From being a social worker in Florida, to completely upending her life and moving across the country with no definitive prospects, Diablo Valley College’s new San Ramon Campus dean, Catherine Franco, has come a long way to make an impact on DVC students.

“I never thought I would go into higher education,” said Franco, “until I just kind of fell into it, and once I fell into it, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I love working here.’”

After 18 years working at DVC, this year Franco takes on a new responsibility as dean of SRC following the retirement of Jennifer Tejada this summer, who held the position since 2019.

Franco said she is someone who enjoys helping others, and wants to see students flourish at DVC.

“I just always really wanted to help people, I wanted to work with people,” she said. “My skill set is making people feel comfortable, building rapport, and then doing whatever I can in order to make their lives better.”

As a college student, Franco majored in speech pathology at the University of Central Florida, but quickly realized it wasn’t something she felt passionate about.

“I did speech pathology because my aunt was a speech pathologist and she was like, ‘Oh, it’s a great career, I love it,’” Franco recalled, but “it really wasn’t a good fit for me.”

After that, Franco decided to go into social work, but ultimately decided against continuing that career as well.

“I did social work for about seven years, worked for the state of Florida, and that was really hard, really stressful,” she said. So, “when I was 30, I picked up and I moved to California, and I fell into higher education.”

When Franco came to California, she didn’t have a set plan or job, but after her arrival, she came across a job here at DVC. “There was a job opening as a financial aid assistant, it was hourly. I was just like, ‘I’ll take it so I can just get a job’,” Franco said.

During her time as financial aid assistant, Franco soon realized academia offered her a better outlet for doing what she loved: improving people’s lives.

“It seemed like a good balance between social work and not taking kids away from their parents or anything like that,” said Franco. “I felt like education would be great because you can get to people before they have so many problems that they’re trying to get out of.”

After working her way up the ladder—from being a coordinator in the financial aid office, an employee for the DVC Foundation to senior program coordinator for career and transfer services—she moved over to the Workforce Development/Career Education department where she served as an academic and student services manager for five years, from 2018 to 2022 and then again in 2024 to 2025.

During her time in WD/CE, she worked with Dr. Beth Arman, senior dean of career and community partnership.

“I absolutely loved working with Catherine. She has so many good ideas,” said Arman. “She was really helpful. She worked in a number of different jobs at DVC and so she knew the processes, she knew the people to contact. I really relied on her quite a bit.”

After 4 years working in WD/CE, Franco worked as an interim dean at SRC for 2 years, from 2022 to 2024. During that time, Franco learned more about the role, which contributed to her desire to apply for the permanent position after Tejada announced her retirement.

“I learned all about the instructional side of [being a dean]. I learned more about the funding, and how we manage this huge organization and keep it afloat,” said Franco.

Having just started her position at SRC in July, Franco already has a lot of plans for how to better support students at the San Ramon Campus in their academic journey and help them transition into their careers.

“One of the things we’re trying to do is build out more small industry-specific career events and bring more employers here to meet with students in specific areas,” said Franco.

She also talked about expanding DVC’s Career Technical Education program to SRC.

“We’ve got a lot of programming like that at the Pleasant Hill campus, [but] we haven’t been able to do that here,” said Franco, “so that’s a goal for us.”