By MARTY LEVINE
Andrea Hergenroeder has spent her career in multiple roles, as staff and faculty, often simultaneously at Pitt and UPMC.
“A lot of people at the University have multiple roles,” says Hergenroeder, director of the Undergraduate Program in Rehabilitation Science in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (SHRS) and of Pitt’s Pre-Health Resource Center, which helps students make careers from their health-science schooling choices.
UPCOMING EVENTS
February’s Staff Council Coffee and Conversation events will be (with times and locations still to be announced):
Feb. 15: Pat Narduzzi, head football coach
Feb. 29: Kris Davitt, senior vice chancellor for philanthropic and alumni engagement
“Having dual roles can be a challenge,” she says. “It does lead to growth and development in all those areas,” she says of her work — but of course it involves a lot of juggling. In any case, she says, “It’s not where you start, it’s where you end.”
Hergenroeder described her early years at the latest Staff Council Coffee and Conversation event on Jan. 22. As she grew up in Erie, she did not have a clear plan for even one role. For college, she applied only to Penn State, as an undecided major, and then because her father directed a hospital dietary program, she too she went into dietetics. “I just did what was in front of me,” she says, as she headed toward a career as a dietitian.
Then circumstances intervened — she went home to take care of her mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer, and decided to go to graduate school at nearby Gannon University. There, she took advantage of its physical therapist education program.
As a physical therapist clinician for 10 years at hospitals that eventually became UPMC facilities, she found herself with a lot of management duties, as well as opportunities to help train new PT students to take care of patients. It was only then that she discovered: “I really think that it was the teaching thing that I wanted to do.”
She was invited to lecture to Pitt classes, and eventually the dean of SHRS asked her to teach — all while she remained with UPMC.
She also decided to pursue her Ph.D. in exercise physiology here. “I really fell in love with teaching students,” she says.
Today, “having a role in developing future health care providers is something I absolutely love. I learned a lot (at Pitt) about how to talk less and listen more.” She also has had great mentors, including leaders in her profession, with whom she has worked and consulted for decades.
She admits her own path from staff to faculty is a bit unusual. “I haven’t worked with a lot of staff who have moved into faculty positions,” she says, but “it is a very viable path.
“Staff are the backbone of what happens here at Pitt. They’re behind the curtain, knowing what goes on. ... A lot of the things faculty don’t know when they are coming into their roles,” such as higher-education technology, for instance, are skills staff often have. “I’d like to be talking about it more,” especially with the opportunities Pitt employees have here: “These six schools of the health sciences, to have them all in one place is very unique.”
Recently, she asked faculty in the health sciences to volunteer to be mentors for pre-health undergraduates in the Pre-Health Resource Center’s Scholars Program. “We had a very robust response from faculty” across all six schools, she says — “all who wanted to step up to support the students on their pathway to a health career.
“Pitt is it for me,” she says, “because of the helping hands; this is the place where people jump in and roll up their sleeves in all sorts of places.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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