Have you met Carlo, Student Services Specialist, part time grad student, and Flash Gordon super fan? Spend the next 2 minutes getting to know him a little better.
Where is your favourite place on campus?
I think Quad is my favourite place on campus. I like the open space; I like that it’s green. To me it represents student life: if you were to sit in Quad for an hour, you would see all aspects of student life — students rushing to class, students walking slowly and talking. And I like to think they’re talking about ideas on how to change the world, but they could just be talking about what they did over the weekend. There’s that part and then watching people play Frisbee or tight rope walking and to me that’s what life is on campus.
Tablet or paper?
Probably tablet. I’ve got one of those tablets you can write all over. So only that tablet. If I couldn’t write on that tablet, then it would be paper. I used to be really paper-based but then I got the tablet you can write all over, so tablet.
Name one thing you’ve brought to work from home.
I’d say my posters.
What is the one thing you can’t live without?
It would have to be my running shoes. And if I wasn’t in grad school, I’d be in the gym for as many hours as I could.
If you won airfare to anywhere in the world, where would you go?
That’s such a hard question because my travel list — I’m half way done. So if it were somewhere new, it would have to be in the Scandinavian region — Sweden or Denmark. But, my favourite place in the world — it would have to be Greece. Hanging out with all the architecture, the mythology.
[Interviewer: I sense a theme here: superheroes, mythology…]
Oh yeah, a little bit. I have always been interested in superheroes since I was younger. I think that’s why I enjoy Greek mythology so much. It’s also like superhero culture but it’s historical superhero culture. That was an entire civilization of superheroes, hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
You can invite anyone — alive or dead, real or fictional — to dinner. Who would it be?
It’s going to be superhero themed. I’m going to give two answers to this one. Fictional, I would probably want to sit down with Barry Allen — the Flash, but the CW iteration. There’s something about him and his ability to connect with his humanity I find really intriguing. He cries on TV and superheroes who cry — I think that is a connection to emotion and humanity that I find really interesting. So that’s cool.
But then in terms of someone whose brain I’d like to pick and learn a lot from I think, Jean Luc-Picard from Star Trek. I like the fact that he’s a scientist, a diplomat, and a fighter all at the same time. His ability to think in all of the different ways I find interesting.
If you could switch jobs with someone else on campus for a week, what would you do?
I’m often in touch with the Alumni Office and I hear about all of the international events that they go to, representing the university on the international stage. I think that would be really interesting. The international travel being one part of it, but really representing the U of A, being the brand ambassador out — I find that to be really interesting.
What does “uplifting the whole people” mean to you?
When I hear that, it makes me put my teacher hat on. With me being a teacher and uplifting the whole people, it means taking each individual person and getting them to where they want to be. I think we do a lot of that work here especially with students, doing the advising and telling them, “this is who you are right now and this is where you see yourself in four years, eight years, two years, whatever that time frame is.” It’s about how can we get you from there to here, but also how to open you up to new possibilities. Everyone has this path that they want to follow and that path is based off of what we know about our own experience. So as a university I think it’s about getting people from A to B, but hey, have you considered C? So for me “uplifting the people” means getting people to be their best self, whether that’s what they currently plan or whether it’s something new that they don’t know about yet.
That’s why I enjoy my role here at Student Connect. Student Connect as a unit is still pretty new. It only really started three years ago and I joined the university as part of it. It’s the potential this unit has in terms of helping student services move forward on campus and being that kind of campus wide leader that excites me about this position and this unit and the work that we’re currently trying to do. It’s really about looking at how to make things better.
If you could solve any global problem, what would it be?
That’s so hard because I’m writing a paper on it right now for school and it has biased my opinion. If I could solve any problem in the world right now, it would be the unequal distribution of wealth. I just think it’s tough to see some people who have everything and have more money than they know what to do with. And then it’s seeing the other side where people are struggling to put food on the table or struggling to clothe their children. To me that’s where I think “something’s wrong there”. I think that’s where the balance needs to be put back. I don’t know if it was ever the right way, so “put back” is probably not the right word. Equalized is probably the right word.
What 3 words best describe your U of A experience?
Unpredictable — we’d like to think that there’s a pattern to how things work and part of my job is to find that pattern. But I also find that it’s not easy to predict what happens one year to the next, one term to the next, even one week to the next in terms of what you want to be coming across.
Challenging — partly because for me, I’ve always taken on challenges. Working and being a student is a challenge I took on myself. But then the university has all these goals and directions in which it wants to head and, as part of my role, it’s about how we get from here to there and it’s a challenge. It’s always about how can you make things better.
Engaging — I’ve been in jobs where you could just do your day to day and close the door at the end of the day and just be done with it. But I think with all of the potential and the ideas and what the university is capable of, I think that’s where I’ve really gotten invested because it really allows you to be drawn in and to say “well, what can I do to make this better and to have us think differently.”
About Carlo Dimailig
Carlo Dimailig is Student Services Specialist, working for Student Connect at the Office of the Registrar. Carlo joined the university in 2013 after a few years of teaching high school social studies. Keen to be part of postsecondary administration, Carlo is currently enrolled in a Masters of Education in policy studies where he does research into the authentic representation of student voice in governance. When not writing papers for school, he can usually be found working out at the gym or at one of Edmonton’s many escape rooms.