CAREER:
Carol has served as Director of Student Recruitment and Admissions at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta since October 2000. In her current position, she directs the recruitment, admissions operations, and orientation activities for graduate and undergraduate health professions students. She served as the Team Lead for MCG’s successful implementation of the Recruiting and Admissions modules of the SunGard Higher Education Banner student information system (September 2005 go-live) and has built more validation tables than she cares to recall, including all tables and forms related to communication plans, population selection, and letter generation. She is responsible for managing the budget of the Office of Academic Admissions and for overseeing an admissions staff of 10 full-time professional and support staff employees in the areas of new student recruitment, administrative support, data entry, files management, and credentials evaluation. She serves as MCG’s Academic Common Market coordinator and as its Transfer Ombudsperson for the University System of Georgia. Prior to coming to MCG, she served as Director of Admissions, Recruitment and Orientation at the University of Texas at Arlington. Other than her adventurous stint in Texas, her background is all Georgia, with previous service as Assistant and Associate Director of Admissions at the University of Georgia and Director of Admissions at Gainesville College. Her background, therefore, includes positions at a two-year college, a land-grant flagship university, an urban university, and a graduate/professional university.

EDUCATION:
Carol received a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism (ABJ) with a major in Public Relations and a Master of Education (M.Ed.) with a major in Student Personnel in Higher Education, both from the University of Georgia. She also completed doctoral courses at the University of Georgia in both Sociology and Higher Education. She is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi honor societies, as well as the Kappa Tau Alpha journalism honor society and Kappa Delta Pi education honor society.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT:
Program: Carol’s professional associations are her passion! She has served as the recorder, moderator or coordinator for 16 program sessions and has presented more than 30 program sessions at the state, regional or national level, on topics ranging from transfer credit, to international credentials evaluation, to professional development, to the benefits of laughter. She has been an invited presenter at the Arkansas and Florida ACRAO annual meetings and was keynote speaker at a Carolinas ACRAO annual meeting. She has also been a member of the Georgia Association of International Educators, for which she presented on the topics of international admissions and the educational system of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Committees:
A big believer in the benefits of professional association involvement, Carol has chaired numerous committees in GACRAO (Nominations and Elections; Honorary Membership and Awards; Site Selection; Program; New Professionals; Exhibitors), SACRAO (Constitution and Bylaws; Site Selection; Finance; Program; Membership Relations; Nominations and Elections; Recognitions and Awards), and AACRAO (Recruitment and Marketing). She earned the “AACRAO University” Certificate of Completion in Strategic Enrollment Management, with concentrations in both Nontraditional Education and Recruitment and Marketing. At some point in her career, she has served as a member of every GACRAO committee and every SACRAO committee.

Leadership:
Carol served as GACRAO President in 1997-98 and SACRAO President in 2005-06, and she currently serves SACRAO as Immediate Past President. She previously served SACRAO as Vice President for States/Regionals and Membership; during that term of office, she restructured the SACRAO website, migrating the SACRAO membership database from desktop to online and implementing functionality for members to update their information online and conduct Directory searches online. During her term of office as SACRAO President-Elect, she developed the SACRAO program planning website, migrating it from desktop to online and tying program sessions to the online conference module so that all program changes could be seen in real time. She also developed the preliminary logic and design for the online SACRAO conference registration module.

Awards:
In 1984, Carol received GACRAO’s “Outstanding New Professional Award,” given for outstanding statewide program participation and committee activity within the first five years in the profession. This was only the second time in history this award was given. Subsequently, she received “Outstanding Young Women of America” recognition; a Certificate of Appreciation from the Georgia Academic Decathlon; a Certificate of Appreciation recognizing significant service to the Athens, Georgia community; and a SACRAO Certificate of Appreciation for her restructuring of the SACRAO website and membership database. In October 2005, she received GACRAO’s highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award, for career achievement spanning a period of at least 25 years. She is the first person in GACRAO history to have received both its Outstanding New Professional and Distinguished Service Awards.

PERSONAL:
Carol has been married for 30 years and has four children: a daughter in college, a son and daughter in high school, and a daughter in middle school. An accomplished seamstress, she recently taught her two younger daughters how to sew --- a hobby she hopes they enjoy for life. She enjoys photography (before they started their family, she and her husband were wedding photographers on weekends), acting, singing, dancing, reading, and movies (especially comedies). She has been a soloist in the church choir. She loves taking photographs of her children and collecting Christmas ornaments of mice. (You’d have to see her 9-ft. mouse-covered Christmas tree, which she leaves up from November to January each year, to understand.) After raising four children, she can quote passages from nearly every Disney movie ever made, complete with character voices (her favorite is The Lion King).

Carol has overcome considerable adversity in her personal life, including breast cancer, and is frequently sought as a presenter on the topic of laughter as a coping mechanism. She’s not afraid to be silly or to laugh at herself, and she has personally researched the health benefits of laughter. Her family insists that she write a book on this subject after she retires from her career in higher education.

--------------------------------------
Carol S. Nobles