No. 33. Astrid S. Tuminez, University President

This is the People in their Work Podcast. I am Professor Doug Cardner in the student leadership and success studies department at Utah Valley University. In this podcast, you will hear the first-person stories of people journeying through their education work and career decision-making. AstroTuminez is the president of Utah Valley University. Growing up in the Philippines slums, challenging her fears, working harder than everyone else, and not being afraid to ask questions as part of her story. Listen and she shares some of the experiences that led her to where she is today. I had a very what I call a very inauspicious start having been born in a really remote farming village in the Philippines and it was a place where you had no electricity or running water. Everybody was a peasant and my mother already had six children when I was born and she really just wanted her children to have better opportunities so she moved us to the city of Ilo-Ilo and the only place where we could afford to live was the slums and literally we had this house that was a hut on stilts in the water, in the sea and it was made of bamboo and grass. The grass is called Nipa and so it was a rather inauspicious start and probably at the time I never thought about a career or you're being a university president or traveling the world but when I was five years old, some nuns, Catholic nuns from the daughters of Charity found my family and offered us free spots in their schools, the girls because it was only a girl's school and that was how I got my start of really breaking down the barriers of my imagination. I learned to read, I learned to be numerate and understand numbers and so that's how it started and then later on I got a scholarship to the University of the Philippines when I was 15 years old so I was a very very young college student and then at 18 I moved to Utah to attend Brigham Young University, I had joined the LDS church when I was about 10 and a half years old so from BYU then I moved on to Harvard and MIT for graduate school and I pretty much credit you know the career journey first to education and the people who helped me and mentored me along the way and then secondly to my own curiosity, imagination and hard work and then third I just never hesitated to kind of raise my hand no matter how nervous or unqualified I felt when opportunities presented themselves I would I would raise my hand with my heart pounding and so my career has really spent many different areas. If you think about it I was a Russian literature major doubled with international relations at international politics and Russian literature and then my PhDs in political science my major was international relations, my minor was defense and arms control and I focused on the country that used to be called the Soviet Union, the USSR and so my early career was really working for Harvard University on a project in the former Soviet Union and then I branched out from that to Philanthropy where I worked for a foundation in New York City called Carnegie Corporation of New York and we were giving out millions of dollars in grants every year and my area was conflict prevention, non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and then I went from that to Wall Street and what led to Wall Street was that I discovered in 1998 as Russia and the Soviet Union had fallen apart there were these 15 new countries and everything in Russia was about money, it was about privatizing what companies that were formerly owned by the government, the government used to own everything in the communist system and so companies were being privatized, I was really starting to think that I didn't know my own field anymore, I didn't understand money, how money was made, how companies went private, were stocks and bonds, what was a financing and so I decided to get educated but I no longer wanted to go back to school and so I went to Wall Street and interviewed at some of the biggest banks, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, SBC Warburg which owned a bank called Brunswick Warburg in Moscow at the time, so anyway I ended up working on Wall Street and actually became eventually a venture capitalist in biotechnology and then from that I was really getting bird out after two kids and you know really crazy schedule and so I was going to take time off but it only lasted for two weeks because I was asked to work on a project in the southern Philippines after 9/11 where the US government was really worried about al-Qaeda infiltration of the Moro Islamic liberation front, insurgency and independence movement in the Philippines and so I ended up working in peace negotiations so you can probably see that these are all very different fields, they are kind of very separate from one another so I went from Harvard University, academic and then applied academic staff in the former Soviet Union to Wall Street, from Harvard sorry to philanthropy, Carnegie Corporation of New York to Wall Street and I worked for SBC Warburg briefly through their bank Brunswick Warburg and then I moved to AIG Global Investment on Wall Street and then peace negotiations in the southern Philippines and then after the Philippines I was in Hong Kong, my husband had gotten a job in Singapore and so we were moving to Singapore and I had two job offers at the time, one from Google and one from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and interestingly I opted not to make money at Google and instead joined the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy because it was new and it was patterned after the Harvard Kennedy School of Government where I had been a fellow in an employee and so I decided if I could make a difference in Asia by helping to educate government leaders I would do it so I was