Lyndsey Emmons joined Dartmouth’s Office of Pluralism and Leadership as an assistant director in September 2024. During the seven months she has been here, she has led civic engagement initiatives such as Lunch and Learn and promoted Women and Gender Advising initiatives.
What is your role at Dartmouth and how have you connected with students so far?
LE: My official title is Assistant Director at OPAL, and I am one of four [assistant directors]. My advising area is Women and Gender advising. Each Assistant Director has an education initiative through OPAL, and mine is Civic Engagement Education.
I’ve been on campus for a little over seven months, so people are still getting to know that I exist here. I’ve had a lot of fun getting to know students and I’m super excited. I’ve been able to recently connect with Spare Rib and some students in the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies department.
Why did you want to work at Dartmouth and how has your career led you here?
LE: I am originally from Keene, New Hampshire, so I grew up knowing and learning about Dartmouth. My wife is also from the Northeast so we wanted to move out of Boston and come back to the mountains and trees. We wanted our daughter, who is 16 months old, to grow up with a yard and a dog and things that we couldn’t necessarily have in Boston. That’s why I started looking for jobs and chose this one, or it chose me.
My career in higher education started at Cambridge College. There were a lot of students who were 25 and older getting their Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees. I worked for the Dean of Student Affairs, so I often helped students advocate for themselves, which was super interesting because I was in my early 20s, and most of them could have been my parents. But it was also a really empowering situation.
Then I moved on to MIT, where I was [an] Administrative Assistant for student support services. I used that knowledge to move to Wentworth Institute of Technology and that’s where I really learned how to support students, which is my favorite thing.
At Suffolk University, I worked in the Center for Student Diversity and Inclusion. I advised 10 diversity peer educators. I mentored them to give workshops across campus to faculty, staff and students on pronoun usage, microaggressions and identity based topics. I also mentored them on how to have tough conversations with their peers and how to guide peers through difficult things.
What does advising look like?
LE: I meet the students where they’re at. I’m here to listen. At Suffolk University, I did a lot of advising around identity and how to navigate certain scenarios like, “my roommate said this,” or “my best friend feels this way but I feel this way and that’s conflicting with me”.
One of the other things that I work hard to do is build up pockets of resources, so that if a student comes to me and says, “What do I do? Who do I go to?” I can say “Do you want me to come with you? Can I make an introduction?”
Eventually, for the student coordinators for Women and Gender Advising, who are planning our bigger events, I want to advise them on how to be student leaders, plan large-scale events for their peers, involve alumni and involve other campus partners. So it kind of runs the gamut. It just depends on what walks through my door.
What initiatives have you been involved with?
LE: Just an hour ago, we wrapped a program that was climate justice with 350NH. 350 New Hampshire is a nonprofit climate justice organization, a grassroots activism group that was here along with Positive Tracks which is based in Hanover. They do a lot of awareness initiatives where sport is involved, whether it’s a run or a hike or a 5K.
My first event for civic engagement was to host an open space for people the day after the election called The After. It was a bipartisan, non-political place to eat food, be in community and chat with people. We also had crafts and things like that, so people could eat and do things with their hands if they needed a distraction, or if they just needed to be away from just the politics of things.
What are the needs of the Women and Gender community on campus at this time and how is OPAL addressing them?
LE: I think that there needs to be more programming from Women and Gender Advising. We did two focus groups in January of students, and a lot of the feedback we got was that students wanted more community around [women and gender] identity.
Historically, there has been a program called the Men’s Project, which centered around sexual violence prevention; there’s a whole wealth of funding and knowledge around that. We’re going to flip that around and do a men and masculinities project where we do a lot of programming geared towards men on campus talking about redefining chivalry. We’ll also talk about the masculine identity and the intersections with other identities and how that shows up in different cultures. I’m very excited about that.
At the end of May, we’re partnering with Still North to bring Chris Barcelos to campus. They are an author from Massachusetts who just published a book, “Youth Organizing for Reproductive Justice,” which a lot of students are looking forward to.
What have been highlights from your time working at Dartmouth?
LE: This is probably one of my favorite jobs that I’ve ever had, and I’ve only been here for seven months. I genuinely appreciate the people that I work with. The students that I have met have been wonderful and I love their passion.
OPAL is a very special place on campus, and I think everyone here does a really great job of being there for each other and being there for the students. They’ve helped me navigate Dartmouth more than anybody else.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
