My name is Sandra Reid, and I am the Chair of the Graduate School of Business and Director of the MBA for Dallas Baptist University in Dallas, Texas.  I help students, alumni, and corporate partners to grow and develop in all facets of their lives in order to reach their dreams, their fullest potential while serving as leaders of impact.  I believe with all my heart a well-rounded education is a life’s journey with no final destination and no real roadmap clearly drawn. And this journey is impacted by all of us who choose to be all-in for those with whom we are destined to encounter along the way, forever changed as a result.  It is so much bigger, broader, deeper, yes significant, than what goes on in a classroom environment, the workplace, etc. For me, it requires honest relationships of genuine sharing and courageous participation like our lives depended on it because they just do. I am grateful every day for my calling, and for each of the many students, alumni, and colleagues who have chosen to share all aspects of their lives with me over these two decades through this very day.  I am a professor, too, and I teach graduate level marketing and technology related to specialties. It was a tremendous honor for me to receive the Business Faculty of the Year Award in 2002.

 

Prior to joining DBU, I served in many various leadership capacities at American Airlines which proved to be an amazing, rewarding, and educational experience for me!  I started out serving in accounting (with a BBA in Accounting from TCU) and financial roles that would ultimately lead me to launch a huge route acquisition that was highly successful.  I spent a long time in operations serving in many leadership capacities, and I loved it! The opportunity to connect people to the experiences they desired was certainly how I viewed it, and so much of my growth and development came from knowing/seeing that I could directly impact others with purpose and intention based on my own engagement in relationships.  While at AA, I completed two degrees, an MBA with an area of focus in technology (University of Dallas), and Ph.D. (University of North Texas) that includes organizational development, education, and marketing. I believe passionately, however, working within the airline industry and being able to take the educational experiences I had back to my various AA work environments literally made it all come alive and together for me.  Working, raising a family, going to school, to church, so many demands, is just never easy, no matter how we look at it; in fact, it was incredibly hard and demanded lots of familial sacrifices throughout. But I know for sure, this part was required for me to grow and develop ever preparing for what I believe now to be my calling. It doesn’t look all that direct a path, it is, though. It is about serving others to reach their full potential.  Otherwise, I can’t hope to even come close to reaching my own.

 

I have been involved in SHRM for many years serving as past President and past Chair of the Board of Trustees for the DallasHR organization which has a membership of over 2000 HR leaders from throughout the DFW Metroplex.  Serving to support the volunteers in the training and development delivery to meet the needs throughout the State of Texas is definitely a highlight of my career!

 

Everyone has a unique creative artist inside of them, and mine surfaced through photography as I searched for additional meaning; the lifelong learning aspect of who I am.  Photography, creating images to tell a story, or at least surface a thought-provoking and engaging question, represents a powerful language that can say so much more than any words, phrases, or sentences I might be able to create!  It represents the expression of emotion coming from often we can’t know where. I am always drawn to the local documentary story, mostly to really “see” the beauty of everyday life; character, strength, legacy, expressive relationships, lessons learned & moments shared.

 

These moments shared, the relationships, the legacies, yes, the stories, represent life lived and what I passionately believe is lifelong learning.  Within this platform I want to find valuable ways to inspire, enrich, engage others to form a community where we all will embrace wholehearted living and the critical importance of relationships.  We will collectively demonstrate how reaching one’s own greatest potential can come most successfully through helping others to achieve their own, and practical actions to accomplish our greatest desires at the same time.  It’s a call to be genuine, to be self, and to dig deep inside introspectively for daily improvement with emphasis on the focus to be uniquely “YOU!”

 

 yes, a theme I call “Dare to Be You!”