at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy for four years and then I joined Microsoft in 2012 that I was with Microsoft for six years and Microsoft is a whole different wall game it's technology and I'm not an engineer or a techie I was actually running the legal department of Microsoft but the legal department of Microsoft was also in charge of government relations and philanthropy along with commercial legal work and compliance and so it was just a very very rich portfolio and I love did so much I learned so much the first three to six months were incredibly difficult difficult as in I was crying in terms of the difficulty and I thought that I'd made the biggest mistake on my life but it all worked out and I really look back on the time with Microsoft as almost giving me a second lease on life because technology powers everything today and it's important for leaders to have a good understanding of technology you know I've lived and worked in five different countries I speak five languages I've worked in very different sectors very different industries and now I'm at a university and I see the university as one place where all of my experience and all of my learning and all of my networks come in very handy because a university needs everything because my childhood was was one of you know really great poverty and deprivation it was hard at the beginning to really know that I could make a big difference in the world or travel the world or become a leader in in a global sense I know at UVU we have students who are both very well prepared for college and we have students who are less prepared because what we're saying to students if you don't care about your past we care about your current aspirations and where you want to head in the future so I think that's very very powerful own it own the education because not everybody can go to a UVU my first school you know what we didn't have toilets that work not everybody's a chance to go to this you know gleaming campus with lots of really nice people around us and we have good classrooms and laboratories and computers and a library and a nordus school of the arts whether you get an education or not time will go by you will soon be 35 you will soon be 50 and it is this education that will make you're being 35 years old so much better you're being 50 years old so much better whatever it is you end up doing on your education be proud of it believe in yourself that that difference for me is I can't I can't even describe it in words and sometimes I use the term breaking down the walls of my imagination you can teach someone to read a write and that's not enough it's it's really when the people read books or listen to a professor talk about Africa or talk about genetics or talk about politics and history that you will break down the barriers of your imagination in terms of what is possible when I was a senior in high school in the Philippines I already had a falling out with the Catholic nuns because their feelings were hurt rightly so because I changed religion so it had become tense for so many years and in my senior year of high school I was 14 and my family decided to leave our city to go to the capital Manila and I went to Manila it's my last year of high school it's so critical that I finish I had no transcripts I had no money I had nothing I didn't know if I could go to school at all and my mother and I went to this school a Methodist school called the Union High School of Manila and we asked for a meeting with a guidance counselor who didn't know me from Eve but he was kind enough to agree to me and we said my mom and I sat there and we said to him you know I have no transcript I have no money I can't even pay tuition but I will work really really hard and I'm smart and will you just please let me go to your school we will eek out some money to pay you slowly and really it's a miracle this this gentleman said yes I ended up being voted most likely to succeed in my senior year of high school and people really didn't know me I couldn't be valedictorian for lack of residency in that school but I think I got 17 you know awards I got a lot of awards I started in a chemical engineering major and no hard work would have made me a successful chemical engineer I just knew my brain wasn't fast enough in the field but then my hard work got translated into exploring other fields until I found the field that was great for me I have to tell you in advance algebra that I had to work hard harder than anybody but I couldn't would not accept a C I would not accept that that was the best I could do I did end up giving I think getting an A minus but I had to work you know I mean maybe hundreds of hours more than the other kids in class and that's just fine my first transition was really the transition to school at all to formal schooling because I I couldn't spell my name I thought my name was our astrid ASTR ED I couldn't spell my name and so the early transition was just you know discovering letters and numbers but then when I got it I mean I got zeros at the beginning so so really not giving up was really important to that transition and then another important transition was in college where I didn't know what I would become so I started in chemical engineering as I mentioned earlier and I really was not fast enough and I thought well maybe I should become a doctor so I started to take you know chemistry and zoology and it was hard also and then in zoology because we we were dissecting animals and I didn't want dissect a big animal so we were supposed to bring our own cat and put it to sleep and dissect it that was how the lab worked and and I didn't want to dissect anything bigger than a mouse and a frog and and so I kind of kind of failed in that major as well and then I started taking European languages and then