Staff Interview: Katie Decker

Interviewers: Benjamin Woo & Jade Iry

Interviewee: Katie Decker 

Katie Decker is the Assistant Director of UCI’s COSMOS Program. In addition to the three years that she has run the program, she also has experience with attending COSMOS. She attended COSMOS in 2012, where she participated in a cluster called ‘Mobile Digital Media,’ which was unfortunately discontinued in 2021. Before accepting her role as the assistant director, she majored and worked in the field of engineering.

How did you find the role of being the director of COSMOS?

The way I found this position was very interesting. I initially got a job in mechanical engineering because that was what I studied in college. I worked at a really bad company that has since gone under. It was very stressful, and I was overworked. I ended up quitting, and really had to take a look at my life., and consider if I really wanted to do engineering, or if there was something else that would make me feel more fulfilled. At Berkeley, I worked with the New Student Orientation, and I loved helping new students. I was still in touch with some of the people from COSMOS because I had done an alumni panel virtually in 2020 and 2021, so I reached out to the director at the time. I told them I was contemplating a career switch, and asked if they needed help in the office that summer. The director told me that she was quitting that year, and asked if I wanted her job, which I agreed to. So, I started in April of 2022. We had to run the first in-person program in three years in July. So that was really fun to kind of get started with. I was kind of going the project management route before and so I really enjoy this job. I always like to joke that I am managing the circus, because there's always something fun and interesting going on. 

Can you describe what a day in your life as the COSMOS assistant director at UCI typically looks like?

I guess your question before was what I do in my position? The answer is that it really is anything. I'm always in the office, handling things that have to do with contracts, liability risk, and other general management. I work with a lot of on campus partners, like housing to book all of our rooms and common spaces, and risk management since you guys are all minors. I have to make sure everything is properly set up with field trips, parental permissions, and more. I also help with the application system. I don’t make any of the decisions, but I help streamline all of them so that the professors don’t have to look through too many applications. I look through and organize the applications to make them more accessible.

I like to joke and say that my work calms down when Cosmos actually starts because I work so much on the front end. I do the behind the scenes making sure everything is all set to go, like matching all the roommates. During the program, I just have to make sure everything is running smoothly and how I planned it.

Everyday for me looks different. I meet with our teacher fellow coordinator, Miss Jacqueline, who subs in for our teacher fellows. In the mornings, I touch base with her, as well as the other teacher fellows, to make sure they all know what they need help with in terms of coverage. Sometimes I will also help sub in too. I sometimes also have to go on field trips to help supervise.

I'm the main point of contact on campus for different things, so if someone gets sick or someone gets hurt I am the person that everybody will come to. Generally I let the RAs have some autonomy, but I am the last say, and sometimes an RA will come to me and ask for advice. They will ask things like if an offense is worthy of a write up or not, or whether or not to bring a student to urgent care. I just try to offer guidance to everybody, and I like to be on campus to offer my support to everybody. 

Is running COSMOS a year-round job?

Yeah, that's what everyone always asks. All my friends ask me, “oh, what do you do the rest of the year?,” and I’m like, “this job.” So it definitely is very cyclical, which I do enjoy. I feel like I get bored easily, so I like being busy and doing a lot of different things. 

I'm very much looking forward to taking most of August off and just sleeping a lot and like catching up with friends that I haven’t seen in a while. So I guess the fall is kind of more relaxed, because there's less structured work that I do. Because the rest of January through June is very much on a timeline. In the fall I'd say I take August and some of September to recover. In September, all the cosmos campuses have a meeting to talk about what went well, what didn't, and changes we want to make for next year. Then we move into outreach and recruitment. We try to make sure that cosmos as a whole is representative of California as a whole throughout all the five campuses, which is difficult, because some schools know about Cosmos and tell all their students about it, and some schools have never heard of it. We want to get students from all the schools so we have to go into schools and do virtual info sessions. I have to fill out the form for housing in October, even though they don't get back to me until May, just to make sure we get the space because we do rent out four halls, which is a lot of space. We have to make sure even though we've done this for 25 years that we get in really early. I try to make sure that everything is as repeatable as possible, which means having guides for things, which I work on in the offseason. Basically we make activity guides for the activities, so that all of the new RAs can just plug everything into the same activities every year. 

Then, in January the application opens for a month. At that time I am mostly just monitoring to make sure that all of the applications go through. When the application closes, I immediately go and export them all as a spreadsheet; I'm working on spreadsheets for like 12 hours a day sometimes, and then I send them out to the professors. The professors always send their choices back two weeks after the deadline I set for them, so we are always running behind. While I'm doing that I'm also hiring people. I'm starting to hire the teacher fellows again, hire the RA’s, and I do interviews for two weeks straight. 

I plan training for June, so right after RAs finish school. June is crunch time where we’ve finalized all of our students and match roommates, which I really enjoy. I feel like I generally do a pretty good job with matching roommates.

Then two weeks out, it's just chaos. Whatever's left to do like ordering merch and dealing with technical mishaps, is all rushed in the two weeks before the program starts.

What is your favorite part of running COSMOS?

Definitely seeing all of the students on the first day. I feel like I’ve seen everyone’s name on a spreadsheet since the start of application season. I have read through some of the applications, and even though I don’t get to pick any of the applicants I always have some students who I hope to see get accepted. The first day is always so fun, because I get to see the students in real life, rather than just a picture, essay, and survey online. I love seeing that the applicants are all real people, and it’s just really cool to see everyone.

