By Hailey Heinz

For most students, Northeastern is a temporary stop on the road to a career. For Dirk Rodricks, however, that stop turned into his career.

Rodricks, now the assistant director of student center activities, was a graduate student at Northeastern, and graduated in 2004 with a degree in applied educational psychology.

While he was a student, he had a graduate assistantship in the student center, which he described as the graduate school equivalent of co-op. After two years, he said he decided he did not want to leave because he “fell in love with working with students in higher education” and was offered a job in his current position.

The former student-turned-employee is one of numerous Northeastern staff and faculty who are alumni of the university.

Rodricks said he stayed because he liked the environment of the university and the progress it was making.

“I got to Northeastern in 2002, and when I was about to graduate, it wasn’t the same Northeastern that it was when I got there, and that was the exciting thing,” Rodricks said. “I realized that 20 years down the line, my degree would be so much more valuable because of the direction Northeastern is taking.”

Rodricks said he thinks Northeastern is moving toward giving students a more valuable education and more for their money.

“At the end of the day, education is a business, and you can’t deny that … we’ve got to make students feel the kind of experience they’re having is worth the money they’re putting into this institution,” he said.

Unlike Rodricks, who was hired right after he graduated, Bob Gittens, vice president at the Office of Government Relations and Community Affairs, is a Northeastern alumnus who returned to his alma mater as an employee 25 years after he graduated.

Gittens graduated in 1978 from the Northeastern School of Law after first earning a bachelor’s degree in political science. He went on to a successful career working for the state of Massachusetts. He served as chief legal counsel to former Gov. Michael Dukakis, as well as chair of the Massachusetts Parole Board and chair of the Boston School Committee, among other positions.

Gittens applied his experience and now works as a liaison between Northeastern, local government officials and community organizations. Gittens said his experience as a student makes his job easier.

“Having been a student here, I understand the historical context of Northeastern and the surrounding area, which relates directly to what I’m doing now,” he said.

Over two decades after his graduation, he said he was drawn back to Northeastern by his personal ties to the university. “The experience I had, activities and co-op all helped shape my career. Being back at Northeastern while it shapes itself into a Top 100 university was an exciting prospect for me,” Gittens said.

Northeastern students deal with setbacks and complications every day, including the infamous NU Shuffle. Having gone through these experiences firsthand could come in handy to someone who deals with students’ problems and issues on a consistent basis — such as a staff member.

P. David Marshall, chair of the Communications Department who is active in hiring communications faculty, said he does not give Northeastern alumni any special consideration when hiring faculty, but thinks it would he helpful at a staff or administrative level.

“People who have background at Northeastern are much more able to handle the strange queries we get, and know the inner workings of the university,” Marshall said.

Angela Balaouras is a former student and Homecoming queen who now spends her days handling student queries. Balaouras is an administrative assistant in the Office of Student Affairs, having graduated from Northeastern in 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in political science.

After graduating, Balaouras went to work as a legislative aid at the State House. Part of her job was working with interns, and she said she enjoyed working with college students and talking to them. Based on that experience, she said she decided it was time for a career change and wanted to work in higher education as an administrator. Because Northeastern is her alma mater, she said it was the obvious choice.

Balaouras discovered a job opening at Northeastern in the student affairs office, and said it was just what she was looking for.

“This pretty much fit, because I would be exposed to student life,” she said.

Staff and administrators are not the only ones that ended up on campus for good. Many Northeastern professorial faculty members have “switched sides” from the back row of a lecture to the front of the classroom.

Sam Lotuff, an associate academic specialist in the Communications Department, earned a bachelor’s in communication studies at Northeastern in 1993, then went on to earn his Master’s degree in journalism, graduating in 1997. Lotuff worked at the media center in Snell Library while he was completing his graduate studies, and was later hired as a lecturer.

Lotuff teaches courses in digital editing and television and radio production, and said he tries to improve upon and build on his experiences as a student when teaching others.

“What I always try to do is implement more of a real-world experience. I look back and see that if I’d had that experience, it would have given me more skills,” he said.

Due to the expansion of the department and the availability of advanced technology, Lotuff said he is able to give students a richer experience than was necessarily possible for him to have.

“I received a fantastic education, but … I always want the students to get more out of it than I did,” he said. “It was a smaller department then, and there were only a few courses offered in television production. I want to take advantage of more of the current technology in teaching these courses.”

For Rodricks, the feeling of being around students who are currently traveling through the same college he did and working with them on a daily basis is one of the best things about the job.

“When you work with such great people and the environment is such a great place, you don’t grow any older, because everyone around you stays the same age.”