“Let’s do lunch.” That invitation exemplifies how Lila Tooker approached her jobs during the 28 years she worked at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She met with coworkers and colleagues, networking before networking became the thing-to-do. She seemed to know someone in every university office on the Lincoln campuses, people serving in extension offices across our state, folks at our sister University of Nebraska campuses, and many at other colleges and universities in our state and regionally.
Her presence at UNL dates back to her undergraduate days in the late 1970s. She earned her BS degree in Vocational Home Economics Education in 1980 and her MA degree in Educational Psychology in 1990. She served as a student services advisor for the UNMC College of Nursing Lincoln Division from 1990 – 2001. She was an assistant director and extension recruitment coordinator in the UNL Office of Admissions from 2001 – 2012 and then served as the recruitment/retention coordinator in the UNL School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences (SVBMS) from 2012 until her untimely death this summer.
I first met her during her tenure in the Office of Admissions. She worked closely with CASNR faculty and staff during recruiting activities as extension recruitment coordinator for Admissions. It was obvious that she knew UNL, IANR, and CASNR and was proud of each of those organizations. She was part of the Admissions team that planned and executed the Big Red Road Show, UNL’s outreach first to the Omaha metropolitan area and subsequently to out-state Nebraska when it went to the Nebraska Panhandle and South Sioux City. What a great way for those of us who participated in it to meet potential students and their families. It was during those events that it became evident to me that Lila knew how to recruit prospective students and their parents. She never criticized our college or university competitors; instead she emphasized the advantages that UNL offered to that prospective student.
Problem-solving was part of all her jobs. Here is an example of a problem-solved that I witnessed during her Admissions phase. A group of 4th graders was visiting campus and Lila was helping escort them. I was scheduled to give presentation in one of the meeting rooms on the 3rd floor of the East Campus Union. Across the common area from the meeting rooms is a wall on which various kinds of art were and continue to be displayed. The art show the day those 4th graders visited consisted of drawings of nude human bodies. That presented a potential problem. Picture the family of one of our 4th grade visitors at the dinner table that evening. Asked by a parent, “What did you see when you visited UNL today?” comes the answer, “A bunch of pictures of naked people.” It is not good when a parent complains necessitating that a university regent and campus chancellor have to find out why 4th graders saw pictures of naked people during a campus visit. The solution: Lila and other escorts lined up and ushered the students immediately into the meeting room, giving them little or no opportunity to find the wall-of-art.
Lila served as the Recruitment/Retention coordinator in the UNL School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences (SVMBS) beginning in 2012. Lila’s personal goal was to make the UNL Pre-Vet (PVET) program the best in the country. Her vision of the program started with the campus visit, which she dubbed the first pre-vet advising session for the student.
She honed our Pre-Veterinary Medicine (PVET) recruiting message, which focuses on how our PVET program can help students become viable candidates for admission to a school or college of veterinary medicine. Lila personalized each high school or transfer student’s campus visit to his/her circumstances in academics, veterinary medicine career exploration, and leadership development, the three areas in which applicants are assessed for veterinary school admission. The feedback given to us by our visitors indicated they liked our approach.
She knew how to design and use a recruiting booth. One aspect of a booth is the “hook,” something that will cause a passerby at the booth to stop and allow us to chat with them. One example is our stuffed dog, which Lila named “Langdon Frothingham.” A sign on the booth table invited people passing by to “Ask about the puppy’s name.”
Why the name Langdon Frothingham? Dr. Langdon Frothingham was the coach of the 1890 Nebraska Old Gold Knights football team. He was also a veterinary physician and graduate of Harvard University hired to the Nebraska faculty in 1889 to teach physiology, agriculture, and bacteriology. He was named the coach of Nebraska’s first football team partly because he brought a football with him. He and his team played two away games, one against a YMCA team in Omaha and the other against Doane College in Crete, NE. The Old Gold Knights won both games holding both teams scoreless!
The genius of Langdon Frothingham the dog is that it ties Husker football to veterinary medicine and our SVBMS. Even folks not interested in being a vet who stop by the booth find that interesting.
She helped advise the SVMBS undergraduate students, especially those with demographic characteristics that placed them at risk of poor academic performance and less likely to be retained at UNL.
She and wrote and designed the UNL Pre-Vet website, along with Marcia Oetjen. Visit it and see what a quality PVET website looks like.
I am uncertain how the best PVET program might be identified, but I would hold our program up to any other in the country. Lila helped make it what it is today. She was proud of it; we are proud of it.
She helped teach VBMS 101 – Success in Veterinary Science, the introductory course taken by all of our freshmen in the PVET, Veterinary Science, and Veterinary Technology programs. It is intended to help them adjust from high school to college life and to help them better understand what they are going to have to do to get accepted to a vet school. Lila’s background in college student development and her experience teaching in a high school classroom made that course much better.
Her preferred soda was Diet Coke. She was not pleased when UNL became a Pepsi campus and wondered what Warren Buffet, a UNL alum and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, which holds a sizeable investment in Coke products, thought about UNL going Pepsi. We kidded her that when she was at an official UNL event, she had to consume a Pepsi product.
We miss her.
Lila did not just bleed red, she bled Big Red! So this memorial of her contributions to UNL ends the way Lila ended her presentations and emails: GBR, Go Big Red.
More details at: https://go.unl.edu/7bcu