Office Hours

Giselle Kowalski:
Hi, everybody. My name's Giselle Kowalski, and I'm the digital marketing strategist here at Texas State University, and you are listening to Office Hours, and today I'm here with AnaBelle. AnaBelle, what's up?

AnaBelle Elliott:
Hey, Giselle, how are you?

Giselle Kowalski:
I'm good. So this whole interview was with Dr. Rodney Rohde, but unfortunately you were sick that day that we had to talk to him, so I got to talk to him.

AnaBelle Elliott:
I was, and that was actually so nice, that was so cool when you went instead, and I still got to edit it, so I got to hear everything, it was a super interesting episode. What's something that you learned from it, Giselle?

Giselle Kowalski:
Dr. Rodney Rohde talks a lot about working super hard to get where you are today, and he's one of those people that's so incredibly intelligent that you think things just come naturally to him—

AnaBelle Elliott:
Yeah.

Giselle Kowalski:
... but when you actually get to know him, it's all about every single step and every single morsel of work that he put in to get to where he is, and it was really inspiring—

AnaBelle Elliott:
Yeah.

Giselle Kowalski:
... and it made me want to push harder to do things that I really care about.

AnaBelle Elliott:
That's really cool. It sounded like you had already talked to him, or had already met him. Did you know him before this?

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah. In undergrad, I actually had to do a project in which I had to interview someone about something that was current and going on at the time, and it was 2020, and it was right towards... Maybe it was 2021, it was towards the tail end of all the crazy COVID stuff, and Dr. Rodney Rohde was super on top of that, so I had to interview him. I even did my first mini podcast with Dr. Rodney Rohde.

AnaBelle Elliott:
Whoa.

Giselle Kowalski:
So it's kind of crazy how full circle it's come, and he actually knows my uncle.

AnaBelle Elliott:
Wait, this is so crazy.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah.

AnaBelle Elliott:
I'm not happy I was sick, I would've loved to do the interview, but I actually think it was supposed to work out this way. That's crazy.

Giselle Kowalski:
Honestly, it felt very serendipitous, and I really enjoyed it—

AnaBelle Elliott:
Yeah.

Giselle Kowalski:
... so I'm glad you enjoyed it too,

AnaBelle Elliott:
And I think everyone else is going to really enjoy it.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah. So please enjoy this conversation between me and Dr. Rodney Rohde.
OK, so I know who you are, but to start us off, for those who don't know who you are, can you please tell us your name, what you do at Texas State, and why are you so important for us?

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Yeah, so my name is Rodney Rohde, I am the chair and Regents' Professor for the medical laboratory science program, which is in the College of Health Professions at Texas State. My background and training are primarily in infectious disease, clinical microbiology, and some other specialties, and so that's the core of who I am as far as my training and education, but teaching and mentoring and helping, not only faculty, but students, obviously, find their way is really a passion of mine. And so, that's really why I'm here and why I love Texas State.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, and it shows in what you do every single day too.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Thank you.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, of course. For an icebreaker, if you could have dinner with anybody, living or dead, who would it be and why?

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Wow, that's an interesting question, because there's the personal me that would say it would be interesting to meet with a variety of people, I don't know if I can narrow it down to one person. I have—

Giselle Kowalski:
Maybe give me top three.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
... a love of sports, so I'd love to go back and spend some time with Tom Landry, he's someone... I named my son Landry.

Giselle Kowalski:
Really.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
I'm a lifelong Cowboys fan, which has been difficult for the past 25 or 30 years. But from my professional background, I would love to sit and talk with someone like Louis Pasteur or Jonas Salk, people that really changed the face of health, through vaccination or through other really cutting-edge life-world-impactful types of things that I think the world forgets sometimes.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, I was going to say, those are not household names that I know of, so I have to go and do my research.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Louis Pasteur was the discoverer of the rabies vaccine—

Giselle Kowalski:
Oh.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
... which I did all my core work in for 10 years.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Salk was polio, which I did my master's work in. So just some historical giants in the realm of public health and medicine.

Giselle Kowalski:
Do you think that you're going to be one of those giants?

