Charles Street Chats: Q&A with Michelle Walters-Johnson
BEHIND THE CHAT
Order: iced mocha with oat milk
Location: Baby’s On Fire
Distance from campus: 0.2 miles
Michelle Walters-Johnson, senior associate director of graduate admission, came to The University of Baltimore as a prospective student who loved the location. She didn’t know it at the time, but that decision would link her to UBalt for a career of serving students. Walters-Johnson earned her B.S. in Psychology in 1998 and returned later to earn her MBA in 2016. She started working with the University’s Office of Admission and rose to senior graduate admission counselor and then senior associate director of graduate admission.
Q: Tell us about your introduction to The University of Baltimore, and what you love about the community.
A: My introduction goes back to like 1998-1999. I was actually working at the University of Maryland, down the street, and of course, you have wonderful tuition remission, so then I looked at all of the different options that we had, and I picked The University of Baltimore.
It was very convenient for me to get here. I got on the Light Rail after work and went to classes. I had a great undergrad experience, but I literally came in the backdoor and went to class, and then walked out the front door. I did talk to my friends, but I didn't hang out with anybody outside of the building. That was my first introduction.
Years later, when I did get a job at UBalt, I fell in love, seriously, because everybody was so welcoming.
Q: A common thread across your personal and professional experiences is your desire to instill confidence in others. Tell us about your journey to build your own self-esteem and why it matters to help others grow theirs.
A: I struggled a lot with my self-esteem growing up, and I don’t know why, it wasn’t like I had a traumatic childhood. In retrospect didn’t have like a lot of negative things happening to me, but I was always a negative person, and I was very shy. To this day, I consider myself an extroverted introvert. Fast forward to being an adult, now married, going through life and everything, I started losing my hair. I didn’t get diagnosed with alopecia until 2019, but I went through the alopecia process, or I discovered it rather around 2006. Going through the whole alopecia journey definitely can take away your self-esteem. As a woman, hair is a natural part of you. If you lose it, it can mess with you psychologically.
The funny thing is, for me, losing my hair wasn’t that devastating. I always wanted to wear wigs and hair pieces and stuff anyway. It’s just kind of like an excuse, right? So when I started to lose it, I took the time to experiment and I found myself. When I say I found myself, what I mean by that is, sure, people could compliment me and call me intelligent and whatever, but I didn’t feel it or believe it for myself. When I started experimenting with different styles and trying out different textures and colors—I want to be blonde today, let me try that out, or I want to have short hair, let me do that—I was able to be creative. This was my way to be creative, and it made me feel good.
Even before I started my business [Lady Behind the Wig] selling wigs, I was very creative in making wigs and doing different things. Then I realized there were other women out there who also needed help with wigs. People need to be walked through each step of something just because of their fear. Confidence is so important to me because so many things (like alopecia or other ailments) can affect our self-esteem, how we feel about ourselves, and how we show up in the world.
WATCH: Walters-Johnson offers advice for prospective students
Q: You’re a key part of our students’ enrollment process, getting them over the final hurdles they may face on their way through application and into a classroom. How does it feel to be in your position, knowing you're making this seemingly small, but definitely life changing impact on these students lives?
A: Until you asked me this question, I never really thought about it. When I sit and think about it, like, wow, there are people that I have met who are the first person in their whole family that’s ever gone to a university.
There was this one time when the University hosted a transfer decision day. With those events, we allowed students to bring in their transcripts and whatever remaining documents were missing, and then we gave them a decision that day. I’ll never forget, there was a young lady, she didn't have the best GPA, but it had been some time since she had been in college [since she was an undergraduate], but she had the right number of credits to be automatically admitted. I was so excited to be able to tell her she was admitted. I’ll never forget her, looking at me and saying, ‘Really? I’m actually admitted?’ and she burst into tears.
It feels so good to know that what I do impacts people. Because when you’re going back to school, that can affect how much money you’re going to make, which can affect you may be opening up a new door into a new area that you never thought you would be in before. Going to college can literally change the trajectory of one's life! I feel very privileged. That’s the word that comes to me: privileged, to be a part of the process.
What Charms Us
We end all of our Charles Street Chats with the same question: What do you love most about Baltimore? Here’s Michelle’s answer.
After growing up in Edmonton, Alberta, where I probably knew 100 Black people, it was really cool to move to Baltimore and experience all of the things that I've experienced. I have met some very prolific, some very smart, very intelligent women and men that are just awesome people here. Being part of a culture and seeing all the different arrays of people, especially the ones that are succeeding, gives me a very huge sense of pride.