For St. Augustine native Mark Bailey Jr., ‘08, it was a huge jump from his small hometown to Hollywood.

But that leap of faith has paid off for the alumnus, who is now a production assistant on Fox’s hit show “Glee” and working at Paramount Pictures.

“The Paramount Pictures lot is without a doubt the coolest lot in L.A. So many shows and movies shoot here: ‘The Doctors,’ ‘Dr. Phil,’ ‘Community’ and ‘Hung,’ just to name a few,” Bailey said. “You’ll be randomly walking around the lot and you’ll see Joel McHale (‘The Soup,’ ‘Community’) walk right by you, or you’ll see Dr. Travis Stork (‘The Doctors’) just hanging outside of the commissary.”

Bailey heard about the position from a close friend in the business and landed an interview. His daily responsibilities include the production and distribution of scripts, schedules and anything else the office might need on a given shift — which can be as long as 15 or 16 hours.

“No two days are ever the same, which is the biggest reason why I love my job as much as I do,” he said.

Bailey said he has always dreamed of moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the film industry.

“The fact that it’s all a reality now, really blows my mind,” he said. “I started working with ‘Glee’ in December of 2009.

Bailey, a communication major in the broadcast track, started in radio while still in college. He spent four years as on-air talent on WAPE 95.1 FM in Jacksonville.
But as graduation rolled around, he had to decide whether to pursue broadcasting in Jacksonville or to give Hollywood a shot.

“Turns out that it [leaving for Hollywood] was the best move I could have made,” he said.

Bailey is already having success in working with industry professionals he has long admired.

“One of my favorite shows back in high school and college was ‘Nip/Tuck,’” he said. “I really liked how edgy the creator, Ryan Murphy, was with his writing and the way he directed many of the episodes. Mr. Murphy is one of the creators of ‘Glee,’ and I must say, it’s very cool to see him work his magic.”

Bailey says he has grown professionally as well. Still, it’s hard to ignore his good fortune.

“What I’ve learned so far is this business can be a fickle one,” he said. “So to hop on a show that’s doing so well and has garnered so much attention — let’s just say that I thank my lucky stars every night before I go to bed.”

Mike Galluzzi, ’88, is in the business of space. And right now the space business is in a period of transition.

The current shuttle program is set to retire by September 2010, leaving a gap in human space transportation for at least a few years while the new “Constellation” program takes off. Constellation’s plans echo the heyday of the space program with exploration of the moon and eventually manned missions to Mars.

One of Galluzzi’s jobs as NASA’s supply chain manager for the Explorations Systems Mission Directorate is to help ease the transition by streamlining common processes and eliminating redundancies — even looking at ways to use the resources on the lunar surface as part of the interplanetary supply chain. He calls it “designing for sustainment.”

“When you look at us going to the moon and beyond, I like to say ‘Spares are not an option,’ ” he said. “We really have to be focused on what we call the ‘ilities,’ which is reliability, maintainability, supportability and more importantly, affordability, and from an agency perspective, accountability.”

With the significant time gap between human space flight programs, it is unknown whether the companies that supply components of the shuttle will still be producing the same products. Galluzzi says this is the key to his line of work. It’s not just about streamlining current business practices. It’s also about ensuring these same processes can be applied to future programs as well.

“What we’re [NASA’s] designing today may be obsolete when we get up to production,” he said. “So it’s my job to ensure a healthy supply base and ensure that we’re flexible and agile enough to allow the engineering community to design in the next evolution or innovative product.”

At the end of the day, space exploration is still a business. But because of its unique challenges — NASA is entering uncharted territory with the Constellation program — existing business models don’t always apply. Missions to the moon are no longer a week-long “camping trip.” The goal is in-depth, long-term space exploration, and that creates new supply chain dilemmas. Any delay in parts or supplies increases exponentially the moment you leave Earth. Galluzzi has invented software that could help to solve some of those problems.

