Member Story

Everyone's untangling the same big ball of wax

Wafa Hakim Orman is an economist who has led as associate dean since 2017. She will tell you higher education right now is a big ball of wax, a set of challenges all tangled together. What she found at WIBE was a room of leaders working to untangle the same one.

Wafa Hakim OrmanAssociate Dean, College of Business, University of Alabama in Huntsville ยท Member since 2022
Wafa Hakim Orman, Associate Dean of the College of Business at the University of Alabama in Huntsville
The path

From an economics degree to the dean's office

Wafa fell in love with academia about a year into her Master's degree program in India. She wanted to do research, and the opportunities in the United States were too good to pass up. She earned an assistantship at the University of Arizona and completed her PhD in economics, then spent a year in a pure research postdoc at Baylor.

She joined the University of Alabama in Huntsville as, in her words, a baby assistant professor, and earned tenure in the spring of 2015. What came next is a story a lot of faculty will recognize.

"They backed up the service truck and dumped a whole lot of service on me. Here, you have tenure now, you're doing all the things."

One of those things was the dean's search committee. It pulled her out of her narrow niche and into the life of the whole campus. When the new dean arrived, Wafa took the initiative to share some ideas she'd been developing on student retention and first-year seminars. That move eventually led her to apply for an associate dean role. She got it, and she has held it since 2017.

What she loves

Impact you can actually see

Research is a slow burn. You work for years, publish, and maybe it shapes policy somewhere down the line. Administration is different, and that is exactly what Wafa loves about it.

"When you're an administrator, you make a change and you see the impact right away. It's measurable, it's real, and it's much less abstract."

She has never let go of the classroom. She still teaches and still researches, and she says she would miss teaching terribly if she stopped. She has even turned the job into scholarship, publishing a paper on a student-retention analytics system she built with a team of colleagues. A foot in both worlds, on purpose.

Wafa Hakim Orman presenting economic research on ABC News
Wafa (bottom right) shares her economic expertise on ABC News.
Why WIBE

An accomplished leader, still saying yes

Wafa joined WIBE in 2022, just before the Washington, DC conference, after someone reached out on LinkedIn. She studied the agenda, talked it over with her dean, and he did what good leaders do. He told her to go, and that the college would support it.

She already knew the larger association conferences and valued them. WIBE, she found, was something different. Smaller, more focused, and more personal.

"I found it incredibly beneficial, and much more focused. I see these as complements, not substitutes. I love that I get to do both."
The workshop

Worth the price of membership on its own

Ask Wafa for a specific moment that mattered, and she goes straight to the fundraising workshop. Development had never been a big part of her portfolio, and it showed her the strategic and the practical in one place.

"That workshop alone was worth the price of membership and everything else. It was one of the best online learning experiences I have ever had."

Her college now has a development officer. Because of that class, she knows how to work alongside him, support what he is building, and be a stronger member of the team. Even after years in the role, there was still a skill worth adding.

The hard part

A big ball of wax

Wafa does not sugarcoat the moment higher education is in. She calls it a big ball of wax, a set of challenges all tangled together. Technology and AI sit at the center of it, and the questions they raise feel existential.

"What is the point of teaching students to write a term paper when a machine can do it? We know what we do is useful. So what should we be doing, and how should we prepare them?"

Add rising costs, a shifting regulatory landscape, and hard questions about return on investment, and the stakes are real. Wafa believes an institution that does not adapt will wither. She also believes leaders do not have to face that alone.

How WIBE helps

The cure for main character energy

It is easy, Wafa says, to get siloed inside one institution, talking only to the people down the hall. You start to feel like the center of the universe.

"You get a lot of main character energy. Then you meet people from other institutions and realize we are all dealing with the same challenges. If we collaborate, it is a lot easier to meet this moment."

That, to her, is what WIBE offers. A platform to compare notes across schools, and the leadership development to actually rise to the challenges everyone is facing.

Wafa Hakim Orman at the WIBE conference
Wafa (middle) at the WIBE Conference.
In her words

You never stop learning

For a leader who had already accomplished so much, Wafa's reason for joining, and staying, is disarmingly simple.

"There's no point in your life at which you have nothing left to learn. As long as you're alive, you have something left to learn."

These days she is often the experienced one in the room, and she treats that as a gift, not a graduation. Mentee to mentor, and back again.

"When you have more experience, you can give back. People can learn from your failures and your successes. That giving back is really meaningful."
The whole thing, in one line

What WIBE has meant

"WIBE is the place where we can have real conversations, without feeling like we always have to present ourselves at our best."

And asked to describe WIBE in a single sentence, she landed on the words we would choose ourselves.

"A supportive community network, focused on professional development, in a very positive and supportive way."
Could this be your story?

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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