Former College Student Athlete Comes Home to Teach at SDSU
Former College Student Athlete Comes Home to Teach at SDSU
Amy Randel
The life of a college professor can be a somewhat nomadic experience as SDSU management professor, Dr. Amy Randel can attest. Randel’s father was a professor of English literature at the University of California, San Diego and the family moved between England and San Diego County twice before she was even six years old.
When Randel was in first grade, her family returned to San Diego and that’s where she lived until the end of high school. After graduation, she moved to the East Coast to attend Brown University and play on the university’s volleyball team. It was there she met her future husband, Michael Gates, who was captain of the Brown men’s basketball team.
Following in Her Father’s Footsteps
After the two graduated from Brown, they settled in Washington D.C. for two years
before returning to San Diego where Randel worked at a local public relations firm.
While in that role, she realized she wanted something more – something “that involved
learning at a deep level every day, as well as a lot of variety,” she noted. Having
seen the trials and triumphs her father experienced as a professor, she felt confident
she wanted to follow his path and pursue a career in the field of academia.
In 1999, Randel graduated from the University of California, Irvine after earning her Ph.D. in management, with a specialization in the field of organizational behavior.* She scoured the country for faculty job openings targeting organizational behavior experts and she found one at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. That summer, Randel and Gates (now married) moved back to the east coast where Randel took her first academic job as an assistant professor at Wake Forest. In 2001, Gates enrolled at University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill to earn his Ph.D. in nursing.
In 2005, Gates finished his Ph.D. at UNC at Chapel Hill. Having both earned doctoral degrees, Gates and Randel wanted to find a more permanent place to live where they could both work at universities and raise their growing family.
That’s when Amy Randel got lucky.
Coming Home to San Diego
As a San Diego native, Randel was hoping either she or Gates could find an opening
in, or near, San Diego. Having grown up with a father who was a professor, she knew
that this might be difficult. “You can’t pinpoint a location to work when you’re in
the field of academia the way you can with other employment sectors, but when I scanned
the job placement listings in my field, I was surprised to see a job listed at San
Diego State that seemed written for me,” said Randel. “The timing for the organizational
behavior professor opening at SDSU was perfect.”
In the fall of 2005, Randel, her husband and their two young children headed west to San Diego, where she started teaching at the Fowler College of Business as a management professor. Her husband worked as a nursing professor at the University of San Diego for three years before he also joined SDSU as a nursing professor in 2008.
Both Randel and Gates still work at SDSU, where both have earned tenure and Gates has become the associate director of SDSU’s School of Nursing. In addition to her work at SDSU, Randel does community service both as an usher at the Old Globe Theatre in Balboa Park and with Father Joe’s Villages, where she makes meals for the homeless.
Randel also spends a good deal of her time watching her two children play collegiate sports– just like she and her husband did years before, though both her son and daughter play volleyball closer to home at Stanford University.
In fact, it’s Randel’s experience as a former college student-athlete that provided her with a unique opportunity. “I was approached to teach organizational behavior in SDSU’s Sports MBA program and I’ve now been teaching in the program for the past 12 years,” she said. “I’ve built up a network of former students in different facets of the sports industry and when the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl, my thoughts immediately turned to my two former students who work for the Chief’s organization!”
