Focus on Staff With Michele Wyan

Michele Wyan earned a bachelor of arts in English and comparative literature while working full time at UC. She graduated summa cum laude with a 3.914 GPA. Her high academic achievement is no surprise since she is also a member of Mensa, the high IQ society.

Born and raised in the Greater Cincinnati area, Michele lived in Dallas for 20 years. Prior to working at UC, she worked as the administrative assistant to the associate dean of academic affairs at Baylor University’s Louise Herrington School of Nursing in Dallas. Michele returned to Cincinnati in 2002 and joined UC in December of that year, first working for the department of dermatology. In 2006, she joined the department of ophthalmology as the assistant to the chairman.

What are your duties? 

"My duties include assisting the chairman (James Augsburger, MD) with correspondence, keeping his calendar, communicating information that needs to be sent to faculty and staff, coordinating departmental ARPT matters, coordinating Grand Rounds, arranging shadowing experiences for medical students enrolled in our electives and clerkship and many other administrative tasks.” 

What is your favorite part of the job?

"My favorite part of my job is interacting with people.” 

What is one word to describe your job and why?

"Versatile. This word describes my job because I do a lot of different tasks in the course of an average workday as opposed to doing one or two things over and over all day as I used to do when I worked in a bank many years ago.”

What do you like to do when you aren’t at work?

"When I’m not at work or spending time with my family and my two cats, I write. I’ve sold a novel and a couple of short stories including a ghost story that was published in the summer of 2011. I’ve also sold children’s puzzles and games to Highlights for Children and approximately 20 word search puzzles to monthly puzzle magazines. In addition to writing, my interests include violets and roses, genealogy, Sudoku and visiting historical sites.”

When did you first begin writing? When did you find out it was your passion?

"I first started writing at age 16 while taking a creative writing class in high school that required students to write and submit poems to magazines and journals. We had to show the editorial responses to our submissions to the teacher, a published poet and poetry editor at Writer’s Digest magazine. To my delight, I sold a few of my submissions and ended up selling around 18 poems between the ages of 16 and 18. I learned writing was my passion when I took that poetry class with John Engle at Princeton High School.”

What is your next writing project?

"I’m working on a prequel to Emma, Jane Austen’s classic romance novel. It’s an epistolary novel in the tradition of Austen’s Lady Susan, although it’s written in the form of a journal rather than a series of letters.”

How do you feel writing helps with your everyday duties?

"I feel my writing skills help quite a lot in the execution of my everyday duties since clear communication is essential in a chairman’s office. Good spelling and grammar help convey a tone of professionalism, too. I handle a lot of letters, emails, and telephone calls, and I always strive for clarity and succinctness in my business communications as well as in my fiction.”

Focus On highlights faculty, staff, students and researchers at the UC Academic Health Center. To suggest someone to be featured, please email uchealthnews@uc.edu.