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
I think what I hope I'm remembered for is what we started off with, which is getting people to understand their potential, accurate science communication, which, as you know, I'm passionate about in the current world right now, and just an understanding of how important education is and how it can transform your entire life. I never dreamed I'd be a professor, I think I've mentioned that to you before, and so that role is a very important role, it's like being a father, in many cases, and a good colleague, so that you're trying to help people better themselves and make a place for themselves in the world.

Giselle Kowalski:
So I'm going to take it way back to the beginning.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
OK.

Giselle Kowalski:
What was it like where you grew up in Smithville? What was that like, was there anybody doing science on a deeper level like that?

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Yeah. So not early in my life, I didn't really have that understanding of other people or mentors in this area, other than the occasional teacher that encouraged me, I had some great teachers growing up. I'm a first generation college student, neither of my parents went to school, but they were amazing parents and hard workers, and I get all my drive and hard work and perseverance from them. My grandmother, believe it or not, Irene Pruce Rohde, went to school here, not for a college degree, but she came here and got a teaching certificate at the normal school, just an amazing woman. This is 1921, and a woman who came to San Marcos and got her teaching certificate, and she went back to where I grew up, near Paige, Texas, which is even smaller than Smithville, and taught in a one room schoolhouse up through the eighth grade. So that was her education, but for that time-

Giselle Kowalski:
That's pretty crazy.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
... pretty amazing.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
So she was a role model for me, and I really didn't appreciate that until later in life, like many of us do when we get to know our grandparents and things. But going through high school, I had the occasional, not always science teacher, but good teachers in general, that helped me see what a college education could do for me. And so, it was a little terrifying, because nobody had been in my family, and so it was really all trial and error for me, even to the point of the old school written applications to come to SWT at the time, and drive up here by myself, and the whole thing, the dorm, how do you get here, where do you go, who do you talk to, how do you pick your major? All—

Giselle Kowalski:
A lot of unanswered questions, yeah.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
... foreign to me, yeah, totally foreign. But backing up, what really helped in that high school early college timeframe was, in my junior and senior year, I took something called distributive education, which is where you worked and went to school, but I got a part-time job at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Research Center—

Giselle Kowalski:
Wow.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
... which is in the middle of a state park between Bastrop and Smithville, and they do cancer research there, the whole bit, it's just a massive complex. And so, as a sophomore, junior, and even in my senior year, I worked there after school for 20 hours a week, and neat story is I worked in receiving and shipping, and I would deliver laboratory supplies and animal models and things like that to all these amazing scientists with cool credentials behind their name. Again, first experience seeing all that.
And so, I did that for two or three years, and through that process, I learned that they had an internship opportunity for college students. It was just in the back of my mind, because I met all these college kids, never in my life thought I'd be doing it. And then, when I got to SWT one summer, I was... In fact, I was the first SWT student to do an internship where I got course credit and got paid to go do this. And so, I did two summers back home, so I'd go home and hang out with mom and dad for the summer, but I got to go in and work full time with amazing researchers—

Giselle Kowalski:
That's a gig.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
... in cancer research. It was a gig.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's a good gig.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
I've had some amazing, when I look backwards, some amazing points in time, that I would say, in hindsight, did open my eyes to these types of things, and that was the first time as a young person that I went, "Internships can absolutely change your life." And that mentor role that I do that I love so much, the most fun thing to do is to find first for my students, the first Mayo Clinic intern out of this program, the first to get into pharmacy school, or whatever the first is, so that is—

Giselle Kowalski:
That's the bread and butter, yeah.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
... yeah, that's an amazing feeling.

Giselle Kowalski:
That actually brings me up to what my next question was, which you touched on already, is, what was your first job? Was it that job that you had in high school?

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
It wasn't, but I'll tell you, the first jobs I had were absolutely instrumental to my success, and that's because my parents expected all of their kids, I have an older brother and a younger sister, to work, and I mean I had to buy my own car, buy my own stereo, so I had to have a job, because mom and dad just wouldn't hand out the cash. They provided us with clothing, shelter, all those things you have to have, and food, but all the extras were up to us. So I grew up on a farm, so to me, work was always work. I was hauling hay, the old school squarebills, I was feeding cattle and pigs, I was building barbed wire fence, really hard work, from really third, fourth grade up. As soon as I could do something, dad had us doing it.
And then, I went to work at a gas station in downtown Smithville when it was full service, it was Exxon, from eighth grade all the way through college, I would sometimes work there on the weekends when I'd go home. And so, I had literally two jobs in high school, I did the cancer center thing on the weekdays, and I worked on the weekends at the gas station. And I'm still doing two jobs, I work at Austin Community College, it's my 28th year as an adjunct. So to me, multiple jobs have been part of my life, my whole life, and that came from my parents.

