Farewell tribute to Pat McCutcheon P’09
Pat, during your tenure as a member of our Admissions team, you allowed us to benefit from your many talents and skills as you helped to recruit and enroll the best students to Lafayette by showcasing for them and their family members the ways in which the College would offer them the higher education that they sought. A champion for the city of Easton, you also were effective in highlighting to visiting families the wonderful aspects of the community of which Lafayette is a part. As the wife of our director of athletics and the mother of a Lafayette student-athlete, you also used your insights about our athletic programs to inform our prospective students and their family members. Your talents made you a great ambassador for the College and for our community.
When you first joined the Lafayette Admissions team in 1998, you were a wonderful addition to our staff who helped to interview prospective students and welcomed the many families who visited our campus. You also used your talented writing skills to personalize each and every acceptance letter with information gleaned from the student’s essay and the activities that they wished to continue in college. Your ability to showcase what made each accepted student special helped us to attract the best and brightest to our campus.
We were fortunate to have you rejoin the Admissions Office in July 2007. For more than a decade, you effectively served our Admissions team in a number of ways. Your responsibilities grew as we witnessed how incredibly capable you are and your success in helping us reach our goals. Your professionalism set an aspirational standard for all of your colleagues. When we asked you to accept a new role in our recruiting efforts, we were confident that you would take it on with enthusiasm and a determination to be successful. We are so glad to have had a team player like you on our staff.
During the fall, when your Admissions colleagues were traveling, you stepped back into the role of interviewer and helped prospective students envision themselves here. When their applications were received, we could always count on you to evaluate and assess those you read with a keen eye and attention to finding students who would be welcomed members of the Lafayette community. You also played a very important role on our Merit Selection team. Because of your dedication and effective efforts, Lafayette was able to welcome a new class of students each year.
Your leadership of our senior interviewer program and our visitation team was very successful. Our senior interviewers considered you as a valuable mentor. Your commitment to them was obvious to everyone who witnessed your efforts. It is clear by the number of them who are still in touch with you that you played an important role in their lives.
Your colleagues also valued the professional, forthright, and insightful person you are. When they needed an honest answer, they could always count on you to give it to them. If they wanted to get a sense of where the office was at, they knew that they could get that from you. For someone who was in their first job, you were an inspiring role model about the importance of being on time, showing up ready to work, meeting deadlines, and being professional in front of students and families. Many of your colleagues, and even our senior interviewers, got their careers off to a good start with you as their role model.
Pat, please know that you are missed by your Lafayette colleagues. We hope that you enjoy a wonderful retirement.