I I was good at it I was good in Spanish I was good in French and then I met this professor who who was a communist and had lived in the Soviet Union for 11 years and we didn't talk politics so much I speak Russian I wanted him to teach me Russian I became really close to him and so I realized that I was good at languages and when I came to BYU I saw that they had a really great Russian program so I decided to major in that and then I became interested in economics politics and history because you can't really separate Russian literature from the history and politics and economics of the country it was very intertwined and so I changed my major I guess four times and so that was another big transition and then transitioning to BYU of course was actually easier than than hard in the sense that you know for the first time in my life life was easy food was easy electricity was easy running water I was just I was just like blown away by that that I lived with my sister in Orem and she had you know a bathtub and running water I mean it may sound silly and her floor had carpet and today that carpet would look to me really old and ratty and cheap because I'm no different person but for me at the time it was like wow there's carpet on the floor so exciting and I remember I would do all my homework on the floor if there's a hard part to transition it was really sort of learning you know the American way but again I always asked for help I remember my first job and and this is how I found my mentor at BYU professor Gary Browning and he has been mentoring me for 35 years now you know when I went to ask him for a job he had advertised for secretary he asked me to take a typing test and to type a letter I didn't know how to type a letter I didn't know how many spaces between the the address and deer so and so so I totally flunked the test but this man you know saw something in me and he said okay it's fine he didn't even he did he was so nice about it and then he said wow why don't you take a spelling test and you know I was a reader I was a voracious reader from the day I learned to read I'd probably read you know hundreds of books at that point and I took the spelling test and of course it was an A plus and so he gave me the chance to be secretary and from then on I just worked with him through my entire three and a half years he employed me for the entire three and a half years I was at BYU whatever he had I was the assistant and so so asking for help and then you know I didn't have very much money so I went to the Lamanite scholarship program and I asked them for a Lamanite scholarship and and it was really great a Lanny Nighting I still remember him he he said you know but you know you're not a Lamanite and I said well you know the Book of Mormon it says that there was the ship builder who went off and was never heard from again and who knows what islands he ended up in it could be it could be in Southeast Asia and you know they gave me I forgot the I forget the amount now they gave me money for books so that was from the Lamanite pro a scholarship program the worst thing that can happen is people will say no to you and that's not so bad you know you learn from being rejected and that also helps you be a stronger and and better person all of my education was in the humanities and in political science history and I was really familiar with words words are easy to me I didn't care about money and part of me even though I was poor curious thing that I didn't care so much about money because I thought that business people and rich people had no soul I thought that all they cared about was profit and and making money and they didn't care about people and and I was really ignorant I have to say that the bottom line is I was a pure ignorance when I thought that way and so I cared so much about Russia and to understand the Russian people my field of study I realized that I had to understand money and business and the stock market and so when I made the transition a friend of mine facilitated a way for me to interview with a very senior executive at Morgan Stanley one of the biggest investment banks in the world his name was Vikram Pandit and he was number five in the hierarchy and later on became the CEO of city bank and so when I went to interview with him I knew that I couldn't pretend I knew stuff I didn't know I wasn't going to discuss banking or trading or options and so I said to him you know Mr. Pandit I thank you for agreeing to interview me I am happy to discuss anything under the sun with you except investment banking but I want to be an investment banker I think he was kind of shocked by that but he was really wonderful and he said to me oh sure and so he he asked me a lot of questions and I answered them to the best of my ability I had already worked in Russia so he knew that I had done some interesting things and then he walked me up and down the the trading floor you know there was a section there was an options trading and I mean for the life of me I had no idea what that was and I remember just kind of nodding my head and feeling really really ignorant and terrible but Morgan Stanley flew me to London after that to talk to their emerging markets people and and they made me a job offer in in two weeks and so that transition was hard because I had to learn about money I had to in order to be a broker and in order to work with pension funds and investors you know I had to have a Series 7 and another one Series 63 or 65 license and I had to work really hard to understand I mean a lot of the exam was options trading and I just had no clue what that was so I had to study really hard to pass those tests and then later on when I was in venture capital focusing on biotechnology I really came to admire the people who wanted to work in the field of biotech and finance