Southwestern Magazine | Spring 2021

SOUTHWE S T E RN | 9 It was an inauspicious end to Rick Martinez’s first day on staff at Southwestern University. The school was a few weeks away from spring break. That afternoon, he attended a meeting of the emergency management team where, huddled close around a conference table, they discussed a virus that was still mainly an issue in China but beginning to impact certain regions of the U.S. “Within two weeks, there was a drastic change from the day I started,” Martinez says. Martinez had previously worked up the road at the Belton Independent School District, but in March 2020, he began his new job as the associate vice president for facilities management at Southwestern. As spring break began and students headed off to South Padre for vacation, Martinez turned on the TV and saw nonstop coverage of the pandemic and other universities deciding to close their campuses. New York, the initial epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis in the U.S., was just beginning its lockdown. The rest of the country, epidemiologists determined, was a week behind New York. Back at SU, administrators decided to extend the break for a week. Then, they canceled the students’ return to campus entirely. “After spring break, everybody realized that this was going to be a long, drawn-out process,” Martinez recalls. “I don’t want to say it, but it hit the fan.” THE GREAT PIVOT In every department, Southwestern employees began preparing for a job they never signed up for: working on the front lines of the university’s response to a global pandemic. Because of interdepartmental cooperation and SU’s size, which allowed the university to pivot to confront the newest challenges, Southwestern has been able to provide an on-campus experience for students while also keeping them safe. Scarlett Moss '86, chief marketing and communications officer and vice president for integrated communications, immediately began spearheading the communications effort. Her team collaborated with other offices to develop informational videos and keep the website and social media updated. Behind the scenes, they reached out to experts, epidemiologists, public-health workers, and alumni to get information about the disease. ThiswastrialbyfireforMoss,whostartedheremployment at Southwestern in January 2020 after years of working in corporate communications at Coca-Cola. “I can honestly say that in all of my years in the corporate world . . . a pandemic as widespread as this was never drilled,” says Moss. Daryl Tschoepe, director of technical support and services, refers to the beginning of the pandemic, when the university went fully remote, as “the great pivot.” “In tech support, you could've heard a pin drop,” he shares. “Oh gosh, I’m remembering the horror of that now.” The great pivot drastically altered daily life in information technology, which Tschoepe says normally did “a lot of hand-holding”: logging people on to their computers, fixing a projector when a panicked professor called. Now, his team was a crucial link in the transition to remote learning with a staff that previously relied entirely on in-person meetings. STORY BY CLARA MCMICHAEL '17 Staff work overtime to keep the Pirate community safe during COVID-19.