PatrickJackson

Greetings All,

I am a Doctoral Student in Higher Education Admin and Student Personnel. Prior to Kent State, I earned a BS in Psychology from the University of Akron (fear the Roo!), a MS in Counseling from UW-Madison (On Wisconsin!) and MS in Human Resource Management from Purdue University (I don’t exactly get the train mascot, but choo choo!). I am transitioning to higher education after a career in the corporate sector. My graduation assistantship is teaching the undergraduate exploratory Career Construction and Career & Life Planning courses.

My research interests include culturally relevant and inclusive curriculum and student success, but mostly identifying and helping alleviating the barriers to educational attainment and student achievement. While I do not fully subscribe to the critical perspective, have a social justice agenda, or work within a deficit model or equity-minded perspective, I do believe that social institutions have a legacy of advantaging some groups and disadvantaging others through validating and rewarding the social norms of some groups over others. Regardless, I believe the practical means of achieving success for many marginalized groups is to master the norms of the majority social context (not always a popular perspective with the Critical or equity-minded research-practitioners).

Appreciating that social context contributes to groups succeeding in different ways, my research objective is to identify the factors that most contribute to the success of different groups –such as parenting students, low income students, students of color, and other marginalized populations. My working dissertation title is **//Examining Variables of Campus Climate, Institutional Satisfaction, and Academic Adjustment in Predicting the Academic Success and Expressed Intention to Persist for Successful African American and Latino College Students at Traditional Four-year Colleges in the United States.//**

I look forward to experiencing dissertation prep with you all,

Patrick