Turtle-ing and Sharks

Lori Heath Sundberg

My adult children have developed the word “turtle-ing” to describe Mom. It comes from a random Facebook quiz (which animal are you most like?). I don’t usually do these quizzes – really!! – but my memory is they baited me into it, the way that children do. I had a brief hope of encountering my spirit animal via BuzzFeed, a romantic vision placing me as a snow leopard or maybe a raven.

Turtle.

But what does it mean that I am a turtle, yet was so comfortable opening the first-year production doing a dance number that involved throwing off clothes? That was enormously fun! And I was in a musical pretending to eat squid, creating a character to roast my fellow PMPers. I was a member of the hug club. I helped design T-shirts for a pig roast. We created an advertising campaign for the city of Oakland for a class project.

In Professor Meier’s class I found the “power of the podium” in desperation one morning after two hours of sleep, realizing that although our group project was not good and the class had turned into a shark feeding frenzy during our presentation, I had the ability to control class by shutting off speakers. And we were all still friends afterwards. (I knew you all couldn’t stop the shark thing, it was just in your nature and you temporarily lost control.) I have never been afraid of public speaking since.

I found a calling in cost accounting class. I remember a moment of realization that I was so into that class, and everyone else seemed to hate it. And for the GSB women that worked on the outsourcing circuit-board project with me, I really did end up doing cost modelling and became an Excel fiend.

I found a niche in the PMP group. Even though we did not complete the curriculum, the existence of the program provided us with a spiritual home. Many of you non-PMPers generously funded my summer internship in DC from your more lucrative jobs. There was never a hint of anything but inclusion and support from my classmates.

And yet, I have not stayed in touch with any of you from the GSB. I’ve forgotten names and forgotten specifics about classes. I put it down to turtle-ing and I have to find the fault in myself. Part of it is a natural inclination to the quiet, part is being in the Midwest which feels somehow more foreign than Phuket, and part is always doubting whether I have accomplished anything worth discussing.

Here is my quiet story from the prairie.

I married the volleyball player, economics PhD student that some of you met and followed him out to Illinois. Then a few years later I followed even more closely and took a position at the same college where he teaches, a residential liberal arts college ranked somewhere in the top 100 of its kind by a magazine that shall-not-be-named. Twenty-eight years later I am still there, and it appears that my mission in life has become finding financial balance for this small community. Starting as controller and taking a detour through institutional research, I became the CFO eventually, but my primary contribution remains balancing the budget over multiple years with the help of extensive Excel modelling.

I named where I worked once to a Stanford professor, and his words “it’s been heard of” (meaning he probably had not) have never left me. In the world of rankings and elite colleges, where money buys a lot, Lake Forest College has a low profile even in the Chicago area where it is located. My HP 12C has enough digits for our endowment (8 plus 2 decimal places). Judging the value-added for a particular college, when so much of success is based on qualities that students bring in with them, is very difficult. However, this past ranking cycle we were #7 for social mobility for national liberal arts colleges; that is a measure that ought to have extreme bragging rights! We are a caring and inclusive community of faculty, staff and students and it has been a great place to make a difference.

I remain conflicted and uncomfortable with my Stanford degree and my employment. But as I look back at my GSB experience I only have good things to remember. There was no elitism in our program, or none that I remember. There was no reason to be afraid that you would all turn out to be sharks. And anyway, I had stood up to you in class and made it through, and you supported me. Now it is my chance to do this for someone else.

A few personal notes.

We live in a house we had built a few years ago in Grayslake, Illinois, with five acres of hay and five acres mostly restored into prairie plants. We are on the edge of an eighty-acre prairie reserve and surrounded on the other side by forest preserve land. During this stay-at-home period, husband Jeff has been teaching me to identify birdsong every morning before I start my full day of zoom meetings. Most days we can get up to twenty species. I have a fiddle set up in the other bedroom, opposite the bedroom where my current office is located. I wish that it would tempt me more to get away from my computer.

Our daughters are grown, healthy, employed, and irritating enough as they should be in their twenties. Our children will be the ones to hold us all accountable and reflect back to us the persons that we are, not the ones we think we should be.