Archive for ‘Student Awards’

This year’s National Communication Association Convention was in New Orleans, Louisiana. Two graduate students presented their research mentored by Dr. Lauren Lemley:

• Sahori Hernandez-Quiñones, “Portrayals of Sexism & Misogyny in TV: A Rhetorical Analysis of The Queen’s Gambit”
• Sydney Risher, “Hozier and Hegemonic Masculinity”

Heather Johnson, a graduate student, presented the research she conducted as an undergraduate entitled “A Frozen Fumble: An Analysis of the 2015 Blue Bell Creameries’ Listeria Crisis.” Dr. Sharp Penya was her research mentor.

2022 National Communication Association Convention, students with mentors

This year’s National Communication Association Convention was in Seattle, Washington. Sahori Hernandez-Quiñones presented her paper, “A Company in Denial: An Analysis of Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Powder Crisis Response Through the Lens of Situational Crisis Communication Theory.” Her paper was on the Lambda Pi Eta top paper panel and Dr. Lynette Sharp Penya was her research mentor.

Senior communication major Jackson Scott and Dr. Lauren Lemley presented on the top panel in the Communication Centers Division at NCA. Their panel was titled “Renewing Our Focus on Tutor Training: The Transformation of Communication Training Needs.” 

Can you tell me about your time at ACU?

I was a student there from fall of 99 through December of 2003. I was a Communication major with a minor in Political Science and a minor in Business. And, as all good ACU students, close to a minor in Bible but can’t quite count that. I was not a member of a social club, but I was a member of the Aggie club for a while, and I was also a member of Lambda Pi Eta- the Communication honor society. I was a student government association representative- I actually represented the Communications building a couple of different times. I was the President of the College of Republicans as well when I was on campus.

Did you receive any education after ACU?

I actually just in 2018 completed my Masters of Public Affairs from the University of Texas at the LBJ school.

What led you to want to get your Masters?

Well, ACU, to be honest. I applied to the Masters of Corporate Communications program that ACU was trying to get off of the ground, but it never quite came to fruition. I always appreciated the fact that the professors that I had, especially in the Communication department, weren’t just professors. They were people who had actually done the work that they were talking about in the real world. It was the same with the business school and in political science department- we seemed to have a lot of professors who weren’t just professors, but also practitioners of what they were teaching. My ultimate goals when I get done with my private sector degree is to go back and teach, and what led me to wanting to do that was ACU and the experience that I had. So, I had always been kind of thinking about getting a Master’s to help with my goals of someday teaching, so that’s what led me there. The immediate circumstances were that my company offered to pay for it, and I got accepted to the LBJ school. I think they are now ranked number 9 in the country for public policy schools- it’s hard to say no when the starts align, right?

Can you talk to me a little bit about the jobs you did after ACU?

Sure! My first job, when I was in college, I went to work for Dr. Bob Hunter who was the state representative from Abilene. I became his legislative aid in the district office which was located on campus, while he was serving as state representative. When I graduated, I went to be his chief of staff in Austin until he retired, so that was the first part of my career. After that I went to a small startup company called ORYXE energy. I went to work for them for a couple of years where I did regulatory and government affairs work for them. Then, in ’08 I went to work for Exelon which is actually where I currently am, but it’s kind of a bumpy path to how I got here. I got hired for them to work on a special project, and I worked for them just from ‘08-’09. I left them in ’09 to go back and run political campaigns. I ran a race for Rob Orr out of Burleson, TX- I did his House race. And then I did a special election for State Senate District 22. I helped Brian Birdwell as his campaign manager who got elected in the special election. From there, he offered me his Chief of Staff job so I went back to working in the capital to be Chief of Staff for Senator Birdwell for a couple of year. I worked for him for one session, and about the end of that session, Exelon had merged with another company and had a job opening. My boss called and asked me if I wanted to come back, and I came back. That would have been in 2012- I went back to Exelon and I have been there ever since.

What all does your current job entail?

My title is Director of State Government Affairs- west and south. I work in a group that cover 30 states and Alberta, Canada. My primary responsibility right now is Texas, but my secondary states are New Mexico, Oklahoma, Alabama, Kansas, Utah and I cover Alberta, Canada. What I do is government and regulatory affairs work. Basically everything from the county level of government to the state level of government. Whether it be commissioner courts, or state legislators, or regulatory bodies, public utilities commission- I do work in all of those different areas. From time to time, I get involved at the city level depending on what the issue is, and if they need someone with our group’s expertise. Recently I have worked on some tax negotiations with the legislature in session, I read through bills, I track legislation, I engage on those bills- good, bad, or indifferent. I’m the advocate on behalf of our business unit before all of these different bodies.