Prime Supplier™ is a one-of-a-kind supply chain simulation software, which NASA is pursuing a patent on. He developed the software to look at the percentage of business NASA generates for its suppliers, which are shared with the Department of Defense and the aerospace industry as a whole, and to help NASA determine mutually beneficial systems, pooling of resources, etc.

Galluzzi says his philosophy comes from a basic economic concept he learned at Flagler: supply and demand.

“How do you adjust to changing economic and customer demands?” he said. “That is essentially the foundation that I built everything else on, from Prime Supplier, to simulation, to possibly ultimately influencing policy for the agency.”

In an industry where the average civilian worker is an engineer, Galluzzi gets to use his knowledge of business to influence processes that could be used for years to come. But that career path wasn’t always clear.

After graduating from Flagler on a baseball scholarship, Galluzzi was somewhat torn. Within the course of two weeks he had three possible career options: play baseball in Italy, become an Air Force pilot or work in the space industry. Three choices that, in his mind, were dreams come true.

Galluzzi says the decision to join Rockwell International Space Systems Division and work as a logistics engineer on the environmental control and life support system for the space shuttle seemed like the best chance for a long-term career.

“I had the most unique opportunities fall into my lap,” he said. “Then the offer from Rockwell came. So I thought it’s time for me to quit playing around and grow up.”

Galluzzi has “grown up” immersed in business, from that first job at Rockwell, to returning to school for more specialized training, to owning his own company. It’s all helped him understand those basic supply and demand principles even more. But business models aside, Galluzzi really believes in the objectives of space exploration.

“When you start seeing the next vehicle … you start saying ‘Wow, I want more of this. We’ve got to do more.’ When I first stepped into the lunar rover (LER), I thought, ‘I want more … we need to go to Mars.’ We need to do all of these things, and the timeline, from my personal standpoint, is too long. We need to become agile and come up with quicker design and contracting processes.”

That includes looking out for the types of scenarios that will eliminate situations like on Apollo 13 when NASA scientists literally had to find a way to fit a square peg into a round hole because parts weren’t interchangeable.

It’s undeniably a tall order to fill, but Galluzzi tries to stay focused on the big picture.

“There are times when you just stand back [and realize the magnitude of what you are doing],” he said, “but I try not to let that happen. I must stay focused and not be so lost in the fog of admiration that you lose touch with what’s important. Literally people can get hurt if you don’t focus.”

Of course, when you spend your days “seeing what some might consider science fiction become reality,” it’s hard not to live every day in awe of your surroundings.

“We really do work with rocket scientists,” he said.
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Photos by Scott Smith, ’04

Photo Gallery: SIFE

Whether teaching Nepalese refugees or training young employees on workplace ethics, the Flagler College Students In Free Enterprise team produced several unique projects this year that not only helped others, but also earned them a second national championship.

Students worked on approximately 20 projects that created economic opportunity by teaching concepts related to free market economics and other business issues. The projects paid off in May when Flagler took home first place at the 136-team SIFE USA National Competition in Philadelphia.

Among those projects was Suruwat, a success skills and financial literacy program designed for the roughly 6,000 Nepali refugees who were recently moved to Jacksonville, Fla. FCSIFE president Jessica Welch said Suruwat means “creating new beginnings” and the program is designed to help the refugees adjust to American culture.

“They had just spent the past 17 years living in refugee camps in primitive conditions and faced many challenges while adjusting to life in America,” said Sheila Acharya, an FCSIFE co-secretary whose family is originally from Nepal. “FCSIFE saw the struggles these people faced every day and decided to take the opportunity to share our knowledge and help them transition into this new country.”

FCSIFE has organized educational field trips to a bank and a grocery store, arranged weekly meetings and prepared seminars on topics like getting into college, house cleaning and learning English. Acharya said the friendships sparked by Suruwat have been educational for both the refugees and the Flagler students.

Another popular FCSIFE project was an ethics training video created for the Winmark Corp. The project recently earned FCSIFE the Jenzabar Foundation’s 2009 Leadership Award, which gives the team a $5,000 grant to develop and market ethics videos nationwide. The unique Winmark videos take a funny, informal approach to address topics such as theft, honesty and customer service.