Do you play a role in the admissions process for COSMOS?

Not necessarily, but if I read one that's particularly compelling I’ll let the professor know. I'll be like, “take a look at that; I think they really fit like the mission here.” Sometimes they’ll say yes, and they get admitted or other times they don't so I don't really have a say. I'll just be like “oh, this essay was really good!” All I know is that it is very holistic. They do a good job, but sometimes they have so many that I'm like, “maybe you want to reread this one super quickly, like read it again!” Because some people's essays are really good, and some others you can tell just lack effort. It’s impressive how some are just really creative and I was like “oh, it's like you're good at STEM but you're also a really good storyteller.” I love well-rounded students so that's kind of fun. Hey, you know what? To be good at STEM, you don't have to write, it's not all of it. Like I said, different professors like different things and you all made it so you’re all good!

What skills do you think are necessary to successfully run COSMOS?

Definitely flexibility and adaptability. Like I said, I was a COSMOS kid, so I was perfectionist to the max: I had straight A's and a 4.6 GPA in high school. All the extracurriculars, all the APs, everything; and I didn't know how to fail. I definitely try to tell all of my students the story of how I crashed and burned so hard in college, and I had to learn how to fail and pick myself up and try again. Failure is one thing, but it isn't actually failure if you learn from it. It sounds so boxy, but it's true. When I first started COSMOS, I wanted it to be perfect. I wanted everything to go exactly according to plan, and if not I considered it a failure. And that's never gonna happen. There's always something that happens. In fact, last year someone got scratched by a squirrel and had to go to urgent care. Also, obviously having a good sense of organization is important too. It's really nice that we have a plan laid out, but knowing that something's gonna go wrong and just being able to think on your feet is underrated. Honestly, that was my really big worry about the hike last weekend. I was like, “oh my gosh, I have to have like six contingency plans; we have everybody bring a first aid kit and like 10 bottles of water and I was like, something's still gonna go wrong.” Somebody still went off trail and luckily for us she was found immediately, so it wasn't a big deal. But it's okay, you really just have to be okay with things going wrong. Rather than focusing so much on how the goal is accomplished, just worry about if the goal got accomplished. So I really had to let go of that perfectionism that I had so ingrained in me.

What is your goal for running COSMOS?

My number one goal is for everyone to stay safe, and then very closely number two is for everyone to have fun. The parents of all 227 students entrusted them with me, so safety always comes first. That’s why I feel like I always come off as being very strict in the first couple of weeks. You can have a little more freedom but from my perspective, I'm like, “Oh my gosh, 227 kids, on their own for the first time, how do I keep everyone safe?” My biggest thing this year was to make my safety goals the students goals as well. That was why I created the hall point system, to incentivise following the rules to stay safe. I want to make sure that everyone's having fun but keeping each other accountable for learning how to live in community, 

Another big goal I have is for kids to learn that it’s ok to fail. I want students to realize that COSMOS is such a safe space to fail in. Because when I went to college I didn’t know how to fail, which made everything so much scarier. So COSMOS is a great opportunity because there's no grades or pressure to do well. Obviously everyone is here to learn really cool stuff, and I think that it’s a perfect place to; if there's something you don't understand and you feel like you're failing at, it’s ok because the stakes aren’t high. I think I just want to prepare everybody to go out into the world and be awesome at STEM and know that it's okay to not be perfect, because I feel like gifted kid burnout is really real once you get beyond college.

Would you say that having your college burnout was beneficial?

I would say yes, I’m glad it happened. I wish I'd asked for help earlier on in college, and then I maybe wouldn't have gotten to the point where I failed two classes and had to retake them. But then I did and I had to reconsider them. I was wondering if I wanted to stay in mechanical engineering, or switch to nutrition science or something else? But I decided to stick it out. I realized that I'd been the Smart kid my whole life. Then all of a sudden, I was getting D's, and I didn’t know what to do with myself, because being smart was my whole identity. So then I was like, “Okay, I just need to recommit and I need to be okay with getting like B's and C's and not like A's all the time.” So I was like, “Where else can I find meaning in my life? Like what else could I find?”  I ended up teaching Zumba at the school gym and or at the Berkeley gym and I liked teaching and helping people; seeing them get better at dancing made me so happy and I realized that while I was still doing engineering, I had really started finding a passion for helping other people get better at things. It was really important for me to find an outlet outside of school, a piece of my identity that wasn’t so tied with studying and education. 

What do you hope students will take away from their COSMOS experience?

Just that it's okay to fail. It's gonna happen and it's not the end of the world. I don't know a single person who hasn't had a pivotal moment of having to recommit to a major, or having to pick themselves back up after something failed; and in the moment they're like, “oh my gosh, like my life is over. Like, I failed. Everything is Terrible, like, how am I ever going to recover?” Then afterwards, even though they would never wish for it to happen again, they are also glad because it helped them look at life in a different way. Like I said, I would never want someone to have to learn about failure in a really high stakes way. So here I am glad that it is completely ok to struggle in class, and to ask for help. 

I hope everyone finds a niche topic here that they really are interested in and they find kind of like a passion for STEM; or maybe they realize that their passion isn’t for STEM. Either way, this experience just gives them some more direction and the feeling that they can take on anything, because Cosmos was hard and they got through it. You know, it's never too important to always succeed, and success can come in many different ways. But failure is never final.