I was really excited to write the newsletter this semester, because I wanted to be able to show students all of the unique things someone with a Communication degree can do, and how beneficial having a Communication degree is.

Yeah, I think that’s what a lot of people forget about it. When people think of a communication degree, the first thing people think of is media which is wrong. What I always like to tell folks is “Hey, if you want a degree that teaches you a wide variety of skill sets from business to communicating to political, across the spectrum, then you should get a communication degree because you can legitimately do anything with it. It doesn’t have to be politics and it doesn’t have to be working as a news anchor and communicating. It can be anything. Ong guy I know went to work for Enterprise, Rental Car, and just worked his way up into management there. Others have gone on to work in consulting firms- I think it is just the gateway degree into anything that you want to do. I work on business deals every day, and I don’t have a business degree. The degree is a degree that can be utilized across any field. I hope more people realize that if more people understood others and how to communicate with people more effectively, than organization’s from top to bottom would be more successful.

I initially came to ACU as a transfer student athlete where I finished out my Kinesiology degree while on the softball team. From there, what I thought would be two years in Abilene, turned into five. I was blessed with the opportunity to continue my education as a masters student in the Communication department. During this time, I was a graduate assistant coach for the softball team at ACU and a graduate assistant teacher in the Communication department. 

Wearing many hats throughout this time equipped me with various skills and opportunities. After graduation I will be moving into the Athletics office here at ACU to fulfill an internship as an Academic Coach. This role will have me working directly with student athletes to help them in their studies, scheduling classes, and advising them academically. Alongside of this, I will have the chance to learn the business and budgeting side of the athletics department. 

I am excited to use what I have learned not only in my sports background but with my masters! I have met some amazing people along the way, many of whom will be lifelong relationships. The lessons and skills I have acquired over my time here are invaluable and I have been truly blessed by it all. Abilene Christian truly is a special place, a place that I will carry with me wherever I go.

I initially came to ACU as a transfer from Fresno State in California. At first my intention was to come here just to enjoy playing football I had no idea the amazing experience I was going to have in the 2 years that I have spent here. First off the amazing people that are here. Living in California makes you miss and long for that southern hospitality that Texas is known for. Everyone here is extremely nice and genuinely care about you as a person and that was really amazing to me. The size of the classrooms was something that really helped me as well because I could be myself and show what kind of student I am everyday and not just get tagged with automatic stereotypes of being a student athlete. The teachers here gave me the opportunity and platform to be myself and speak honestly about different topics that I felt strongly about, In the department of communication and sociology talking is something that is almost guaranteed in every class, but being able to hear feedback from different people who come from all different sorts of lifestyles and upbringings made my time here extremely insightful.

Dan Morrison, Ph.D. joined the department last year and is already making strides in his new role. This year, he has been working on a number of projects in and outside of the classroom. This semester Dr. Morrison taught Social Problems, and conducted a population health simulation which was developed out of a 2020 grant and allowed students to participate in gamification in a sociology course. In the classroom, this allowed students to throw bean bags, take on different personas, decide which public health interventions they wanted for their community, for kahoots, teams and included a competitive point system- sounds like a class we would want to be a part of!

Additionally, Dr. Morrison has been making strides outside of the classroom. He currently has two papers under review and is working on several projects. Just recently, a textbook was released in which Dr. Morrison wrote a chapter. This textbook, Sociocultural Examinations of Sports Concussions, takes a look at the current social phenomena surrounding sports concussions and the controversies surrounding youth participation in sports, concussions, and the risks that athletes should be allowed to take in sports at a professional and collegiate level. In August, Dr. Morrison gave a talk over this chapter to the American Psychological Association in New York.

Right now, Dr. Morrison also has a Cullen Grant funded project that will allow him to interview hospice providers about their emotional labor and their uses of empathy on the job. This is a collaborative project with Natalia Ruiz-Junco at Auburn University and Patrick McGinty at Western Illinois. This is a theory project, and they are studying pragmatic interactionism which is an attempt to recover some of the roots of the interactions expected in pragmatist philosophy. This paper was presented in New York at the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction Meetings in August.

Dr. Morrison currently has other projects going on including a joint project with Johnathan Coley from Oklahoma Christian University, author of Gay on God’s Campus. They are hoping to do more systematic data collection and planning to look at housing policies on Christian colleges and universities to identify the diversity of housing policies and visitation policies. Additionally, Dr. Morrison is working on with Greg Brooks, who is an ACU professor of Family and Christian Ministry. They are interested in gathering data on the social lives and sexual behaviors of ACU students to identify the disconnect between student behavior and student education. This project will help identify potential risky behavior in students and will advocate for public health.