“I think the videos were effective not only because we understood the problems faced by the franchise owners, but also because most of Winmark’s 9,000 employees are 16 to 25,” Welch said. “We created the videos with our interests in mind. We had to enjoy the video, or the employees wouldn’t.”

Donna DeLorenzo, who advises FCSIFE along with Barry Sand, said she was proud of the team’s progress and dedication: “Their projects were great and sincere and authentic … I think we take a very unique approach, and all the projects are extremely creative.”

“The team is really excited,” Welch said. “I think our projects will stand out at the World Cup for the same reason they did at nationals: We are personally invested in every project that we do.”

• The Flagler College chapter of the Society for Advancement of Management (SAM) took second place in the Case Team Competition at the organization’s 2009 International Business Conference.

• Recent graduates Nathan Edwards, ’08, and Aslyn Baringer, ’09, picked up two Associated Press Broadcasters’ College Contest awards and a Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award this spring. Their winning entries explored environmental issues. Ryan Day, ’08, also won an SPJ Mark of Excellence Award for a feature about homelessness that ran in the online edition of The Gargoyle.

• Flagler’s campus newspaper, The Gargoyle, earned honors from the Florida College Press Association’s 2008 Better Newspaper Contest. The publication received second place in the general news writing category.

• Graphic design students Chris Straehla and Luke Brodersen took first and third place at 2009 AIGA Portfolio Review in Jacksonville. Colleges throughout the region compete at the annual competition, and a panel of industry professionals selects the winning entries.

• Education major Kendra Eaton has been awarded one of 10 scholarships sponsored by the international Kappa Delta Pi organization.  The scholarship includes an all-expenses-paid international trip to promote global awareness and cultural sensitivity.

• Students Kincaid Schmidt and Katherine Wrisley recently received scholarships from Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest and most widely known academic honor society.

It’s hard to define “success” in the publishing world these days. As major publishing firms struggle to turn a profit, it’s more difficult than ever to get a traditional contract. Meanwhile, self-publishing companies – which let anyone print their work, for a fee – are rapidly expanding. But the books they publish sometimes reach just dozens of readers – as opposed to, say, a million.

Flagler Assistant Professor of English Liz Robbins is finding success somewhere in between those two extremes. Her first full-length book of poetry, “Hope, As The World Is A Scorpion Fish,” was published by small, Nebraska-based The Backwaters Press in 2008 and has sold more than 1,000 copies.

One of the poems, “Studio,” was recently selected by Garrison Keillor – the famed American author and radio personality best known for his Minnesota Public Radio show “A Prairie Home Companion” – for national radio broadcast on “The Writer’s Almanac.”

Robbins’ book also received praise from David Bottoms — poet laureate of Georgia and editor of the literary magazine “Five Points” — who describes Robbins’ poems as exploring with “unflinching courage the human need for love and meaning. They are born out of that mysterious and painful tension between the hopeful heart and the world it must confront.”

For Robbins, success has more to do with creating, improving and sharing her work than with fame or money. She nurtures a similar approach in her creative writing classes at Flagler.

“I knew I wanted to teach, and I knew if I wanted to teach writing, publishing in a traditional way would be connected to that,” she said. “But I think also there’s so much rejection in sending out your work … that you absolutely have to be driven and passionate about it.

“I think different poets have different reasons and have different ways of writing … For me, it’s always starting with a puzzle of one kind or another … I think that we could benefit collectively from more contemplative thinking and inwardness, reflection. And I think actually all of literature plays that role; whenever we read a short story or a poem, no matter what, we’re getting some insight into the human condition and seeing ourselves and the people we know reflected back to us.”

The “Scorpion Fish” collection is hardly Robbins’ first literary accomplishment; she has received the First Coast Writers’ Poetry Award, judged by Robert Bly, and has been nominated for Best New Poets and a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in “Calyx,” “The Chattahoochee Review,” “The National Poetry Review,” “Natural Bridge,” “Potomac Review,” “Puerto del Sol” and other literary journals.

