Meet Nicole Virelles, Senior Departmental Liaison

In Nicole's first role with WCM in HR, she hired nearly 600 people - and you may have been one of them! From there she made her way to the PMO, and then into her current role as a Sr. Liaison, where she serves as an indispensible conduit between clinical and research staff, and the ITS department.

In your own words, what is your current role in ITS? 

As a Liaison, I try to understand the needs of the faculty, staff, and leaders in the departments that I support. I support clinical and administrative units, and the tri-org, which is NewYork-Presbyterian, Columbia, and really sometimes anything that comes up – like if people are moving to Rockefeller University, we’ll help figure out how to move them to Rockefeller. I try to translate what faculty or other users need into what ITS can offer. Maybe it's a service that already exists, or maybe I need to advocate for a service that doesn't exist, and we need to explore what we need to do to get it there. So, I also serve as their advocate. If a process isn't working, I try to bring it back and communicate that within the ITS department to find a path forward.  

I also herd a lot of cats. There could be a day that’s all escalations, and I'm trying to herd the right people in the same room to figure it out. The days are very varied.   

Two of the cats that Nicole herds daily (but for fun), Figaro and Juniper

That's a fantastic description of what it is to be a Liaison. What did you do before you joined ITS? 

So I joined Cornell almost 12  years ago, it will be 12 years in June. Nine of those years have been with ITS, and the first 3 were with HR. In ITS, I started in the PMO, and then I became a Liaison six years ago.  

After working for the PMO for a couple of years, what appealed to you about the Liaison role? 

One thing I noticed while I was a Project Manager was that I had a really good understanding of what was going on in ITS. I was on a lot of infrastructure and security projects. I was on the project to move Epic to the cloud. But it was all very internal, and I didn't have a great understanding of what the business was actually doing. I wondered “how can I get myself more involved with what the rest of the college is doing and how we integrate into that work?” That's really what appealed to me. Having more interaction outside of ITS. Now I feel like I have a really good understanding of what the college is up to.   

When you were working with HR, were you recruiting primarily for ITS?  

Yes, before I came to Cornell, I was an IT recruiter for a staffing agency working primarily on IT jobs within JP Morgan Chase, and did a lot in the telecom world. Like the people who climb the poles to fix telephone poles! My primary clients at that time were JP Morgan, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Frontier Communications. 

When I joined Weill Cornell in HR I became their IT recruiter, because nobody had any experience doing any IT recruitments. I remember when I joined everyone was like “thank God we have no idea what this department wants!” 

I feel like on my third day they marched me into the old Hyperlink conference room on the 3rd floor of 575 Lex with every IT manager at the time, and said: “This is Nicole. She's going to solve all your problems.” 

And then you did solve all the problems! 

I mean, I did a pretty good job. I did a lot of hiring. I hired a lot of people in this department. Now they're all just my colleagues. But I did a ton of recruitment. I also was the recruiter for all the financial jobs, all the billing jobs, all the engineering and maintenance jobs. In the two or so years I was there, I had like 500 or 600 hires in that time. It was big. 

One of my best working relationships in ITS was with Arun [former PMO Manager], because they had a lot of positions that they were hiring for. So I did a lot of hiring for the PMO, and when I was ready to move on, I wondered if my skill set could lean into project management. So I came downstairs and had a cup of coffee with Arun, and was like hey what’s this all about? And nine years later, here we are.  I recruited myself into the job.  

Nicole with PMO colleagues Alexandra Smith, Carly Nusbaum, and Lavet Velez at a project management conference in San Francisco 

What is your favorite part about your job?  

I like the problem solving piece of it. When a faculty member or researcher or staff come to me and they say, “we have this problem, and it's preventing us from doing our jobs efficiently,” I really like that moment where I can listen to what they need and translate it into what I think they're saying from our perspective. And then go back to them and say, “let's develop this further into a requirement that I can take back to ITS and figure out, is it a request, is it a project? How are we going to get this for you?” But it’s really that moment of them feeling like I’ve heard them and I understand them, so that they can go back to doing their job.  

I think it’s really important to latch onto those moments of gratitude, where you can see the relief on a person’s face that someone is taking care of their problem. 

What was your favorite project that you worked on in the last year or so? 

