In even a very short conversation with the new Dean of MC Online and Academic Support at Montgomery College MD, it is immediately clear that Shinta Hernandez isn’t the type to consider what she can’t do.
Hernandez immigrated to the U.S. from Indonesia at the age of one, when her dad was accepted into graduate school at the University of Maryland. Her parents planned to stay five years and then go back to Indonesia, but mom and dad found jobs in the U.S. government, and Hernandez was raised in the culturally diverse neighborhoods of Washington D.C.’s Maryland suburbs.
It was there that she would get her first lesson in female empowerment as a student at the all-girls Holy Cross Academy in Kensington MD.
“I was surrounded by a sense of girl power,” said Hernandez. Laughing, she added that she hated the idea of being sent to an all-girls school as a child, but as an adult appreciates it as one of her most formative experiences. “Maybe it was the teachers, maybe it was my friends, or the faith piece,” she said, but Holy Cross is where she learned how to stand up for herself as a woman.
But despite the rich cultural fabric of the region, Hernandez said she still didn’t often see many people who looked like her. “I was always from the beginning the only Asian kid, and probably always the only Asian adult in the settings I was in, even the workplace,” she said. As a kid, she struggled with her own cultural identity, saying that she “was starting to internalize that I wasn’t Asian myself, because I was surrounded by great diversity, except Asian.”
These formative experiences, coupled with the unwavering support of her parents, helped Hernandez to see the world not as a place to fit in and find a seat at the table, but to take on head-first and make space for herself along the way.
“I’m not afraid to put myself out there, and I think it’s because of all these groups of people who have supported me,” she said. “I’m not afraid to have conversations when they need to happen. I’m not afraid to tackle opportunities and challenges when they arise, even if I fail. I’m not afraid to fail, because it means I tried something.”
“For a while, I did whatever my parents wanted to do. But I got to college and I said to them, ‘I don’t enjoy math, I don’t enjoy science,’” she said. She overcame her fear of telling her parents. I was scared to tell my parents, but I told my parents I don’t want to be pre-med.
She eventually made her way back to her childhood dream of working in education, after spending some time working in think tanks around D.C. She joined the faculty at Montgomery College as a part-time sociology instructor, and has worked her way up as department chair and dean of the virtual campus, before assuming the role of Dean of MC Online and Academic Support in July.
“I am within academic affairs, considered the highest-ranking Asian female,” said Hernandez. “When I started coming to [Montgomery College] to teach [17 years ago], I felt a sense of welcoming that I’d never felt before. Montgomery College is extremely diverse, [like] Montgomery County is extremely diverse,” she said. “I’m lucky to be, as an Asian female leader, the one who gets to pave that way.”
She has also served as director of MarylandOnline Leadership Institute, and president of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, among other leadership roles in higher education, and Hernandez said she is often the first Asian-American woman in many of the roles she holds.
Since being at Montgomery College, she has also founded the Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) task force. “They see me as the person who can help lead them, give them a voice, because so many of them have wanted opportunities similar to mine, but they don't know where to start,” she said. “People have empowered me and now I am grateful to know that I am empowering people.”
“So much of my life’s developments would not have happened had it not been the support of mentors and family,” she continued. “Professional mentors. My husband mentors me a lot too—he also works in higher education. A lot of times I go to him to lay out how the day was, and he sees things from a different angle. I am lucky that he’s in higher education too and is able to give me input.”
Still, Hernandez credits her parents, and especially her father for helping her to believe she could do anything. “He told me not to let anybody bring me down, not to let anybody tell me I can’t do something … because you’re a girl,” said Hernandez. “He said it in the context of work, in the context of school, in the context of relationships,” and he helped her to see that she was better than “any barriers or any thoughts, stereotypes, especially as an Asian-America female—female already has a lot of stereotypes, but then you put in the Asian-American piece and [people see you as] submissive, docile, fragile, not a leader.”
Hernandez and her husband also run a youth soccer academy, and she is excited that their children get to see first-hand their parents’ approaches to leadership in action. Her 11-year-old son is a soccer player in the academy and her 15-year-old daughter is an assistant coach. “We’re providing that platform for our kids to gain leadership skills, gain teamwork skills, gain that experience for the real world.”
“The skills I have and the skills he has—that leadership piece, in this case running a soccer club where we’re running our own entities within the greater institution … of course the hope is that maybe one day they can become leaders or they feel empowered in whatever space they’re in too,” she said.