Giselle Kowalski:
How many years of medical training did you have to have before you got to where you are today?

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
I think the short answer is that it is a path, it's a journey to get there, and so it's the very message I tell anyone who's thinking about whether it's medical school, which I didn't do. And so, your first goal is your undergraduate degree, and that's the starting point. But then in many of these professions, like you mentioned, let's take medical lab science, for example, in that senior year that we talked about, they are doing full on clinicals alongside massive course work, so it starts early, and they are busy and it's rigorous. And so, they're working 90 hours in a three-week span, on top of 15 or 16 hours of hard lecture laboratory courses for about six months, and so that's where it starts. And all of that's requirements to sit for your first credential. As a medical laboratory scientist, you have to put in the time on the clinical, for us, the bench, to be eligible to sit for that credential. So that's the first step.
And then, for me, and others like me, if you're going to end up where I'm at, you obviously need graduate education and more credentials, so for me, it was a master's degree in virology. After I worked at the Department of Health, and after the immersion there for a decade, when I came back to Texas State in 2002 as a brand new assistant professor, I knew within a few years that I needed a Ph.D. in academia, and in many parts of the research world, you need a doctorate, you need a Ph.D. or a medicine degree or something like that. So I went back in '06 and picked up my Ph.D. in the hybrid area of public health and adult learning, and it really put a holistic package together for me. I always tell people I'm a hybrid professional, because my first two degrees were hardcore, quantitative, wet lab-based, but my Ph.D. was really more qualitative, and so it's allowed me as a professional to holistically approach problems differently.

Giselle Kowalski:
Did you ever have a class that really stumped you? Because a lot of students are getting stumped in their science classes, but do you have one that sticks out, that you're just like, "Oh my God, I cannot get this for the life of me"?

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
It would be amazing to go through your educational pathway and not have that happen. I think we all run into those walls, and it's scary. I had one in undergraduate and I had one in my master's. In my undergrad, it was organic chemistry.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's always what I hear, everyone says that.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Which my students have to take, so I empathize with them.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
And sometimes I have to tell the 4-0 student that, "I know you don't want to hear this, but a lot of people will run into a course, and it might be your first B or your first C, and the job is to not let it defeat you, to keep your eye on the big picture." And I share my story, I made a C in organic chemistry, and it almost killed me for my ego, my academic ego, because I had all A's, and it's just frustrating when you're doing things well and you run into something that really causes you to struggle. But it does build resilience and perseverance, something we sorely need in the world. And so, that was that point, and I got through it.
But in my master's program, I took a course called Advanced Genetics, and you might know this name, I know the university will know the name, Ron Walter, his course. He came in, and it was a graduate course, so there was 10 or 12 of us, and I will never forget taking his first exam, and it was one of those first times where not only were you expected to know the book and the things that he was teaching us, but literature really was part of his world, that was his background, you had to understand current literature and research. And so, that course almost killed about eight of us, it was just unbelievably difficult. It was the application of what you knew in the literature to what we were learning, and that synthesis and critical thinking process, that's probably the hardest part of research is moving beyond what you're memorizing to applying it to a real world research design. So I struggled with that, but it made me a better scientist because it made me realize that it's more than memory.

Giselle Kowalski:
What has microbiology, molecular biology, all of the things you've studied with virology, what has all of that taught you about life? Which is funny to ask, because it's all the study of life.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Yeah, I think the biggest lesson from all of that is not only just the understanding of microbial life, just the world beyond what you see, and it has served me well, whether it was over the years of dealing with influenza pandemics, all the way up through COVID when we dealt with it here, it's understanding that the world around you is more than us, there's always microbial life that always adapt way faster than human beings, and so it's a challenge to stay on top of that. But the other piece, I think, that it's taught me is an appreciation for medicine and advances in public health, all the things I'm passionate about. And to your point of what I think you know I'm all about is trying to turn people on to that who are economics majors or who are custodians. It doesn't matter to me, if I can get people to think about that world with respect to how it impacts their health and each other, and understanding and appreciating science, then I've done my job.

