Let this be known about Liz Finklea: When she commits herself to a job or project, she’s going to work as hard as she can to make the endeavor a successno matter where she is in the world.

And that’s all there is to it.

In the craggy countryside of her native Scotland, she was self-employed as a roving secretary and bookkeeper who kept farmers and small business owners on track with their cost ledgers and day-to-day operations.

In sun-splashed Boca Raton, Fla., she warmed to a new country as a temporary office worker who was quick and efficient in the workplace.

Today, she’s making a difference in the mountain climes of Morgantown, where her work as a women’s advocate has netted her one of West Virginia University’s highest honors for outreach.

Finklea is the 2006 recipient of the Mary Catherine Buswell Award for Outstanding Service to Women, and she’ll be recognized in a 7 p.m. ceremony at the Mountainlair Ballrooms on Friday, April 21, as part of WVU ’s Weekend of Honors observances.

Buswell, the award’s namesake, taught English at WVU from 1947-78 and was an early proponent of women’s rights on campus and throughout the Morgantown community.

That meant, of course, encouraging and empowering the female contingent of her classes, who, more often than not, were saddled with a whole host of care-giving responsibilities that went well beyond the course syllabus.

For Finklea, it all comes down to an unwavering work ethic layered with lots of personal and professional pride.

My father always told me,If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right,’she said in a voice that still carries the rhythms, timbre and accent of her Scottish youth and the time spent living and working in England.Stuck with me, I guess.

Indeed.

Finklea, who is married to WVU chemistry chair Dr. Harry Finklea, arrived on campus and in the community in 1986, when her husband accepted a teaching position at the University.

The two met in London. She was a regional sales representative for a Scottish company that sold candles and crafts, and he was an earnest American college student completing a research fellowship at the Royal Institution.

Tea-time told the tale for a budding romance, as she recounts.

A friend with whom she shared a flat worked for another agency in the same building as the Royal Institution and enjoyed talking to the researchers who were there.

Thanks to the British custom of everything stopping for afternoon tea, my flat-mate would meet and bring home international students and visiting scholars in need of a home-cooked meal. Harry was one of those, and apparently the cooking made a lasting impression.

The scholar and the Scot married and she soon found herself in America, and North Carolina, as her husband completed his studies. He was from the neighborhooda South Carolina nativebut this sojourn was her first time in the States.

Having grown up watching American movies and television shows, I naively believed that we spoke the same language,she deadpanned,but I did get introduced to the joys of good East Carolina barbeque.

She was quite Americanized by the time she and her husband touched down in Morgantown 20 years ago. The couple’s two daughters, Katie and Sarah, were very young at the time and Finklea made friends fast as a Girl Scout volunteer and as a fixture at their school functions.

Participating and making things happen led to a membership with WVU ’s Council for Women’s Concernsthen more volunteer work with the University’s Center for Women’s Studies, which has spent more than 25 years in the business of building up women, through workshops and forums that branch out into the community.

She now works at the center part-time, and one project she’s especially proud to be part of isMom’s Turn to Learnan outreach effort that introduces WVU to working women with children who either dropped out of school and are now re-enrolling, or those making their first-ever forays on campus as freshmen.

I thinkMom’s Turn to Learn’is quite rewarding,she said.The watch-word is,You can succeed, and you will succeed.’They do, and it’s thrilling to watch. You see women coming here who don’t think they’re going to make it, yet when they leave, it’s with an abundance of confidence and a college degree.

And that, she said, is a job worth doingif ever there was one.