because we would have no drugs on the market without these people and often I would encounter people who were PhDs one person would have a PhD and MBA and an MD I worked with people like that they were graduates of medical school and business school and had a PhD in molecular biology and so everything that I'd thought before about business just got just crumbled that I got humbled in the sense that I never saw people working so hard and yes there were patience business people in the world but I understood that without the business world who creates the the new things that we all use by the way and who you know providing employment it's not and I mean again I understand this is not a naive view because I you know I studied the communist system and and so I'm not ideological either way but it's just coming to respect the real people who think up an idea because they see a need in society and then they build that idea into something they can sell whether that's a medical device or you know a new therapeutic and from science to market it's a very long difficult journey I really learned a lot in that transition and then when I was working in biotech I audited courses in neuroscience and molecular biology at the new school in New York City because I had to have the vocabulary to see it across the table from people who know a lot more than I did and if I were to tell AIG global investment to invest in certain companies it has to have the integrity of research and analysis people see me now as very confident I wasn't always very confident and part of that lack of confidence comes from the fact that I was so poor and I grew up in a pretty socio economically very hierarchy called society very snobbish third world countries are more snobbish than first world countries so if you grew up in a society where you know your skin is darker your clothes are poorer you'll go around feeling like a nobody and people do treat you like a nobody and so where did confidence come from so first let me underline that I wasn't always confident an early part of my confidence came from realizing that I was good at school so once I was really I knew I was really good at school I was smarter than the rich kids I got better grades that teachers loved me more because I was smart and they gave me more responsibilities part of it came from knowing discovering not knowing but discovering because I didn't know at the beginning that I could be a good student I discovered it and then I think the second part of confidence just came from pure hunger if you start out with nothing and your very life depends on you know I never had health care I could never go to a dentist I you just couldn't think about those things and so part of that was just the sheer hunger where I was not willing as a child to say I'm going to live in this hot forever this is such a good life you know I had I mean I had worms it was it was just terrible so so the hunger was part of your survival instincts come in and maybe genetically my parents gave me this especially my mother my mother was a go-getter so having some of this inequality is probably part of the confidence in that I I had to face my hunger and say I don't accept it I'm going to change it and then third very important to my confidence was my religion so both as a Catholic and they later as a Latter-day Saint and the Latter-day Saint religion was more powerful because it was just filling my head with you know I'm a child of God and you know what I mean nothing is is impossible you know and so I love that my religion was just filling me with all this positivity and hopefulness and you know the love of God was very real and so and so that was just like you know a drug infusion of sorts that that helped me as a kid say yeah I can I can I can persevere I know that I can I'm capable of becoming great and then the fourth and most really the most important thing I would say to to to people who are interested in confidence is there is no better pathway to confidence than doing I was afraid of heights and when I was at Brigham Young University I went and saw that big football stadium and I made myself walk up to the top and the edge where I thought I would puke because I was so scared of heights and I just made myself walk and look down and I remember doing that and thinking you know I can do this I can I will not die I will not die I will do this point about about doing is raise your hand when you're in doubt as a woman's early in my career I challenge myself in every setting you know in New York City at the council and foreign relations very very elite organization that I will not go to a seminar there where there were senators or even sometimes heads of state or famous scholars I will not leave a seminar without raising my hand and asking an intelligent question and I would think hard about you know what question I would ask so it's in the doing when I gave my first talk at Harvard I was so nervous I had to go to the bathroom because I thought I would throw up I was sweating I was so nervous and I just thought all these people at Harvard will laugh at me even though I'd been a student there and then I did it so I over prepared I would over prepare for everything and this is by the way what a lot of women do I had so many male colleagues who would wing it not once in my career did I ever allow myself to wing anything because as a woman you are judged more harshly when you're in front of people and my early career was in Moscow in the Soviet Union and it was a society that if you had a PhD they still didn't care they would say hey go make the coffee I was very aware of that and so I taught myself to walk into a room I spoke Russian well and that helped a lot I would walk in and just try to take control in five minutes I was little I looked so young in my 20s in Moscow all