Student affairs leader Quamina Carter did not take a traditional route to higher education. For a decade prior to coming to Claremont Graduate University (CGU), she worked as a clinical therapist in DePauw University’s counseling center.
There, she had opportunities to work with the school’s student affairs division and began to learn that she was “sort of good at that side of the camp,” she says.
Quamina Carter
That penchant for student affairs stuck, recently bringing her into her current role as vice president of student affairs at CGU. CGU’s former dean of students and campus life, she arrived on campus in 2017 and became the school’s chief student affairs officer in June 2023.
"A lot of our clinical skills are very transferable,” Carter says. “And having served in the counseling center at an undergraduate institution, I was super familiar with the policies and processes. I was usually the consultant on a lot of cases [and] also the confidant for students in matters where they needed advocacy and representation."
Being a trained and licensed therapist means already having ample empathy, listening skills, solution and resource-finding abilities, and a strategic mind, Carter says. These skills have proven to be a good fit to CGU’s trans-disciplinary approaches to problem solving, she continues.
And with those assets, she has sought to improve student success at CGU and help coach rising student affairs leaders amid issues of turnover and fatigue in the field.
