Imagine having a job in which the hard part wasn’t getting up and going to it each day but actually leaving the workplace at the end of the day.

This is how Dr. Stephen Weber, president of San Diego State University, said he views his job.

“I’ve been having a great time,” Weber said of his first semester. “(My wife and I) have had a really wonderful and generous welcome here by the university community and by the San Diego region.”

The Daily Aztec caught up with Weber for an interview in spite of his busy daily schedule.

Not your typical 9 to 5 desk job

“I have to work at a pace that is ultimately not sustainable or healthy,” Weber said. However, the freshman president is not complaining.

“I like what I do,” Weber said. “Anthropologist Joseph Campbell said, ‘Follow your bliss.’ I believe in this, and I tell my sons this. I tell them to ‘find something you love and do it because if you do things you love, it won’t seem like work.'”

The proud husband and father of two said SDSU has been much more than he ever expected. Weber was chosen unanimously last December by the California State University Board of Trustees to be the new president of SDSU.

He left his position as interim provost of the State University of New York system in June to come to SDSU.

“I knew (SDSU) was a great university, but what I wasn’t able to do in New York was have an assessment of how strong the people are who make up the university community.”

Since coming here, he said he has learned that, “across the board, (the SDSU community is) very strong.”

Weber not only needs to get to know SDSU but he also needs to get acquainted with the San Diego community to keep lines of communication open between businesses and the university.

“A lot of my work has to do with getting to know people and organizations and how they work here in San Diego,” Weber said.

“It’s good that we do that. I’m eager to do that. We need to get to know others. We need those relationships.”

Weber described a typical day to The Aztec.

He had breakfast with business professionals from the Economic Development Corporation.

He then spent lunch getting acquainted with members of the industry advisory board of the SDSU Mathematics Engineering Science Achievement program and the Minority Engineering Program. That night he attended an Interfraternity Council reception.

“(My wife and I) have had stretches where we’ve been out on 10 nights in a row,” Weber added.

A strong president

Weber unfortunately faced an unexpected tragedy within the Engineering department when three professors were slain by a disgruntled student.

Dealing with the tragedy was already a challenge in itself. But add in the fact that Weber has only been in the position of president for a few weeks and the challenge is far greater.

Pieter Frick, dean of the College of Engineering, said Weber handled the tragedy wonderfully.

“No amount of training or experience can prepare someone for something like that,” Frick said. “I can honestly say that if it weren’t for Weber, I would have had a lot of trouble getting through the first few days.

“He came to see me immediately. He informed me that he was going to have a press conference and a public gathering in Montezuma Hall and I didn’t think it was a good idea.

“But he was right on both accounts. I cannot praise him highly enough. He has all the people instincts you need in a case like this.”

More than a thousand faculty, staff and students showed up at 1 p.m. in Montezuma Hall the day after the shooting with just two and a half hours notice. They were notified by e-mail and encouraged to tell their colleagues about the meeting.

Frick said it amazed him that Weber understood something about a campus that he had been at for only a few weeks that he had not been able to see over the year that he has been here.”

SDSU and San Diego: ‘Where the action is’

Associated Students President Guillermo Mayer said he applauds Weber’s efforts to “reach out to the community not just to the community in general but to groups that have a stake in higher education: the Asian community, the Latino community and the African-American community.

“I think Weber really values how diverse our state is and how diverse it will become, especially the San Diego region. He allows different groups to share their ideas. He sees that as a strength to our campus and California.”

Weber is even more enthusiastic about the San Diego region now than he was before he came here.

“I really think San Diego and SDSU are where the action is,” Weber said. “I had known this before I arrived but now I feel it even more. We can literally invent the university of the 21st century. SDSU can literally be the template for other universities across the country.”

He said SDSU has the ingredients necessary to succeed in the next century.

“We’ve got the urban setting,” Weber said. “We’ve got the diversity. We’ve got the emerging technologies. We’re on the threshold of Latin America in the Pacific basin.

“You want to go where the work you do is going to impact the future, and this is where it’s at.”

A resource and a teacher

“Teaching a class is a self-indulgence because that isn’t what I’ve been hired to do,” Weber said. He teaches a freshman seminar class every Thursday.

“The students in my class are full of all the normal questions, anxieties and hopes that are presumable for our student body,” he said. “I think I’m learning a whole lot more from them than they are from me.”

He said he also enjoys meeting with student leaders such as Mayer on a regular basis.

Mayer said he also enjoys meeting with Weber.

“He’s a great person to talk to,” Mayer said. “I meet with him every other week. Our discussions are very productive and helpful to the university.”

Mayer said he appreciates Weber’s efforts to make himself easily accessible to students, faculty and staff.

Weber has made many efforts to reach out for input from the campus, including attending the first Associated Students Council meeting of the semester and the first Faculty/Senate meeting. He also was on hand to meet with students via the A.S. mobile office.

“He is out there aggressively, in a positive way, searching for input from people,” Mayer said. “He doesn’t just let you know he’s available, he makes himself available.”

Mayer went on to say he was impressed with Weber’s presence at the Faculty/Senate’s first meeting of the year, in which the president shared his knowledge of past, present and future enrollment figures of full-time students at SDSU and within the CSU system.

Weber wrote some critical statistics on the board which he obtained from a book titled, “The Future of Public Undergraduate Education in California.”

“The first people he went to talk to about this were the faculty to get their input,” Mayer said.