Giselle Kowalski:
Your work literally changes lives, and you're very much in the public eye all the time. How do you stay sane and calm with all this pressure and attention that's constantly being put on you?

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Yeah, I appreciate that question. I get asked that quite a bit, especially since the pandemic. It was wild, it was wildly frustrating, and at times scary for everybody. It must be what an actor feels like when they're doing their best work, because I got an opportunity to share that expertise and impact lives. But to your point about how do you do it, I don't recommend it for the long haul, but like anything, my background really helped train me, because I'd been through some iterations of that at the Department of Health and at CDC where I'd been through anthrax.
When I answer this question, I think sometimes it's about how I've learned to juggle things in a very effective way, I've learned some really good lessons on how to persevere, but also how to handle multiple irons in the fire without losing my mind, even though at times it can be overwhelming, and I will tell that, because sometimes students and other people need to hear that, I'm overwhelmed. At times, I was doing five to seven interviews a day, for months, including weekends. And so, that, alongside my... I couldn't stop my efforts to teach and educate, and even some efforts at research, how do we make classrooms safe again? Remember, nobody knew anything, so it's easy to think it was, but it was putting together safety plans, and how do people live in dormitories?
It was one of the most challenging times of my professional life, but in some ways, it was the most rewarding. And I think if you talk to anyone who has any crazy hardships in life, going through it is hell, but getting through it is awesome.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, it's like that phrase I've heard, that it's like a kidney stone, it'll hurt when it passes, but it'll pass.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
What an analogy, yeah, absolutely, relief.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah. Well, this is more of a day in the life of Rodney Rohde question, but when you're getting ready for your next 24 hours, what's something that helps your outlook on what those next couple of things are going to happen? What helps you visualize your day?

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Yeah, so I'm showing Giselle right now what I have on my desk, so if we were on video, she would see that I have an ongoing to-do list.

Giselle Kowalski:
It's on a legal pad.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
I'm old school, on a legal pad—

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
... and I cross it off. I tell my students this all the time, "I know you guys live on your pads and your phones," and I do too—

Giselle Kowalski:
It's just a different pad.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
... I love my electronic calendar, it's a different pad, but I still look at this daily, and this sounds cliche, but I do have 24 hour week, and month, and sometimes six month out goals. This took me a while. We tell students and children this all the time, "What are your long-term goals?" That's hard to think about when you're 17 or maybe 21 or something. We all say things like, "Well, I want to be a doctor one day." But how do you get there? And so, that's something I think I've learned over my life, and my professional career, is that I can't fix two months from now, why worry about it? But I know it's coming, so what can I do today to take care of today's issues?
And so, that's how I live my life, both personally and professionally, and again, I'm going to go back to my parents here, I'm going to give my parents a lot of credit for this, and my wife, is that that's in my DNA. I have always been a planner, I've always been a get-up early, get the day started, I have a list. What's been the hardest for me, Giselle, since I became a chair, which happened in 2013, are the fires that come my way unexpectedly. That's a whole new topic.

Giselle Kowalski:
Being flexible.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Being flexible, and understanding that when a student comes through that door and they're having a personal issue, my paper doesn't matter. That's hard, because you're really responsible for some of those professional obligations. But I'm a professor first, and a father, and a husband, and a son, so I think that empathy and understanding of students is what, again, I love about the job, even though at times it's challenging when four people come through the door in one day, and it could be a faculty member, they're sick, how am I going to cover that lab? Something as simple as that.
And so, just working through that in my professional life in the last 10 years has been a learning experience, and sometimes it's painful, because you have your own personal goals, just like anybody else, I want to get this thing done today, or by Friday, and all of a sudden it's like, "Oh, now I know I'm going to have to work half the night because I've had to push my whole day."

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
It's part of being a professional, I think.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, and you can't prepare for everything. I think that's the hardest part of life for me as I'm growing up is not being able to prepare for the things that just happen. Like you're saying, someone walks in and just tells me... Life can change in an instant.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Absolutely.

