A Passion For People

Goodberlet manages the entire ASC, which includes all the tutoring services, the writing lab, special needs and study skills development resources, all assessment and testing, study halls for the athletic department and all advising for freshman and transfer students.

“We basically work with every new student to make sure they have the resources that they need and that they have acclimated well to college life and that if there are gaps in their education, we can fill those,” Goodberlet said.

With everything she is involved with, Goodberlet’s day is usually full of tasks to accomplish.

“The hardest part of my job is not having enough time in the day to accomplish what I feel like I should,” Goodberlet said.

While Goodberlet has a passion for her work, she spent several years of her professional life in the communications field.

“My whole life, when I was a kid, I loved writing. I always thought about doing journalism and writing was pretty easy for me. But my Dad was an engineer and math was like second nature for me. So my whole high school career, my Dad was wanting me to go to engineering school,” Goodberlet recalled. “So I went and looked at a couple schools. My counselor at the time was very much encouraging me to do either engineering or finance, but coupled with the journalism and the writing, I always wanted to teach. No one really encouraged me to do that. Honestly, no one.”

So Goodberlet graduated from Northwest High School in Cedar Hill, Missouri, and enrolled in college at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, with a plan to major in business as she “didn’t want any part of engineering.”

Goodberlet earned a bachelor’s degree in communication theory and rhetoric and began working in marketing and advertising at Herman Marketing, the largest advertising specialty company in the world, which used to be based in St. Louis.

“I loved it, it was creative, I got to write copy, so I was able to use my writing skills, but I also wrote marketing plans and things like that. So I got to use my analytical skills and it was great,” Goodberlet said. “But it was not very conducive to having a family and it wasn’t very fulfilling to be honest. It was a great job and I met a lot of great people, I traveled all over, but the marketing and advertising, there was an emptiness.”

Her heart yearned to go back into the education field.

“So my husband encouraged me to go back to school, I went back to school, started teaching to get my education degree and my certification all at one time,” Goodberlet said.

After getting her master’s of education with a focus in reading specialty, certified elementary, middle school math and English from Fontbonne University, Goodberlet found a job working at Life Christian School, a private Christian school in St. Louis, where she taught two years and was then appointed to be the principal of the K-12 school.

“So I did that for a while and that was really my niche,” Goodberlet said.

It was during her time at Life Christian School that Goodberlet felt she was doing what God called her to do.

“I’ve only had two positions in all my years working, only two positions that I felt the Lord had appointed me or put me in. The first one was the principal position and the second one was this position (at MBU), to be honest,” Goodberlet said.

But when Life Christian School lost one of its main financial contributors, Goodberlet had to painfully lay off 22 teachers and ultimately the high school was forced to close, which led her back into the corporate world.

After finding a job at Monsanto working as director of the global company’s dairy division, Goodberlet had a yearning to go back into education.

“I missed teaching so bad, I just missed the education so bad, so I took a position at another private Christian school that was really really low pay and right after I took that position, another position opened up here that was part-time,” Goodberlet said. “I started working here part-time and then was just quickly promoted to where I am today.”

Goodberlet enjoys leading the Academic Success Center at MBU and helping students succeed.

“I like, first of all, that I can use the Word of God and I can use my faith to impact lives. Whether it’s my staff, other people, my colleagues, my peers on campus or if it’s students, if someone is going through something that I can pray with them without fear of any sort of retaliation — and encouragement comes through the word — I would say that’s the best thing about it,” Goodberlet said. “The other thing is that I’ve been allowed some freedom to really work toward goals for student success and I appreciate that.”

Goodberlet finds helping students academically to be the most rewarding part of her job.

“The most rewarding part, I guess, is really when a student either understands, like gets it, or when a student overcomes some challenge,” Goodberlet said.

And with an average of 900 students utilizing the Academic Success Center during any given school year, she has countless stories of students overcoming personal challenges.

“I had a student a couple weeks ago, I’m working, he comes in and says, ‘Is this where I go if I’m in crisis?’ And I said sure. He came in and we sat down and he was going through a lot of different things and it was really just hard for him to manage,” Goodberlet said. “So we kind of went through, walked through some of the details of what he was struggling with and I gave him a list of things, three things to work on over the weekend. I said, ‘Come back to me on Monday and let’s see what you’ve accomplished.’”

And this simple conversation set a positive process in motion.

“So we sort of baby-stepped our way to a solution, but toward the end of that next week, he came in and said that several of the things he was really concerned about, that he felt he had worked through, he had a much more positive outlook and things like that. Now all I did was listen to him and help him re-group,” Goodberlet said.

While she often helps students navigate the many challenges of college, the academic side of the Academic Success Center is certainly her primary focus, with all her tasks being Christ-centered.

“Another rewarding thing is when you see God work in a student’s behalf. We have a student here who came and he was very much underprepared. From day one last semester he was constantly in my face wanting to know what he could do and needed to do. He had many disadvantages and things that could hold him back. But he had such desire, he really did. He had such desire to learn and to do well at everything. And he would come in, literally, every day. And sometimes it was just to tell me, ‘Mrs. G, I love you,’ or, ‘Mrs. G, how are you doing today?’ And other days we had to talk through some tough things, but he ended up with a 3.7 (GPA) after the fall semester. And he earned every single part of that. But for me the most rewarding thing is seeing that kind of stuff.”

In addition, Goodberlet enjoys working with fellow staff members of the ASC and challenging them to do their best.

“She also loves to push you beyond what you believe you are capable of handling,” Erik Gustafson, data coordinator and student success advisor for the Academic Success Center, said in an email. “She loves to improve her staff every chance she gets.”

While Goodberlet has seen God work in the lives of students and her staff, she has also seen God work in her own life through several challenges and struggles she has faced.

“One of the challenges I’ve probably faced, this is early on when I was middle school, high school, that kind of thing, I was always trying to people please to the point of having that type A personality,” Goodberlet reflected. “I was the student that always asked for extra credit even though I didn’t need extra credit. So I think early on that was one of my greater challenges, that not being able to be comfortable with myself, that can be a challenge.”

“Another challenge is that I wish that I had gone with my gut, which I believe was the prompting of the Holy Spirit … to go into education at 20 rather than my early 30s, but then again I look back on that and I think, ‘Well, maybe I wouldn’t have been as effective of an instructor or educator had I done it early. God has a way of orchestrating things in His time.”

Goodberlet continued: “Another challenge is that I used to have anxiety and panic attacks. Praise God I don’t have them anymore, but I went through a season of that in my life and I didn’t want to tell anyone because I was embarrassed or whatever. But what it’s done is change my perspective on other people who are challenged with that. It’s almost sort of catapulted me into being very determined in whatever I feel like the Lord is leading me to.”