Carmela Thompson is nearly ecstatic as she engages in conversation about her fruitful, and surprisingly varied, career at UB, about her recent participation in the Gates Millennium Scholars Program and about her three comically incorrigible sons. She has much of which to be proud.

But the lilt in her voice as she unleashes the story of finishing her doctoral dissertation is unmistakable-the relief is not ebbing but gushing. She did it. She's done. She's free to slip back into life.

Thompson, associate director of admissions, recently closed the book on her dissertation-which she pulls from a file cabinet, staring with a mix of disbelief and conviction at the thick pile of white paper that marks the celebratory leap over the finish line-the past four months her final stretch.

"Now I feel like I can finally spend weekends with my boys," she says, contemplating aloud what hobbies of the boys', who are ages 7, 10 and 12, she might take up.

Thompson, whose doctorate is in educational administration with a concentration in higher education, said she found that final stretch exhilarating. But taxing as well-as a mother, wife, administrator and student.

"It's tough to stay motivated," she says. "Life gets in the way of a Ph.D." And people still need you, she explains, laughing at the image rolling through her head and off her tongue. "Like a husband who doesn't know where the light bulbs are after 13 years," she says, again laughing.

	“Life gets in the way of a Ph.D.,” says Carmela Thompson, who has just finished work on her dissertation.
	photo: Stephanie Hamberger

For the past four months, Thompson had been getting up at between 2 and 3 a.m. and working straight through until 6 or 7 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, wholly consumed by her dissertation.

Her office-comfortable in appearance-became her "home away from home."

"I really got focused those last four months," she says. "It allowed me to reflect on my own goals and objectives-what my priorities are."

And her priorities-largely participating in and promoting education, and contributing to the minority community-have been with her for much of her life.

While she says her background wasn't as difficult as others growing up in the inner city, Thompson spent her childhood on Buffalo's East Side. She and her sister were legally adopted by her grandparents after their mother died when Thompson was just 4 years old.

Raised by her grandparents, neither of whom ever completed high school, she still grew up in an environment that was very supportive of her educational goals.

"I've always enjoyed education and valued education," she says. As an African-American woman who has taken her education to the highest level, Thompson recognizes the incredible benefits of graduate-level study.

And members of the minority community who pursue graduate degrees often do so in the field of education.

"I think that speaks again to their value of education and perhaps an interest in giving back," she notes. "Within the field of education, you give back formally and informally-regardless of the setting."

Her interests in education and the minority community converged this past summer when she was chosen by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) and The United Negro College Fund (UNCF) to serve as a reader of applications for the Gates Millennium Scholars Program. She was charged with evaluating, over a period of five days, some 25,000 candidates for the program, a privately funded, $1 billion initiative aimed at reducing the financial barriers to a college education.

"I was in awe," she says of the applicants, most of whom were applying with 4.0 GPAs coming from rigorous high school programs. Her esteem for the program, and for the selection process, developed not only because of the stellar applicants, but also because of what she learned along the way about cultural and educational values.

At first, she says, she was put off by the ways in which the readers-a total of 85 members of higher-education faculty and administration from across the country-were regionalized by ethnic group. For example, the Native-American readers were in Denver, while most of the Asian readers were in California, and the Hispanic and African-American readers in Washington, D.C.

"It created a divisiveness that appeared unnecessary," she says.

Also unsettling was the fact that each ethnic group was responsible for reading the applications of students of the same ethnic background. But logic intervened, and Thompson took a tack that made the situation more palatable.

"Once I understood the rationale," she explains, "it made a little more sense to me."

To explain, Thompson offers the example of Jack and Jill of America Inc., a national organization for African-American families that promotes community service.

"I know what that means in the African-American community," she explains, noting the group's significance in fostering young leaders. Thompson served as an officer in the local chapter, and her three sons currently are members. In another ethnic community, she continues, "maybe an individual wouldn't know what Jack and Jill was."

While she says she wishes the various groups of readers would have been better integrated, she also was proud to serve the interests of the youth from her cultural and ethnic background.

"It was well worth the time," she says.

And for Thompson, whose schedule appears seamless as she explains it, time is at a premium.

Given Thompson's endless supply of motivation fueled by opportunities to research and acquire knowledge at UB, even the gaping hole left by her completed doctoral work is closing quickly, the temporarily displaced effort fast finding its way into the facets of career and family. From her initial position in admissions as coordinator of minority recruitment in 1987, to her position as director of Parking and Transportation Services, which she took in 1992-admittedly, a departure from her work in admissions-to her current position, Thompson always has kept one thing in mind in her work at UB: "How can I take what I know about the university and convince students to come?"

"At the highest motivational level, you want to be all that you can be," she says in earnest, circling back to her dissertation, explaining that this notion played a role in deciding her topic, which examined the relationship between leadership style and job satisfaction, and an individual's motivation for becoming self-actualized.

She laughs at the fact that she still wakes in the middle of the night, anxious about the work she's already completed. Her colleagues have told her it will take six months for her doctorate symptoms to dissipate.

Then again, who's counting? Thompson simply has plunged full-throttle back into her role as a student advocate.

"It's a wonderful experience knowing that you've made a difference in the lives of students for whom the college search process is a mystery," she says.

And from that telltale grin on her face, it's evident she means it.