The EdUp Experience

Episode 1: From Higher Education to EdUp - with Elvin Freytes and Dr. Joe Sallustio

Introduction:
You're listening to The EdUp Experience where we make education your business with hosts Elvin Freytes and Joe Sallustio. In this very first episode, you're going to learn about your hosts, how the idea of The EdUp Experience came to be, and some of the issues, topics and ideas that we're going to cover and why listening to The EdUp Experience is going to be key to upskilling and the idea of lifelong learning. We hope you enjoy this podcast. Subscribe, listen, and give us your feedback. With that, let's get to it.

Elvin: Welcome, everyone.

Joe: This is Elvin Freytes, and this is Joe Sallustio.

Elvin: And this is our first episode. And what we want to do is basically introduce ourselves. And I think I want to have Joe go first. Go, Joe. You're on.

Joe: All right. Well, you know, Elvin, the story goes is that you and I were able to connect a while back, and we got to talking about creating this amazing podcast called The EdUp Experience. Of course, I became very interested to be able to do this with you.

My background, as you know, is in higher education. I've been in higher education administration for almost the last 20 years, and I am originally from Syracuse, New York, then via Denver for about 17 years, and then now out in southern California. So every move I make, I get rid of snow along the way, which I know you can't do right now.

I have a passion for higher Ed. I have a passion for learning. Just got my doctorate degree last year, very, very late last year. Thank you, sir. And, you know, it was a rough, rough four years, but worth it in the end.

I just think there's a great opportunity out there for us to be able to chat about what's happening in higher ed. And I'm excited to be able to go on this journey with you and talk to some amazing people. And that's me. What about you, Alvin? Tell me about you.

Elvin: Yeah, absolutely. I have been in higher Ed also for about 20 years. And my journey started when I was a student at Northeastern University. I was that guy, that student that was like the leadership and the groups and all that good stuff. And so I met a mentor of mine there, and she said, you know, you're really good at this. You might want to think about this field called higher education, which I didn't know was a field.

I know we go and get paid to work with students, so I thought that was pretty cool. So she said, go to Columbia University, Teachers College. I have a really good program there. And she helped me out. I got in, and then Ed just took off.

I've been in higher ed ever since. I've worked at some really big schools: University of California, Berkeley, Michigan State, Boston University. I've worked at tiny schools, for-profit, nonprofit, private, public, you name it. So I have tons of experience in admissions, student services, recruitment.

Joe: You're all over the place.

Elvin: Financial aid. Yeah. I mean, you name it, you know, sweeping up the floor after an event. I got it all. I traveled all over and actually did a bit of consulting, too. I lived in China for about a year, trying to get Chinese students over here to the US. So I have experience with international students.

But I think, for me, what I want to talk about in this first episode is how we met. Like you said, we met on LinkedIn, and ever since I got on LinkedIn, I have found amazing connections. And then when I saw you, and then we got connected, and it just felt right. Then I started my own podcast, and I wanted you to be on my podcast, From Idea to Reality, the Magenta podcast.

Joe: And I think I was your first guest on that other podcast.

Elvin: Yeah, you were my first guest. That's awesome. And so you're my first guest, and I just thought we hit it off right away. You know, I felt like we were flowing, and the conversation was great. And even though we've never met, it felt like we've known each other for a long time.

Joe: Right.

Elvin: I said, you know, I really like this guy. And I was following you on LinkedIn, seeing your posts and seeing what you were up to and making sure we were staying in touch. And then I had this idea about an EdUp Experience, and I thought, Joe's the guy. Joe's the guy I want.

Just got his doctorate. Thanks, man. Yeah, of course, right away, you were the guy. I wanted to be involved. I want to work with this guy. I got to figure out how to work with this guy. This guy's amazing. Going places.

Because, again, the way you were in that first podcast interview, I was so impressed with your ambition and your drive, and I said, I want to be around this guy. I got to figure out. Okay, so I got you, and I said, hey, I have an idea, and I pitched it to you. And I love your response. I think I said to you, hey, I have an idea. Would you be interested? And you said, I don't care what it is as long as we do it. Let's do it.

Joe: Yeah, that's exactly what I said. Well, you know, and I felt the same way about you. And we've been collaborating for some time, and it's getting better and better.

What's most interesting for me about you is that you're very driven, you have a lot of creative ideas, and I feel really honored to be included that you reached out to me and said, hey, let's do this. And really, you had a great idea about starting a Higher Ed podcast. As you thought about it, because I think you probably looked at other higher ed podcasts out there, why did you think this was a great opportunity for us to start something like this?

Elvin: Well, it's interesting. I was doing some research, and I found out that a lot of the higher ed podcasts were basically being produced by marketing firms that were selling to the higher ed market. So I thought, you know what? We should do something because we work in higher ed. We've been working in higher Ed and we don't work for marketing firms, and we're not trying to sell to higher ed.

So I wanted to do something different, and I thought you would probably be interested. Yes, I am creative and I have different ideas. And shame on you, you accepted my crazy idea. But, hey, we're off on the journey and we've already recorded a few episodes, which folks will see after this one.

And I thought to myself, yeah, I think this is going to be unique. It's going to be different because of our experience, because the way we're coming at it. We're going to talk to a whole bunch of different people, not just in higher ed, which I thought was really cool that you said, hey, I have an idea. Why don't we talk about more education in general, K through twelve, and let's talk about EdTech and let's talk about lifelong learning.

And that's where we came up with the whole idea of the tagline: we make education your business and we want people to have a lifelong learning mindset.

Joe: And I think, to your point, Elvin, I think what The EdUp Experience is about, and what I think our listeners can expect from us is we are going to try to make higher ed not boring. And, you know, there are a lot of topics on teaching and learning that an average listener is going to get lost in and maybe tune out completely.

But our goal, I think, with The EdUp Experience is that no matter who we have on as a guest, the listener is going to be able to walk away learning something, taking away something, upskilling somehow. And it doesn't matter if it's a university president or if it's a person that started their own business in retail. In the end, the listener is going to be able take away something that they learned from this podcast.

Elvin: Yeah. And that's exactly what we want to have happen. That's our goal. That's why we're doing this. And I'm really excited. We got some other guests that we're trying to line up and it's looking really interesting, again, just folks who have a different perspective on how they see education in higher education as well.

And so it's very exciting and we just hope that you as the listener will support us and be there and level up. Like I said, that's why it's called EdUp. It's kind of education up your life, you know, so there's always room for learning more and continuous education and learning every day.

And hopefully we're inspiring you to do that. And I'm hoping that our audience would be pretty broad but mostly based on education and interested to hear what other folks have to say about the future of education, the trends that are going on there, the marketing trends, specifically what's going on with the squeeze that I like to call that's coming in.

Like Branden Busteed talks about, you know, like going to work to go to college, which folks will get to listen to. That's just a little preview. They'll get that in a future episode. But, you know, things like that. I think it's so important for this type of conversation, these topics to be discussed in this format. So I'm really excited that we're doing this.

Joe: Well, good. Well, as we move forward, we're very excited to bring you what we think are the dynamic parts of higher education and education in general.

And this is The EdUp Experience where we make education your business. Don't go away. You can click into the first, and this is the first, but the second and third episodes right away.

Outro: Hope you enjoyed that episode. To learn more about The EdUp Experience, please visit edupexperience.com. That's edupexperience all one word dot com. And please feel free to rate, review, subscribe and share this podcast. We really, really appreciate your support. You've been listening to The EdUp Experience where we make education your business with your hosts, Joe Sallustio and Elvin Freytes.