A liberal-arts education, its defenders say, broadens one's horizons. At its best, it instills a love of learning for its own sake that can be applied to tasks well beyond the subject studied.

Still, there are those who doubt the direct practical value of such an education. Wadiyah Ali, manager of voice-processing systems in Penn's telecommunications office, is a walking rebuttal to such skeptics.

A lifelong city resident ("West Philly born and raised, and proud of it," she said), Ali has always held a fascination for the cultures of the world. A scholarship she received to attend the Rosemont School of the Holy Child allowed her to pursue her interests. While at the school, she studied French and Spanish. After that, she majored in Italian at Rosemont College.

Her fluency in three languages--four, counting English--turned out to be a valuable asset when, not long after graduating in 1979, she went to work for Bell of Pennsylvania. "As an operator, I had to use the language skills I acquired in school and college," she explained. "We had customers constantly placing long-distance calls abroad, and there were always language barriers that had to be overcome. And since this was before Bell Atlantic and AT&T offered language assistance services, I was it" when an operator was needed to translate instructions.

While helping long-distance callers bridge the language gap, Ali developed a working knowledge of the telecommunications business, which, as with her other interests, she has continued to build on. From her job as an operator, she went on to other customer-service, sales and marketing posts at Bell and, after the breakup of the Bell System, in AT&T's international long-distance business. In 1991, she accepted her current position as the woman responsible for the care and feeding of the University's voice-mail system.

The opportunity to enhance her education was one of the reasons why Ali chose to work at Penn. "Penn attracted me because it's very international," she said, "and it offers courses in many different cultures."

At Penn, Ali continued her pursuit of knowledge in languages and art. As an art-history minor at Rosemont, Ali studied European art; at Penn, as a student in the Master of Liberal Arts program, she studied African art, a subject not available at Rosemont.

In addition to her focus on African art and its influence on modern African-American art--the subject of her capstone-project thesis--Ali also sampled other offerings from what she called "a smorgasbord of courses," including learning another language, Japanese, "purely out of interest."

Ali has successfully kept up with both her studies and the rapid growth of Penn's voice-processing system. When she joined Penn, she inherited a system that served 600 users; now, two systems provide messaging and automated information services to 6,000 campus customers. And, she added, "the number of people using voice mail continues to grow exponentially every year."

Ali is as enthusiastic about her work as she is about her studies. "Telecommunications is a cutting-edge industry--there's always something new, you're always learning," she said. For example, through her job, she has become familiar with the workings of the Internet and the World Wide Web.

Ali's job requires her to be an instructor as well as a student. "Our voice-processing system is feature-rich, and at first, a lot of people express fear about using it," she said, "but once they get used to it, just try to take it away from them and see what happens."

To help both old and new users get the most out of the system, Ali speaks to large and small groups on campus in order to "demystify" voice mail. She also produces an occasional newsletter, Message Waiting, which contains tips for using system features.

Ali stresses that she does none of this alone. On the job, she said, "I have mentors and people who help me a lot every day. Steve Murray, the vice president for business services, is a real mentor to me; he's very sagacious. And there's my day-to-day partner, Shelton Mercer, who allows me free access to his brain."

She is similarly appreciative of the faculty and College of General Studies staff who provided support and guidance during her MLA program. "Dr. Janet Theophano, the director of the program, made sure I had all my ducks in a row," she said, "and Lisa Ratmansky and Nancy Watterson, the instructors for my capstone project, helped me fine-tune and polish my writing."

Because of her educational background, Ali describes herself as "sort of bicultural, and proud of it." She has made sure that her two children will be similarly blessed, with the help of Penn's tuition benefits: Her son, Shannon, has just graduated from Dartmouth College, and her daughter, Persia, will graduate from Rosemont next month.

Even though she has now completed her MLA program, Ali is not through with her education. She is already registered for summer courses at Penn, and later this summer, she will further explore the links between African and African-American art through a study-abroad program in Egypt.

Return to Compass Features for May 21/28, 1996