Giselle Kowalski:
And that's something that's really hard for me to wrap my head around lately, because I've always lived everything so presently, and I feel like I still have that childlike mentality that it's like, "OK, I'll get through it." But now, there are so many other outside factors to life that I never really considered until they're—

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Until you see them.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
It's not your fault. You know my daughter's 27, we talk about her a lot, and she still tells me, "Dad, adulting sucks."

Giselle Kowalski:
It does.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
And we've said that to each other, it's the same for me, I'm 56, and so it's just about understanding how am I going to address that, and how do I get help? And sometimes you can't do it by yourself, and so, again, as you go through life, and as you perhaps have children one day or something like that, that's what I tell my kids is, "It's not that I'm good at this, it's that I've faced it more times than you—"

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
... "and I still mess it up."

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
At times, you just mess things up, but you've got to just keep doing it, because if you don't do it, it just gets worse.

Giselle Kowalski:
It's funny that you say that, that you're telling your kids that, because I also have to remember that my parents are doing things for the first time too.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Yeah.

Giselle Kowalski:
And that to me is a really hard concept to wrap my head around, because in my mind, they know everything.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Yeah, absolutely. I still talk to my parents, my dad's 82, mom's 77, and I've recently had this, I said it to both my parents and my wife, it's weird, because I'm in this stage now, we're empty nesters, and we went home for Christmas a couple of months ago, and we're sitting there, and I still feel like I'm going home as a kid. I'm 56 years old, and you're sitting there on the couch, and you're looking at your parents, and in many ways, I'm helping take care of them now for some things, but you never stop being a child in some ways. But it's weird when you suddenly realize that, "Oh, my kids are looking at me now the way I look at my parents, and I still need help." Like, "Dad, this tax issue that came up, have you ever seen this—"

Giselle Kowalski:
[Inaudible 00:21:22] advice.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
... "going down?" Right.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Yeah, exactly. So it's always important to ask, whether it's a professor or your parents, because experience matters.

Giselle Kowalski:
If you could tell your younger self something, what would it be? Maybe your college self that doesn't know that you're going to be this great behemoth in this medical lab science, what would you tell yourself?

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
I don't know if I'm a behemoth, but thank you. You're embarrassing me a little bit.

Giselle Kowalski:
Oh, sorry.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
It's hard to think that way, but I do appreciate the kind words. I think a couple of things. One is travel more.

Giselle Kowalski:
Really?

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
I didn't do a study abroad, my son did. My daughter's done much more, both of them have done way more travel, because I encouraged it, and we were able to. My parents didn't have the means financially to really get us out there to some of these opportunities. But there are ways, there's financial aid, there's some other ways to think about it. And again, being a first gen, I didn't make those early connections to take advantage of that. My first time on a plane was my honeymoon, I was 25 years old, and so I tell that to college students all the time, "If you can find a way, financially and time-wise, even an extra semester college isn't a horrible thing if you need to go for a summer to go study abroad or do something, or Study America, it is transformational." More people need to travel and more people need to stay in education, because from my standpoint, that changes the worldview of everybody. Americans especially, I think, need to do way more travel, and just look around and see what's going on.
I know we think of ourselves as a melting pot, but when you go live for three weeks, or stay in some places, you see all the blessings around you sometimes that you have in America, and you also see some things we don't have. We work a lot harder than a lot of... Everybody works hard, don't take that the wrong way. They appreciate time with family and vacation in Europe, for example, just a different model. They're not as 15 hour days every day of your life as we are. That's what I'm looking forward to in retirement is even more travel, so we do that. We pretty much try to go once a year now, but even more, making up for lost time.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's awesome.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Yeah.

Giselle Kowalski:
Well, those are all my questions, Dr. Rohde.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
OK.

Giselle Kowalski:
Thank you so much.

Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Thank you. Thank you so much. And eat ’em up, Cats. Go Bobcats.

Giselle Kowalski:
Go Bobcats.

AnaBelle Elliott:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Office Hours. We hope you enjoyed this conversation, and make sure to tune in next time to learn more about the experiences of our amazing Texas State faculty. Also, remember to follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, at TXST. This podcast is a production of the Division of Marketing and Communications at Texas State University. Podcasts appearing on the Texas State University Network represent the views of the host and the guest, not of Texas State University. Once again, I'm AnaBelle, and I'll see you next time.