It’s just after winter break, and Lesley Villarose, ’02 has spent the day “putting out fires.”
As vice president of student development and dean of students at Gardner-Webb University, she balances all sorts of administrative duties, from overseeing the professional development center, multicultural affairs, and campus police to—like today— helping students get checked in and acquainted with the campus. It’s a lot.
But to Villarose, the job really comes down to one thing: letting students know that when they are at her school, they belong. She credits this commitment to her students’ to the education she received at the University of Lynchburg.
“It made me who I am today,” Villarose said, “and it changed my life.”
After graduating from high school in Rockville, Maryland, Villarose was accepted to a number of colleges, but when she visited Lynchburg during Connection Week, she knew it was where she wanted to be.
She remembers her initial impressions of the campus: how beautiful and exciting everything was and how she and her Connection leader—still friends to this day—immediately hit it off. “It felt like home.”
For an ambitious and outgoing young person who initially “wanted to be Oprah Winfrey,” Villarose found in Lynchburg a place where she could spread her wings. Over the next few years, the communication studies major would hone her skills as a writer for The Critograph and a broadcast journalist. She even tried her hand at doing performance sketches.
She ran for student government and won, gaining important problem-solving and conflict resolution skills. And crucially, she learned what she wanted to do for her career.
“I had tremendous professors in comms,” she said. “Dr. [Mike] Robinson, Dr. [Jimmy] Roux — I still have relationships with them.
“When I think about the ways they helped me through my educational journey and supported me as a holistic person, all of that just added up to, ‘This is why higher education is so meaningful and so powerful. This is why I want to go into this field, because I want to be able to do this for someone else.”
In her current role, Villarose has an open-door policy. She makes sure students have her personal cell phone number, and whenever there are games or events, she’s always the loudest one cheering from the sidelines.
“I try to meet them where they’re at,” she said. “Coming to college and being away from home is a big deal, and the people at Lynchburg understood the importance of community and the role they had to play in that. I try everyday to help [my students] feel that same sense of belonging.”
