Profile

Sally Garner is the Director of Student Services for the SOJC's undergraduate program. She works with faculty, staff and a team of award-winning advisors to recruit, retain, advance and graduate approximately 2,500 undergraduate students.

Sally’s “Team Advising” office was a certificate of merit recipient of the 2014 NACADA Outstanding Advising Program award. When Sally took the helm in 2000, she started the office’s transition to a fully hybrid academic and career student services center. The hybrid mission is based on a premise that student development and academic goal-setting are interlinked with career development and career goals. To serve one without the other is incongruent with a holistic approach to student services. The team now routinely present at regional and global conferences on the integration of career and academic advising.

Sally has served in a variety of leadership positions for NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising, including Region 8 chair, Region 8 communications coordinator and Oregon state liaison. She has also been a NACADA Emerging Leader Program mentor, having graduated from the program as a “mentee” in 2013. She presents regularly at regional and global conferences. In 2017, Sally was twice recognized as an outstanding advising administrator by NACADA, first at the regional level in March, and again at the more competitive association level in October.

Throughout her tenure at Oregon, Sally and her team have tried different strategies for promoting student success, including advising podcasts, aggressive outreach programs, and “fly by” efforts to bring advising to students where they are: in the classroom, in the residence halls, in their student groups, etc.

Sally has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Oregon and a Master of Education from Oregon State University. In her free time, she enjoys binge-watching one version of Star Trek or another, baking and taking walks with her husband and their corgis, Carson and Poe.