Robbins has begun working on new projects since the publication of “Scorpion Fish.” Last summer, she received a research award from a Schultz Foundation grant given to Flagler. She used that award to produce roughly 20 poems about Hastings, a rural town near St. Augustine that’s known as “The Potato Capital of Florida.” Four of those poems are already on their way to publication in literary journals.

The award also allowed Robbins to do additional work with Kim Bradley, a Flagler visiting assistant professor of English who runs “Word Play,” after-school poetry classes for underprivileged youth at Hastings’ non-profit Organization of United Resources Center (OUR Center). Bradley mainly teaches elementary school children there. Robbins has assisted with those classes, run a teenage poetry workshop and helped Bradley produce and self-publish “Juice Up the True Say,” a collection of the “Word Play” students’ poetry.

Blog: Juice up the True Say

“Once I saw all the good that she [Bradley] was doing out there, I knew I wanted to get more involved,” Robbins said. “I was inspired by the kids, too, and I wanted to capture their experience to some degree [in my poetry.]”

Bradley and Robbins both said the main goal with the Hastings students is to “make writing fun” – a task that is made especially difficult when the children have already been forced to do writing “drills” and follow strict essay guidelines to
prepare for standardized tests at school.

“Poetry is such a hard sell,” Bradley said. “So I started to think about why I’m a writer and why I loved the written word as a child.”

Class activities range from playing with magnetic poetry to rapping. Their poetry prompts include giving personality to colors and responding to jazz or photography. Robbins said creative teaching and exposure to contemporary poetry helps the kids better relate to what they’re reading.

“They are so confident about words now,” Bradley said. “They have a command of the language that they didn’t have before. They know how to articulate feelings … I hope that having this ability to explore themselves like this, hopefully it will mean great things for some of them.”

Robbins said it was an invaluable experience to teach students of a variety of ages and socioeconomic backgrounds.

“Those built-in walls for self-protection as adults are not there yet,” she said. “That same lack of defensiveness comes into their writing … In some cases, their word combinations ending up being quite profound. I think even the title of the book, ‘Juice Up the True Say,’ is an example of that. It sort of has a nonsensical feel to it, but it absolutely makes sense … There is that lack of self-consciousness that’s refreshing and exhilarating to be around.”

The most difficult part of teaching in Hastings was seeing evidence of struggle in the children’s lives, Robbins said – and not being able to do much about it.

“It’s a cold awakening to see really young kids, first graders, having such an awareness about, say, a violent home life,” Robbins said. “And being able to speak about it with such frankness because it’s so ordinary to them.

“That’s disturbing … The heart of poetry is truth-telling, and some painful experiences are told.”

She added that a “kind of rawness” is something she seeks in all literature: “There has to be an element of risk, where I get the sense that the writer is revealing something that is information we could not get in any other way, in any other setting – things about the human heart, the nature of suffering, the nature
of relationships.”

As an instructor, Robbins said she feels privileged to learn about students’ personal lives and points of view through their creative writing – both at the OUR Center and at Flagler.

“I’ve taught at different universities,” she said. “The students at Flagler, as a group, tend to be compassionate, sweet, self-motivated, modest … Just getting to know them is very rewarding.”Robbins said she sometimes has difficulty making time for both teaching and writing, but she thinks the tasks complement each other.

“I read a statistic somewhere that there are like 200 writers in the United States who make a living off of their writing,” she said. “I don’t think there’s a single poet I know of that doesn’t also teach, and that’s including the ones at the top of the heap.

“But teaching writing helps you become a better writer … and the best teaching requires a profound creativity.”

Vincent Puma has done a lot for Flagler College over the last 36 years. He built the school’s composition program from scratch when he arrived in 1973, and he later established a peer writing center that’s grown from just two student tutors to more than 60.

Now Puma is one of the last professors from the early Flagler years to retire; he taught his last classes this spring. Before he headed out, Flagler Magazine asked him some questions about how the college has evolved over the years – and how he has changed with it.

