At work, Rose Jones, an administrative aide who assists the executive director of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, is all business.
At home, life is a little more akin to the 1970s sitcom “The Brady Bunch.”
Jones, who remarried two years ago, now has six children – three adult children who recently finished college and three high school kids – after the two families combined.
“My job can take me in several different directions in one day, but the main goal is to make everybody happy and help them be more effective at their jobs,” she said.
That quote is supposed to apply to her job at the UI, but it may as well be used for her family life, too.
“It’s worked because the kids get along very, very well,” she said.
The at-home kids include a son, who is a senior, and two sophomore daughters – all of whom play several sports and are involved in a host of school activities.
“Right now it’s fairly all-encompassing and it keeps me busy,” she said. “It’s a very, very busy house – when you have one teen, you usually have a half-dozen. When we’re not at home, you can usually find us at a game somewhere.”
Two of her adult-age children have careers out of the country, another lives and owns a farm in Missouri. She said their visits involve a certain logistical sensibility that has become normal operating procedure amid the “turmoil” of the teens in the house.
“I make a lot of trips to the airport,” she said, “but we always find a way to make things work out.”
Jones has spent most of her life in the Rantoul area.
She has worked at the UI for 11 years, six at her current job.
Before the CIC position, she worked for the department of business administration in the College of Business and for a short time at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
In between the two UI stints she left to raise her children and managed a private legal office. She returned to the UI in 2006.
She said Beckman was new enough when she started that there were only two employees and that conversations were still centered on plans for the institute and its new building.
“It was an exciting time to be there,” she said.
She said the current job is positively challenging because it entails a variety of responsibilities that go along with planning high-profile events. That’s something that happens a lot at the CIC, considering a majority of its members must travel every time there’s a meeting. The CIC is a consortium of the Big Ten universities and the University of Chicago,
“Our office is not like a lot of other university offices,” she said. “A lot of our work is done outside of the campus.”
She said the two skills most valuable in her work are communication and an ability to adapt to most any circumstance.
The recent Global University Summit, hosted by the Urbana campus in Chicago, is a good example of how her job takes her in different directions.
The summit included education and political leaders from 35 nations – and an almost never-ending flow of detail work setting up meetings, and completing travel and lodging plans.
“It was a very busy time,” she said. “That’s what happens in this office – things come up really fast and they have to be put together just as quickly. I have to be well-organized and be able to change directions in a second.”
And when she’s not at work, at a game, at the airport, or making pizza for an entourage of her children’s friends, you may find Jones at the family farm or Hardy’s Reindeer Ranch in Rantoul, which is owned by her brother.
In fact, the entire family has spent time working at the ranch.
“In the early days of the ranch, we were are all enlisted to help from time to time – but it’s something we really enjoyed,” she said. “I grew up on a dairy farm right down the road so it’s not that far out of my element.”
