October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, is a good time to consider how many women around the world are surviving breast cancer. One such woman is our Dean, Dr. Dolores Straker. Dean Straker is beginning her second year here at RWC and is the perfect role model for her students and staff.
Transferring here from the City University of New York (CUNY), where she was the University Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, was not easy. She was diagnosed with breast cancer only a few weeks after beginning her first year here.
Many people might have chosen to back out of the job and return home to more familiar environs to fight the disease, but she didn’t. “This was my dream,” she explained, “to branch out from the state of New York and to come to a school that celebrates the strengths of students, a school that is nurturing not punishing, and to work with a faculty who are great role models to their students.”
What Dr. Straker may not realize is that she is the best role model for both her students and faculty. Learning that you have cancer is the easy part; dealing with it everyday of your life is the hardest.
Dean Straker has been undergoing chemotherapy for the past year, underwent a mastectomy this past summer, and now receives radiation five days out of the week. Yet she still manages to hold her head up high and be the leader of the College.
What makes her so remarkable is that a lot of people in her position would have stopped working and sulked in their own misery. But not Dean Straker. She is teaching us all the greatest lesson about life. She demonstrates that sometimes in life you come across many travesties, but life goes on and you have to keep walking.
She is a very intelligent, friendly, and personable woman, who, even in her busy schedule, has time to talk to anyone. She’s not just a regular college dean, who is too caught up in her own life and schedule; she’s a dean with a tremendous heart and the confidence to make our college one to be proud of.
We not only welcome Dean Straker back for her second year, but we recognize that we are lucky that such an empowering woman chose to lead our school.