This month’s employee profile features Holly Fling, lecturer and academic coach with the Office for Student Success and Achievement. Learn about Holly’s role as an educator and mentor, her road to UGA, and her record-setting coffee consumption as well as some of her favorite travel destinations around the world.
Q – Can you tell us about your current role and responsibilities with the Office for Student Success and Achievement?
A – I’m a lecturer and academic coach, and I’m in the process of getting certified to be an academic coach trainer. I teach three sections of “UNIV 1201S: Learning for Success,” which is a service-learning course, and one section of “UNIV 1105: Introducing English Composition.” I’m also a mentor for the UGA Mentor Program. In the spring, I mentored a fourth-year English major who is now enrolled in a master’s program. I’ve had a phenomenal experience with this program and hope more people will get involved.
Q – What has your career path been like, and what led you to DAE -> OSSA?
A – Prior to academia, I lived another life in northeast Missouri. For 18 years, I worked at Pizza Hut, where I was the assistant manager of a Pizza Hut food truck and worked a weekly average of 45–50 hours. After getting divorced, I decided to take a college class, but I couldn’t decide which class to take because I wanted to take all of them! So, I ended up enrolled in 13 credit hours while working my full-time job and raising my son Jake (who is now 32, has a master’s in public health, and is a manager of research compliance at a pharmacy school in St. Louis).
I was the first in my family to earn a college degree, I graduated valedictorian and summa cum laude from Truman State University, and went on to earn a master’s degree before moving to Georgia to work toward my PhD at UGA. After graduating from UGA in 2019, I accepted a position as assistant professor of English at Georgia Military College in Milledgeville, where I taught for 2.5 years before becoming the interim academic dean.
The longer I worked in administration, the less time I was able to spend in the classroom. While I enjoyed administrative work because I could help students on a higher level, I missed interacting with them in my day-to-day work. When I saw the ad for my current position, I knew this job was exactly what I wanted to do. I am so fortunate to have this position in OSSA, where I work with the most wonderful colleagues and students. Every day when I wake up, I’m excited to go to work!
Q – Are you working on any new or upcoming programs/projects that you are excited about?
A – I’m excited about so many things right now! Take your pick:
- I’m really excited about becoming a trainer for academic coaching. My fellow trainers and I just finished leading our first full training. It was a fantastic experience, and I’m looking forward to the next training opportunity.
- I’m also really excited about my partnership with Beth, Cory, Ian, and Ashley in Athletics-Academics. They recently invited me to be the guest coach at the first home football game—what an amazing experience! I toured Rankin, met Coach Smart, and talked to the academics group about how to apply some of what the students do on the field in the classroom. During the game, I was introduced on the jumbotron. The experience was such an honor!
- One section of my UNIV 1201S course is working on a project at the Special Collections Library. Mazie Bowen, one of the Hargrett librarians, and I piloted the project with my Thrive class in the summer. The students are transcribing 19th-century handwritten documents about enslavement in Georgia, particularly in and around Athens. Not only will academics be able to use these transcriptions for their research, but the transcriptions can also help people trace their genealogy. Seldom do first- and second-year students have opportunities to do archival work, especially on documents that lets them uncover the history of people who lived and worked here in Georgia or even Athens two hundred years ago.
- I’m looking forward the upcoming CTL T&L conference in Columbus. I’m in the service-learning faculty learning community (FLC), and we are submitting a proposal for a presentation, so I’m hoping to be able to share something about the students’ service-learning at the Special Collection Library.
- I’m also really interested in integrating more active learning activities into my classes, so this year, I joined a second FLC that focuses on active learning. I’m excited about all the great knowledge I’ll gain from this experience!
Q – What do you like to do outside of the office? Are you involved in any organizations, or do you have any favorite hobbies?
A – Outside of work, I take long daily walks with my dog. I love to travel (especially when travel involves museums and art galleries), read and listen to audiobooks, cheer on the Bulldawgs, and experiment with new recipes. And I drink so much coffee that we can probably consider coffee-drinking to be my main hobby–we’re talking five big cups of coffee (about 1.5 times larger than regular-sized cups, so around 7-8 regular-sized cups)–more than I need! However, my coffee consumption has significantly dropped because I no longer keep a coffeemaker in my office.
Some of my favorite travel destinations have been Rome (the Roman Forum and walking along Via Appia); Florence (Uffizi Gallery, where I saw the Sleeping Ariadne statue and Michelangelo’s David at the Accademia Gallery); Pompeii; Lake Geneva (the Castle of Chillon, where Lord Byron set his long narrative poem The Prisoner of Chillon); Paris (the impressionist paintings at Musée d’Orsay); the Palace of Versailles; London (Tate Modern, the British Museum, the British Library, the V&A, and Madame Tussauds); Oxford (exploring all the colleges and reading/writing in the Bodleian Library–thanks to Jamie at UGA at Oxford); Haworth, England (the Brontë Parsonage Museum); Alton, England (Jane Austen’s House Museum); the bookshops in Hay-on-Wye, Wales; Dublin; and the beaches in Sri Lanka.
A fun fact about these travels is that I visited most of these locations with my friend Holly Gallagher. Everyone in the English Department referred to us as “the Hollys” because we studied the same area (19th-century British women writers–and many of the same novels), had the same dissertation director and committee, and participated in the same conferences and events. We traveled together in Europe before and after working terms for the UGA at Oxford Program. She teaches science writing in the Biology Department at UGA, and we’re in a service-learning FLC together.
Since most of my favorite books are British novels written by women writers from the long nineteenth century, I can give a few contemporary recommendations. I listened to Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus on audiobook. I enjoyed both the main character’s story and the narration. I also love Octavia Butler’s dystopian novel Parable of the Sower and its sequel, Parable of the Talents. I have to read these two novels in hard copy rather than listen to audiobooks because Butler’s writing frequently forces me to stop and think, and then I need to reread passages and think some more.
Q – And last, do you have any fun facts your coworkers might not know about you?
A – Well, I don’t know how fun these facts are, but they seem to be incongruent with what most people know about me, so that’s sort of fun!
- I’m probably one of very few people who has both a commercial driver’s license (CDL) and a PhD—the result of living two weirdly different lives!
- I grew up on a farm, and I was a rodeo queen.
- In my senior year of high school, I was voted most artistic, and I wanted to go to art school.