Distinguished Employee Award

Distinguished Employee Award

BY DANA BENSON
Rice News Staff

Sue Friend can’t
think of any place she’d rather work than Rice’s
chemistry department. She loves her colleagues, and they
are quite fond of her as well.

In fact, Friend’s
co-workers think so highly of her that they nominated her
for Rice’s Distinguished Employee Award, and she was
recognized at a ceremony in September.

The award is
given by the human resources department on behalf of the
university to recognize employees who perform above and
beyond their job descriptions to the benefit of the Rice
community.

Friend, a senior
staff assistant who has worked in the chemistry department
for 14 years, said that she enjoys the department’s
pleasant and comfortable environment and the variety of
her work.

She sees her
job as enabling the professors she works with to have more
time to do the things they should be doing—teaching
and research—and less time working on paperwork.

“It’s
just wonderful to see the professors work,” she said.
“It amazes me how much they give of their time. I do
the stuff that lets them spend time on the things they need
to do with their research and in their classes.”

“Sue is
absolutely fabulous,” said Robert Curl, the Harry C.
and Olga Keith Wiess Professor of Natural Sciences. “She
is eager to do everything in her power to make me more effective
and my life easier. I can count on her to take a somewhat
unclear suggestion on my part of something that I want done
and do it.”

Curl continued, “I am not the only person Sue works for, but she is
so efficient that I feel like I have her working only for
me.”

Friend likes
her interaction with students as much as that with professors. “It renews my faith in today’s youth and keeps
me young,” she said, adding that she doesn’t have
the chance to be around students as much as in the past
because the professors she works with now mostly teach upper-level
courses.

That’s
just one of the many ways in which Friend’s job has
changed over the years. She first was hired as a word processor,
but her responsibilities have since changed dramatically.

“There
have been a lot of changes in the department,” she
said. “But it’s all good. It was good then, and
it’s good now.”

To nominate
someone for the Distinguished Employee Award, contact Colleen
Dutton, assistant human resources director, at (713) 348-4755.