For Sandler, campus life full of many flavors

Megan McVicker
Staff Writer

Reliability, dedication and a gregarious nature are just the cherries on top of the ice cream sundae that is Courtney Sandler. In fact, if she really were an ice cream sundae, it would be one of the 24 scoops assembled with every possible flavor out there.

She is the director of campus life here at Wingate and an intricate part of students’ overall success and satisfaction on campus. A day in the life of Courtney is hard to even describe because it is never the same.

She arrives to her office a little before 8 a.m. on most days. The mornings are filled with meetings discussing student success, campus life, anything related to multicultural affairs, Spring Fling, Refuel for exam weeks and the list goes on. The afternoons she tends to leave open for one-on-one interaction with students. Courtney’s door is always open. In just about everything she does the students and their happiness comes first.

What’s the best part about Courtney? After listing off her massive pile of responsibilities, she shrugged her shoulders and with a smile on her face simply said, “I love what I do.”

Courtney gets to know students by participating in all sorts of activities, such as the trip to the Presidential Inauguration last year and most recently the Alternative Spring Break trip to Oak Ridge, Tenn. where Courtney served as a chaperone.

At Wingate she plays many roles. She is responsible for campus life activities, as well as supervising those who run Greek Life, Student Activities, Ad Team, Multicultural Affairs and residence education. She is the “biggest cheerleader” to her supervisees, always providing support for those individuals. She facilitates an open forum series known as Diversity Dialogue, designed for students to discuss topics such as sexual preference, inter-racial relationships and more. She also co-instructs a course for at-risk students, an issue she is adamantly devoted to improving. She has even submitted a grant proposal for a program designed to “focus efforts toward underrepresented students at Wingate University encouraging their growth and development.” And that is just skimming the surface of the work she does at Wingate.

Everything Courtney does for this university is for the benefit of the students. She often uses the word “rewarding” to describe just about everything she’s ever done here. Each job is geared toward enhancing the student’s Wingate experience. Most of all she is pushing for an environment where students are immersed in their education, where “experiential learning” plays the largest role. She referred to her job as a “passion, not just a position.”

She said if she had a tagline it would have be that, “Wingate University has lots to offer for every student! Find your niche, take opportunities, and do not let anything pass you by.”