Contributed by: Sheila Ritchie, Director of Forensics & Debate

• We attended 10 tournaments throughout Louisiana, Arkansas, Oregon, Texas, and Virginia. The competition included LSU, SMU, Cornell, Rutgers, George Washington, Georgetown, Idaho State, TCU and many others. We earned at least one award at every single tournament we attended.
• Our Novice Squad ranked 11th out of 92 teams in the Nation for IPDA Debate.
• We had students who advanced to either Octofinals, Quarterfinals, and Semi-finals in Debate at each tournament.
• We had two students who advanced to finals in Extemporaneous Speaking in addition to their debate achievements. (Garrett Bonner and Mark Shi)
• We had three students who won Speaker Awards in addition to their debate achievements. (Shekinah Kahongo, Elizabeth Miller, and Lexi Ritchie)
• At the National tournament, we had two students, Elizabeth Miller and Noah Pruitt, who advanced to the elimination rounds. Elizabeth reached triple octofinals (out of 115 Novice debaters) and Noah made to quarterfinals before being eliminated. This puts Noah in the top eight Novice IPDA debaters in the nation.
• We also had two teams invited to the Madison Cup Invitational at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The competition was intense but the team of Garrett Bonner and Elizabeth Miller ranked in the top 8 teams for the tournament and in the end, they won a $500 scholarship.

At the National Tournament, I was also honored to be asked by the Executive Committee of IPDA to join the National Governing Board for the International Public Debate Association. The Governing Board consists of 7 members representing the areas of the nation that support the IPDA style of debate. Most debate coaches are male, so female coaches are the minority. On this committee, I am proud to be the second female member and the representative for the western part of Texas and the southwest part of the United States. The goal for my time on the committee will be to help spread this form of debate westward. We will begin that task by hosting a collegiate IPDA invitational tournament on ACU campus in February 2020 and possibly bid to host the National tournament in 2021.

At this point, the team is resting and getting ready for another great year. We grew from seven students in the fall to nine in the spring. We hope to welcome a few new Freshman to the team in the fall as well.  We will attend some camps and trainings this summer to sharpen our skills and get us ready for another great year.

Thank you again!

Dear Fellow Scholars,

The truth is, I’m not sure that anyone who would venture to pen a letter to the undergraduates of her alma mater and give them “insight” or “advice” about “what I’ve learned about the ‘real world’ since graduation” could ever possibly have a clue what she is actually talking about. The world, and thus human work and human lives, are changing at a rate rapid beyond belief. Our wildest imaginations may not be enough to predict the world of the next 10 or 20 or 50 years, which means you should probably be a touch suspicious about this quasi-life-advice-column I’m writing to you now. Permission to stop reading and go get a Bean cookie or something, it’s the end of the semester and you probably deserve it.

But, if I was going to offer you anything at all in the way of reflections on what’s stuck with me from my time at ACU, suspicion might actually be a good place to start. The world is changing faster than any concrete, “marketable skills” can hope to keep pace with, but what about those skills that require thinking like a human, not a computer? A critical, helpful suspicion is one of these skills you’ve had the opportunity to practice and refine at ACU. Why are these people in power and these people not? Why are these people rich and these people poor? Who decides who gets what? The world may evolve, but it is unlikely that the burning importance of asking these questions will leave us. I worry that there are not nearly enough people asking them.

It’s important to note, however, that one key trait in any good asker-of-hard-questions is that they are willing to turn this suspicion back to face themselves. Another word for this would be one we hear all the time at liberal arts colleges, “humility,” taking seriously the possibility that I might be wrong. At the risk of seeming didactic, I propose to you that this, humility, is actually the central mission of the “college” thing you are up to. Liberal arts colleges are, after all, supposedly “liberating.” And what is it that we need to be liberated from? I don’t know about you, but the thing I need to be liberated from pretty much every day is the easy assumption that I am Right, that the highest Truth is my own experiences, and that the most important thing is the world through my own eyes. This sounds overly dramatic, but it’s more real than it seems. Think about it—I don’t currently hold any beliefs that I think are false, otherwise, I wouldn’t believe them. This makes it incredibly easy for me to write off people who disagree with me, because, from my current view, I already have all the right answers. A suspicious critic without humility cannot hear, cannot emphasize, cannot recognize their own limitations. Only when I can break out of my automatic assumptions can I meaningfully listen, ask critical questions, stand in solidarity, go to work for the sake of justice and the other.

I reiterate. The world is changing faster than we can dream it. The problems of the future are yet unknown, as are their solutions. You are among those lucky enough to spend a few years thinking about the world, what all this means, how we might make it better.  Your best tools just might be the questions you can ask, of yourself first, then of the world as it is, and then of the world as it could yet be. And if you do, you just might figure out how to make things even just a little bit better, and in these small acts, we may just change the world.

Sincerely,

Courtney Tee