Sometimes the job chooses you.
Isho Tama-Sweet planned to be faculty for life. Twice. Leadership kept finding him anyway, from an untenured senate chair in California to associate dean in Montana.
He only ever planned to teach.
When Isho finished his doctorate, his plan was simple. Be faculty, for life. He gave no thought to anything else. He started his career at Cal State Fullerton, in a college of business with roughly ten thousand students.
In his third year, still untenured, he got pulled onto the college faculty senate. Then vice chair. Then chair. Then the college needed an associate dean, and in the end, he says, no one else would do it. So the dean asked him. He took it on while still untenured, earned tenure, and then his family made a move most Californians would call a leap.
His dean pointed him here.
Isho joined WIBE on his dean's recommendation. She was a member, and the group of deans she leaned on had come almost entirely from WIBE. Her advice was honest. The big association conferences have their place, but they are large and impersonal. WIBE would make it easier to actually build relationships.
His first WIBE dinner sold him. He asked the table how they were using technology to automate the back end of their assessment of learning process, a question he had raised at a larger conference and never gotten a real answer to. This time, one associate dean started explaining, and six people went dead silent to listen.
Sometimes the job chooses you.
ISHO TAMA-SWEETPeople who get it, from a safe distance.
In his monthly inner circle, Isho found the same reassurance in a smaller room. Everyone is navigating the same big picture concerns, even when the specifics look different. In the past year alone, several people in his group faced leadership changes at the top and hard questions about their own next steps.
What makes it work, he says, is that these peers understand his world but are not inside it. They are close enough to get it, and independent enough to be honest.
A safe space to go and talk about the professional and the personal, and the intersection of those things.
ISHO TAMA-SWEET, ASSOCIATE DEANBuild the support system.
Isho still leans on the group today. He is candid that accreditation is a constant, unglamorous part of the job, and not the only part.
Before WIBE, he did not really have a connection to other college of business leaders. Now he has a room that holds the professional and the personal both, and the place where those two things meet.
Your next chapter starts in the room.
Every member story began with one decision to stop doing it alone. Yours can too.
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