, including some of the people we’ve given our distinguished alumni awards to, and these are very accomplished people who have been in public health for 30 or 40 or 50 years,” Rick says.

Rick is aided in his many job responsibilities by a number of others, he stresses. “We’re very team-oriented. I rely on two full-time staff who help with the external affairs, and the staff of a half-dozen or so in our [admissions] office helps with the student recruitment.”

Rick says he has an excellent relationship with GSPH Dean Bernard Goldstein, who is stepping down as dean this fall to continue his scholarly activities as a professor in environmental health and public policy.

Unlike many deans, Goldstein drafts his own op-ed pieces, but always seeks Rick’s advice. “He drafts them; I look them over, I express my opinion. So I feel trusted, and I’m also grateful that he’d take time to write it out himself. I keep telling him he knows better than I about what he’s thinking,” he says.

Rick also has a good working relationship with staff at the UPMC News Bureau with whom he coordinates press releases.

“The news bureau has most of the direct contact with the media,” Rick says. “Typically, I pull together the information, they draft the release and I look at it, and if I need to get the dean or other people at the school to look at it, I do that.”

Rick also gets calls from the news bureau reps who are forwarding media requests for a public health expert on a particular subject. “In that case, I usually e-mail the dean or the associate dean for research and academic affairs and say, ‘Who do we have that fits this request?’ And if there isn’t a specific GSPH person, I ask for a recommendation of someone at another Pitt school. Part of what a good public relations person does, if you don’t have somebody who can deal with it internally, you can at least point them across the street and say, ‘This would be a good person to talk to.’”

Some days, Rick says, he comes into work bursting with ambition. “You start off the day thinking, I have to get to this, this and this,” he says. “And then the phone rings or you get an e-mail that says, ‘Mike, I need you to take care of this right away.’ That’s the kind of thing having a background in public relations prepares you for,” he says.

“And there are days I go home and feel I didn’t accomplish enough, but you do what you can with the resources you have. You think: The work will be there when I come in tomorrow.”

His responsibilities could change when a new dean comes on board, Rick acknowledges. “But it’s out of my control. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it,” he says pragmatically.

—Peter Hart