FM: What did you enjoy most about teaching? Any favorite classes?
VP: My favorite course has always been the language studies course … I liked the science side of English because it was always changing … It [linguistics] has never stayed the same; I’ve never taught the course twice.

FM: What do you find so interesting about language studies?
VP: Linguistics is really a branch of psychology … It has very little to do with underlining nouns once and verbs twice and circling the prepositions…it has to do instead with trying to answer questions about what goes on inside somebody’s head when he or she is attempting to produce or comprehend language.

How do we explain the magic and the mystery of human language production and comprehension? I think that’s the most exciting part of it, and that’s the part the students grab on to … If I could pinpoint one characteristic of my teaching that I enjoyed and tried to engender, it was trying to awaken those new perspectives.

FM: What’s different about Flagler today? Has it changed a lot?
VP: In every way possible. I think the only thing that has not changed and that shouldn’t change is the sense of community. There’s that camaraderie.

The buildings were not nearly as impressive. You have to understand, where you’re sitting right now [Kenan Hall] was just simply a rat-infested, four-story warehouse until 1982…The only people with phones were the department chairs. When we moved into this building and actually saw phones, we felt graced…and the rats were gone.

The first writing center was in the gambling room in the fourth floor of Ponce Hall…We [the Gargoyle adviser and I] were the only people who had our offices up there. Every morning we’d go and make a cup of coffee and go sit out on the turrets and watch the sun rise…it was kind of cool and kind of dirty, but it was lovely at the same time.

FM: So, are you totally done with teaching?
VP: Don’t ask right now. [Laughs.] Job No. 1 is: Learn to do nothing. I have a difficult time on vacations, for example … I couldn’t just sit down and watch television. If I found myself watching a news program, all of a sudden I’d find myself listening to the various correspondents and the kind of power struggles the language indicated. And I would sit there and start taking notes.

The idea of having no plans and not having to think on something consciously, I’m looking forward to that and hoping it will be successful … Is that true six months from now? Tough to say.

FM: Why did you stay here for so long?
VP: Because my colleagues and I were building a school. Because we were on a mission … I probably started understanding that when the first wave of people began retiring, the first original people. Losing them, and the new people were coming in, trying to tell those new people what we had been through and what we had sacrificed, and done so willingly because we wanted the place to survive.

All that baloney about mission statements has nothing to do with what I’m talking about … When someone said we’re meeting at seven o’clock tonight, nobody even batted an eyelash. We stayed as long as we needed to.

FM: What are your thoughts now that you’re leaving?
VP: It’s bittersweet to be leaving in the sense that I see the original mission is accomplished, and in a sense that’s sad.

Flagler’s done a magnificent job of recruiting faculty – people who want to teach, people who care … I want to leave it [Flagler’s future] in their hands. I have every belief that this place is going to be someplace special. It just needs the right mix of people at the right time.

Associate Professor Patrick Moser and Assistant Professor Sara Pedigo, both painters, were picked for the exhibition that showcases the rich variety of artists living and working in the state from realism to abstraction. The museum calls the show “an overview of the innovative images, subject matter and mediums that characterize the work being created in the state today.”

“We are delighted that Jud Damon will be the new athletic director at Flagler,” said Flagler President William T. Abare Jr., Ed.D. “He has extensive experience in leading athletic programs at the college level and he brings to Flagler an impressive record of achievement in intercollegiate athletics and a strong commitment to academics that will serve our college well.”

He is excited about the new position and possibilities at Flagler.

“Flagler has a great tradition of success and I am looking forward to leading the program as it begins play in the Peach Belt Conference,” he said.

In his eight years at SCAD, Damon saw 96 teams appear in the postseason. His emphasis on student-athlete academic achievement led to more than 100 student-athletes earning Academic All-District, Academic All-America or Scholar-Athlete during Damon’s tenure.

In his stint at Georgia College, nine of 10 teams competed in NCAA postseason competition.

Damon will be the eighth athletic director at Flagler and follows Dave Barnett, who served 15 years as both athletic director and head baseball coach. Barnett is stepping down as athletic director to concentrate on his duties of coaching baseball.