goes back to play a game with yourself practice in front of a mirror over prepare but always raise your hand and I would say that to men and women if you're feeling insecure and not so confident you know what even if you make a fool of yourself so what so what I mean people people are liars when they say they've never never made a fool of themselves everyone has made mistakes and so if we can keep that in mind it helps us to stay humble it helps us to really over prepare and then we go out there and then just just do it like the Nike you know the Nike mantra it's hard the first time easier it's second time third time fourth time you're a pro today as as a university president I do feel very privileged in having this job of of what I say you know what I think of us making a difference in the lives of people so it's it's all about the students it's really all about the students 100 percent I feel that as I look back prior to coming to UVU I was with Microsoft for six years and I feel that that job and technology actually prepared me very well for the demands of a university presidency in this job there is never a boring day in every days intense every day whether you're talking about COVID-19 or a human resources crisis HR or student needing help or a blizzard and everybody's unhappy that you did not close campus it could just be anything and everything and what I learned working in the tech industry is I thought that I was fast before before working for Microsoft I didn't really realize what speed was until I was at Microsoft because the the company kind of gave me this enormous amount of freedom and I sat on boards even while I was a Microsoft employee and they allowed me to have all these other activities and what they really cared about was impact whether I was leading my team properly whether we were delivering results in the 15 countries where we were supposed to support the business and it was a very different way of working so speed was of the essence and it was relentless the pressure was relentless because in technology nobody respects tradition you could be the darling two years ago a year ago and this year you could be blown out of the water by your competitor and so it was that kind of relentless pressure I learned a lot about legal stuff because I was running the legal department and then I I really got embedded in the cultures of 15 different countries and so that was the diversity was so amazing and then I learned about the bottom line of technology that if you understood it and we're not afraid of it and could learn it you could make magic happen for poor people for nurses for doctors for business people for government that was just such a discovery for me because I you know it's like the human brain we only use less than 1% of it is the same with technology we don't really know how to put it together and in ways that delight us and make things move faster of course there was again back to all of that pressure and so I felt actually that coming to you time you view there were many many challenges but it was not that same kind of you know unrelenting pressure and then I felt like everything that I learned from working at a tech company could translate in a university because if anything can power up pedagogy student applications alumni outreach financial aid reach out to donors it's technology and you could do it at a cost you know that is manageable that is secure it's just that we you have to build it and then the part that I love most being at UVU is that it's more of a people job and so what kind of bringing people and technology together it is such an interesting problem it's such a high class problem and so I'm very bullish and then we think about tensions today given the focus of UVU on diversity so we have people we have growth we have technology that we're building up and then we have diversity which is to me so inspiring that we are saying again back to our mantra come come as you are UVU has a place for you there is nothing more powerful than that that we are accepting and we look at every individual with the same eyes of you know seeing dignity and potential and the wholeness of the person and so so I'm I'm really inspired to be at UVU and and I feel that as hard as it was so Microsoft was a transition that was very humbling for me and I need to say this when I started you know the person who hired me took a big risk because number one I was not a lawyer number two I was not a tech person and my first three to six months were very very difficult I came I came from the National University of Singapore I had a cavernous office and like 12 people supporting me some enormous amount of people supporting me I didn't even have to dial my phone or turn on my computer because I would walk in my computer was turned on by my secretary to a place where I had no office they gave me a locker and that was it and they told me go and I didn't understand words they were using at meetings and there I was you know 25 years out in my career and not understanding words in a meeting was so horrible and my husband probably had to listen to a lot of complaining for me right at the end of the day and then I was on a plane you know 50% of the time but it was so empowering and that I felt eventually I felt like a student again that I'd been given this opportunity to earn a master's degree in a field that was truly changing the world and so once I got over being humbled by that experience and and my capacity to learn and do just got bigger it it was just it was just really an amazing time and then I feel that I matured got another degree and can come to university and and put it to use I am Doug Gardner and this has been the people in their work podcast music by Christopher Wies images are from the UVU roots of knowledge stained glass exhibit by holdman studios