As executive officer of the Department of Psychology, Rosemary Chavoya helps Professor and Chair Peter Bentler steer the ship, with some 100 faculty, 47 staff, 150 graduate students and hundreds of undergraduates on board.

When she's not at work, she volunteers at the Santa Monica Public Library and St. Monica's Catholic Church, hones her ethnic culinary skills and still finds time to cheer at Bruin basketball games with her husband, Michael Williams, a high school teacher.

This year, she added yet another activity: the presidency of the campuswide UCLA Staff Assembly.

"I'm busy, and I'm lucky," said Chavoya. "I'm lucky that people let me do things."

Lucky, too, she said, to have spent much of her life at UCLA. One of five children from Oxnard, Calif., she was among the first in her family to attend college. Initially an English major at UCLA, she said, "All it took was one Spanish literature course to convince me that Spanish (her family's native language) was far more interesting to me."

She spent her junior year in Spain through the Education Abroad Program. Back on campus, she tutored inner-city schoolchildren and took a part-time job at the medical school, helping patients sort out their insurance benefits. "I learned a lot of counseling skills at that job," she recalled, skills that would later prove extremely useful.

After receiving her B.A. in Spanish in 1979, Chavoya took her first, fortuitous, full-time job as an assistant to the graduate student adviser at the Brain Research Institute.

"That was a real match that lit something wonderful for me," she said. "All of the things that had been so positive for me in being a student at UCLA suddenly were present again in my everyday life."

She enjoyed helping students so much that she became a student affairs officer at UCLA's EXPO Center, coordinating student internship programs in Washington, D.C., Sacramento and New York.

"I was meeting terrific, outstanding students who wanted to continue to learn --and I was part of that learning process," she said. "I realized that this is what I wanted: to influence the lives of students."

Before taking her current executive officer position five years ago, Chavoya was a student counselor in the psychology department, where she played such a significant role in strengthening that area that she was named director of student affairs.

Her involvement with Staff Assembly, Chavoya said, "is a very natural extension for me. I like the idea of assisting in someone's development."

While she oversees everything from the popular Chancellor's Town Hall to the Casino Night fund-raiser supporting staff scholarships, Chavoya is particularly interested in staff training and development.

"I have gone to the well of all the riches that UCLA has to offer for staff development. Now I want to assist in bringing these resources to others," she said.

"Most of all, I love meeting staff. Everyone has a different story about why they're here and what they're doing. I love hearing their stories."