There are so many. The Pediatrics department had two new Chiefs come in this year. The Chief of Pediatric Cardiology, and the Chief of Pediatric Neurology were both hired. One started February 1st and one started March 1st, and they both came from other institutions, and they both brought labs with them. So, we had to figure out: how do we get all the data over here? What do they need in their lab? How do we set it up? How are they going to access everything? And also, what do they need in general? Sometimes I’m answering questions that aren’t really IT-related. Like, hey I’m moving from Texas to New York, is it cold? I’m their contact person.  

But I've been lucky. The two faculty are both very nice and excited to be here, and very grateful for the help that we've given them, so I definitely feel like I've made an impact on their first interaction with ITS. You really do want a new Chief of a division to come in and feel welcome and cared for after they’ve made this huge move. 

That’s very complicated. I can't really imagine them being able to do a move like that without someone like you as a dedicated contact person. 

Luckily this is through Pediatrics, and we have a really good relationship with them.  

I also do a lot of work with the tri-org. There are a lot of calls about how to improve support between Cornell and NYP.  One of my biggest groups is the Access to Care call center, which is a division of the PO. They have a complicated setup because they're on WCM hardware, but all the applications are NYP. I find myself in the middle of that a lot. Well, the Liaisons are almost always in the middle.  

That’s kind of the definition of your job – you're in the middle.  

Yea! We’re always trying to figure out - how do we make this happen for you? That’s another thing about my job I’d say is my favorite.  

Do you think your background in the PMO helps you do this job successfully?  

I think my background in the PMO helps me to take something like lab onboarding and be able to say, “Well, this has to happen. What's the precursor? What’s the risk if that doesn't happen?” People seem to really respond well to that. They get a feeling that it’s going to be taken care of. And a lot of it is getting the right people in the room and asking the right questions. You cannot be a liaison if you can't do that. 

Who are some women you admire and why? 

My Grandmother on my Dad’s side, and my Mom. When I was in elementary school, I remember doing a project that was to make a poster about your hero, and I did mine on my Grandmother. My Grandmother and my Mom have the qualities of resilience and confidence. They never apologize for who they are, and they never back down from what they want. Even though they lived in times where they were forced to. My Grandmother fled Cuba in 1966 with four boys aged 9 months to my Dad, who was the oldest at age 11. And she outlived four of her six children. Two of her children passed away in Cuba before she even got here. She was the kind of person who only had kindness for other people, even though she had been through so much.  

There's a Spanish saying: No hay mal que por bien no venga (there is also a great song of the same title by Gloria Estefan). 

It translates roughly to: there's nothing bad through which good doesn't come. She had so much joy. She was just, love, and she was a joy to be around. I've always been like “how can I carry that on?”  

And when I think about my Mom - she set me up for success. She was very much like “you do what you have to do, so that you can do what you want to do.” And if that means working hard, then we work hard. She always wanted to be a lawyer, but she wasn't allowed to go. She got into law school in the early 70s, but her parents made her go to secretarial school instead. So, I grew up knowing that whatever I wanted to do, I had her support. But I had to open the doors myself. You can do so much more when you have that safety net. She’s resilient and brave.  

I think about it all the time... how my Dad came from Cuba and he met my Mom on a block in Brooklyn. What are the chances? 

Nicole with her Grandmother and Mother

How did they meet?  

I kind of love this story. My Mom’s family is from Ireland. And my Dad was riding his bike one day, and he spoke almost no English at all, and he had never seen a strawberry blonde girl before.  And my Mom was like, holy crap, he's so cute. It took them a million years to get together, but they did. 

Wow. Have you seen the movie Brooklyn?  

I watch it multiple times a year! It reminds me of what my Mom's grandmother's experience would have been. They were from Northern Ireland and she came over alone in steerage on a ship.  

Celebrating St. Patrick's Day with her brother, husband Ed, parents, and nieces 

A rainy day in Florence, Italy with her husband, Ed

Moving on from movies to books. I know you're a big reader. What was your favorite book you read last year? 

One is a book of essays by Samantha Irby called We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. I stayed up late reading so many nights. They are the funniest essays I’ve ever read. And my other favorite book was actually recommended to me by Angela Workoff because she's friends with the author. It’s called Beyond That, the Sea by Laura Spence Ash. It's World War II historical fiction. But not the typical plot line of "set in Paris and they're spies." A girl is sent over to the US so that she doesn't have to be part of the war. And she is with this host family in the US but all her family still back in England. So it’s her journey. It's also a love story.