Honoree: Melissa Rockwell-Hopkins (previously Rockwell-Bellini)

AUTUMN WILLIAMS: I will be speaking about Melissa Rockwell-Bellini; she was the associate vice president for Facilities, Operations, and Development at Ohio State. My name is Autumn Williams and I am currently the program manager for [PACT], which is a project on the near-east side that Ohio State is partnering with the city and CMHA. I met Melissa in 2007 when I came in to interview for a job in FOD.

So currently I still have a relationship with Melissa, Melissa Bellini no longer works for the university but I am so grateful that we have been able to keep in touch. It's funny that we have a good relationship now because when I first met her I was terrified of her. I came in for an interview with FOD to be an administration and communications assistant and her nameplate on the door was so big that...even just the nameplate was intimidating. And then she came out and she was so little and petite but she just really had this strong personality. That really was the first time I'd ever met her and I thought, "Oh, wow, she's really cool." She was young, she was very smart, and she was running the biggest department on campus. She was really very humble but she was a big deal, I think. She kept all the lights on on campus and she kept all the construction projects going and she was very creative and experienced, too, even though she was very young. She really took chances: she didn't stick me in an office and make me answer the phone. She gave me projects that were things that there's no way I should've been working on them because I didn't have that experience or necessarily the skillset necessary on my resume but she knew that I had been watching her and I think, I really appreciated Melissa, because she taught me a lot of different things about construction and management and how to be a good leader, just by being a good example.

One thing that really stuck out to me and is something that I carry with me even today is that she really believed that facilities people, the people that take out your trash and clean up after students and all of those things they do-- repair things and keep the air conditioning working through the hot summer-- those are the people that make the world go around. It's really important to say thank you.

One thing about Melissa's character that I really admire and it's something that I watched and that I try to model is that she's serious when she needs to be serious and she's lighthearted when it's appropriate. She spent a lot of time really understanding her job. She was expert at everything and for her to be that type of leader, it made me know that it's important to not just know what you consider your field or your interest but all of the peripheral things. That knowledge base was so valuable because it enabled her to make informed decisions. The other thing is that she was very intentional about making relationships with people, no matter what their level was, no matter what their title was. She just really wanted people to know that she cared, and she was a woman that was a leader, and so she didn't want to come in and be perceived as "Oh, that's just that girl" or "she's just a young girl." But really, she was a strong leader but she was also caring. That made me understand that women leaders can be stereotypical women in that we can be caring and compassionate but we also can be strong leaders and be really smart.

She also trusted her experts and went to them and said, "What do you think about this?" And then she used their ideas and just really approached everything creatively. She also was really, I think, a pioneer in being collaborative about what campus planning could look like in that it didn't have to be all these separate silos but really the greatest bang for our buck as a university would be to work together. I really appreciated that with her. She is very honest and just kind, and just genuinely herself.

I think if it wasn't for Melissa, I would probably have gone to law school, but I thought I really could learn a lot here and so I learned a lot from Melissa and I told her I was thinking about getting a master's degree and she was so supportive. As I started grad school I was working, and she was very supportive of that. She would work with me on my homework and just really make sure that my work life balance was something that accommodated me going to grad school. I was very appreciative of that because even though this is a school, a lot of people don't really care if you want to go to school, it's just like you have to choose or you need to go at night. But sometimes the opportunity was for me to take a class in the middle of the day and I really appreciated that she was supportive of that and when I graduated she was really proud of me, even though she had left the university by then.

That's one thing for sure that I don't think that I would be going in this career trajectory if I hadn't had that experience of having a boss that really saw something in me and really gave me the opportunity to learn and to grow and to make mistakes, too. I definitely made mistakes because I truly didn't know what I was doing but Melissa always came back with positive feedback, even if it was something that was detrimental or time-consuming, she'd always take the time to say "this is how you should do it" or "this is how I would approach it." But she wasn't really a leader or a teacher that would sit down and give you a lesson. She was just like: "Come with me and follow me." All that time, she knew I was watching and learning and she would ask me questions at the end of whatever the experience was to really trigger my thinking, and so working for her was truly like a living laboratory. I guess until now I really didn't think about the fact that my career has gone in this direction because I went to grad school in a program that was influenced by working with her.

Transcription by Transcribe OSU