Emil Roberts, our New Yorker of the Month for January 2009

Ask a New Yorker: This is a great start for the New Yorker of the month profiles for 2009, interviewing Emil Roberts. Where am I, Emil?

Emil: This is the office of admission Services for The City University of New York located 43 West 42nd street in the bowels of the Grace building.

Ask a New Yorker: You’re on fire.

Emil: I’m a Leo (smiles). This is meek for me. And you’re Mr. Moore, Kennedy Moore, AskaNewYorker.com and it’s your interview. I’ll take direction.
(A potential client, student, customer walks in & Emil gives them an informative answer and guidance)

Emil: That was interesting…Again you’re at 42nd street between 5th and 6th Ave, & anybody is going to walk into that door. So, in order to have a service center that can cater to anybody walking in you need a person with levels of experience with people, levels of experience with beaucracy. You’re going to encounter a whole range, a myriad of bureaucratic problems. So you really can’t get flustered by who walks in your door and says to you some of the most ridiculous things you’ve ever heard in your life.

Ask a New Yorker: Would you like to expatiate on some of these things?

Emil: I don’t want to seem as though I’m snobbish or putting anybody down. I love the diversity of culture but I’m amazed at how many folks from Nigeria, let’s say, believe that you can just send your application anywhere. Or the folks from Bangladesh who really, really need to eat more meat, more protein, a lot more fish. There are a lot of folks who come with cultures who have not given them the equipment to deal with the level of New York. New York is supposed to be the 21st century city. Right? Its fast, it’s vicious sometimes. One thing about education I really always espouse is that it should be gentle.

Ask a New Yorker. You are on fire! Who are you?

Emil: My name is Emil Roberts. I’m manager of The Office of Admission Services Welcome Center located in the Grace building at 42nd street and 5th Ave, the cross roads of the universe. Here we welcome young people to come in and talk about their education, talk about their ideas about careers. But essentially they learn about The City University of New York.

Ask a New Yorker: How many schools are in the system?

Emil: There are seventeen undergraduate institutions. There are twenty three institutions totally. But this office deals with the undergraduate baccalaureate and associate degree levels of admissions and financial aid discussion and college selection.

Ask a New Yorker: Where did you go to college?

Emil: I’m a graduate of Herbert F Lehman College and The City College. For my bachelors degree I majored in history and education. I got my Masters from City College in education, adult and continuing education.

Ask a New Yorker: What do you think of our public schools?

Emil: They have improved tremendously over the years since Giuliani, but there is much more need in a large system. Again it is too large, it needs to be smaller and more specialized, and made more geared towards the emerging technologies. To make it all the things that public educational systems need to be takes a lot more people, a lot more time, and a lot more money, and that’s a discussion New Yorkers will always have about their blessed public educational system.

Ask a New Yorker: You’re sounding very professorial.

Emil:(laughing) Highly fluent and learnie...if that’s a word. Ha! Anyway, it has to do with new Americans seeking educational opportunities. The fact that they hit New York is what we were talking about. New York in and of itself is almost like a cultural abyss for some, unless you’re willing to give up a little of your boundaries as a new American and absorb new American ways. If you’re not willing to do that it makes it that much more difficult for you to function within the rat trap and racy kind of New York setting. Because often times cultures dictate a pace of dealing and often times people are too laid back and they miss deadlines galore. It can take them three, four, five years to get an application in. If you start correctly the process will eventually allow you to end correctly and in a relatively a short period of time.

Ask a New Yorker: What part of the city did you grow up?

Emil: I’m a New Yorker. I grew up on 146th Street and Convent Ave in the heart of Harlem.

Ask a New Yorker: In the day when the Bronx was burning?

Emil: Actually the Bronx started burning when I went away to college, The Bronx Community College. But that has to do with the perception that New York and America were going through the whole cultural awakening at the time, and people were walking away from buildings in the Bronx rather than actually destroying them. They were being destroyed because of neglect by the owners, rather than the people that lived in them. The Bronx Community College was an excellent experience because the thing is, when you get to a community college you really learn fundamentally that you are a technician in many ways before you become a professional. In many ways, academically, career-wise, you’re technically learning how to negotiate our society. And then you can apply some really good skills like learning how to bank properly, buy land, work successfully without getting fired from every job you take. Again, technically speaking, people need to learn to do that before they take on the responsibilities of being fathers, parents. So the community college structures that we have here do that for this generation that we’ve been admitting.

Ask a New Yorker: How would you like your picture taken?

Emil: I better be poised as an educator because that’s who will be measuring this article when they see it. It will show up in the University clippings. We have a person in the central office who goes through the entire NY press and national press and clips out any relevancies to the university vis-a-vis funding, programs, personalities, and that sort of thing. Hopefully I will see this again.

Ask a New Yorker: So you will have a real Heisman pose! On that note, let’s cut to the truly critical & important stuff, Giants or Jets fan?

Emil: Go Giants!! Good boys, those Jets, but they’re not Giants yet.

Ask a New Yorker: Thank you Emil!!

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