Jan Conroy Saw What Others Missed

I came across Jan Conroy's last column for UC Davis Magazine again recently. He wrote it when he retired from the university in 2012. I had already been gone from UC Davis for years by then, but reading it again brought back a lot about someone who changed the direction of my life in ways I did not fully understand while they were happening.

Jan hired me to work at UC Davis when I was not the person most people would have pictured for that job.

I always believed I was capable of more. That wasn't something Jan had to discover for me. What was unusual was that Jan saw it too.

I didn't have a college degree. I had spent much of my working life in warehouses, doing contract work, buying and selling organic produce, working for small startups and doing systems administration. I was still taking internships in my thirties because I was trying to find my way further into technology and the web.

I also didn't exactly look like the typical university professional. I had a beard, a mohawk, body piercings and tattoos. I wasn't particularly good at dressing professionally because nobody had ever really taught me what that was supposed to look like. Outside of work, I was a flat track roller derby referee.

I was not the obvious candidate.

Jan didn't seem particularly concerned about any of that.

He paid attention to what I could do, how curious I was and how hard I would chase something I wanted to understand. When something interested me, I had a habit of diving into it until I figured it out. Jan recognized that there was something useful there when a lot of other people probably would have stopped at everything that didn't fit the expected picture.

And then he gave me a chance.

Taking that chance on me became one of the important turning points in my life. But Jan didn't just open the door and leave me to figure everything out myself. There were some pretty large gaps in what I knew, and one of the biggest was my writing.

My emails and self-reviews could be rough. Really rough. Some of the people around me were appalled by them. I had never learned the kind of professional and editorial writing that was expected in a university communications environment, and suddenly I was surrounded by people who had.

Jan could have treated that as proof that hiring me had been a mistake.

Instead, he helped me get better.

He brought Mitchell Benson in to work with me on a rubric and to help me understand things like AP style and the expectations around professional writing. Suzanne Rockwell spent many hours helping me with my writing too. They corrected me, explained things and expected me to improve.

That eventually pushed me back into night classes. I took more English and core curriculum courses in areas where I knew I needed to get better.

It wasn't always comfortable. They judged me sometimes. I'm pretty sure I gave them plenty to judge.

But they didn't leave me there.

They would point out where I was falling short and then help me climb a little higher. There is an enormous difference between telling someone they don't belong and telling them they need to improve because you expect that they can.

Jan never treated helping me as a handout. It was always a hand up.

He would give me an opportunity, put something difficult in front of me, introduce me to someone I could learn from, or give me enough room to discover what I was capable of doing on my own. He invested his time in me, but he also invested his reputation, which is something I don't think I appreciated enough when I was younger.

And he surrounded me with people who made me better.

I was much more shortsighted then. Jan tried in a lot of ways to help me grow professionally and personally, and I didn't always recognize what he was offering. I took some of those opportunities and missed others. There are things he tried to teach me that probably took another decade of work and life before I understood what he meant.

That may be one of the strange things about having a really good mentor: sometimes the lesson finally makes sense years after the person finished teaching it.

Jan spent most of his professional life at UC Davis. He arrived in Davis in the early 1970s, earned his design degree from UC Davis in 1977 and went on to spend 35 years working in design and communications for the university. He helped shape much of the university's visual identity, worked on UC Davis Magazine for decades and designed the UC Davis Medal.

That is an enormous body of work, and pieces of what Jan created are still part of the university today.

But those accomplishments are not the first things I remember when I think about him.

I remember someone who paid attention to people.

Jan could look at someone who had not followed the obvious path and see possibility instead of deficiency. He didn't seem especially interested in whether someone already looked like they belonged. He looked at what they might be capable of if somebody gave them the opportunity, guidance and sometimes a little correction along the way.

I was one of those people.

In his final column, Jan wrote about generations of students coming to UC Davis "to learn, to stretch and grow, and ultimately to contribute in their turn."

Reading that now, it sounds very much like Jan.

It also describes what he was trying to help me do better than I probably understood at the time. He wasn't trying to turn me into a version of himself or make me fit some conventional idea of what a professional was supposed to look like.

He was helping me become a better version of myself.

Years after I left UC Davis, Jan and I stayed in contact. That meant a lot to me, although I probably didn't tell him that enough either.

He wasn't simply a former boss I occasionally heard from. Somewhere along the way he had become a mentor and a friend, and he remained someone whose opinion mattered to me long after there was any professional reason for us to stay connected.

Jan died in a car accident in 2014 while driving home after spending Father's Day with his daughter and her family. He was 67.

I still remember learning that he was gone and having the awful realization that there would not be another conversation or another email. There are things I understand now that I wish I could tell him, and there are parts of my life I wish he had gotten to see.

I would like to tell him that the guy he took a chance on stayed curious.

I kept learning. I kept chasing things I did not completely understand until I understood them a little better. I kept working on the things I wasn't good at too.

I eventually built a career around many of the same instincts Jan recognized when he hired me. I became a senior engineer, then a staff engineer, and eventually found myself in situations where I was the person expected to give somebody else room to try something difficult.

That is probably where I understand Jan's influence most clearly now.

I have worked with engineers who weren't quite ready for something yet but were close enough that the right opportunity could help them become ready. I have learned to pay attention to curiosity, persistence and the person who keeps asking good questions instead of only looking at whether every box on a résumé has already been checked.

I have also learned that believing in someone doesn't mean pretending their weaknesses aren't there.

Sometimes mentoring somebody means telling them their writing needs work, their approach isn't working, or they need to go learn something they somehow managed to miss along the way.

Then you help them get there.

I don't always get those decisions right. But I know how much it matters when somebody looks past all of the reasons a person isn't the obvious choice and asks a different question:

What might this person be capable of?

Someone once asked that question about me.

After Jan died, UC Davis established the Jan Conroy Memorial Internship for Graphic Design. The university describes the internship as a way to make sure Jan's legacy of mentoring and helping others at UC Davis continues with future generations of students.

I can't think of a more appropriate way to remember him.

A person's work matters. Jan left an enormous amount of work behind at UC Davis, and his designs are part of the history and identity of the university.

But I think people may be the longer legacy.

There are things in my life that exist because Jan Conroy looked at someone who didn't resemble the conventional candidate and decided that what I might become mattered more than whether I already looked the part.

Mitchell, Suzanne and others helped make that possible too. They taught me things I genuinely needed to learn without constantly making me feel like I didn't belong there.

They made me a better professional.

More importantly, they helped make me a better man.

There are opportunities I have been able to give other people because Jan showed me what it looks like when someone gives you a hand up. Not by overlooking the places where you need to grow, but by believing you are worth the effort it takes to help you grow.

I am a better engineer because of Jan, but more importantly, I am a better man because I knew him.

I deeply miss my friend, and I hope that in my own turn I have made his investment in me worthwhile.

Read Jan Conroy's last column for UC Davis Magazine.

Read UC Davis' remembrance of Jan Conroy.

Learn about the Jan Conroy Memorial Internship for Graphic Design.