The Chancellor’s Honors Banquet takes place each spring to recognize students, faculty, staff, and friends of the university for their extraordinary achievements.
Congratulations to Ashleigh Powers, coordinator of academic advising for the Department of Psychology for your 2017 Excellence in Advising award!
Powers views each advising appointment with students as a teaching and mentoring opportunity. The care she takes with students is reflected in their growth, with one undergraduate noting that Powers “created a positive and secure experience” for her. Other students praise her vast knowledge as well as her “calm and funny demeanor.” Powers has served as coordinator of academic advising for the Department of Psychology since 2013. She also teaches Careers in Psychology and the Volunteer Experience. In her role as coordinator, Powers provides regular updates on the status of psychology undergraduates at monthly faculty meetings. She has been instrumental in forging alliances between professional and faculty advisors and works extensively with student advisees, helping them to adjust to university life, plan their course schedules, and find research and internship opportunities. In 2015, Powers won the department’s Outstanding Staff Award.
Congratulations to all the staff in the Department of Sociology for your role in the department’s excellence in advancing diversity and inclusion at UT and receiving the 2017 Dr. Marva Rudolph Diversity and Inter-Culturalism Unit Excellence Award.
The Department of Sociology faced trying times this past year as outside forces worked to undermine UT’s commitment to diversity. Nevertheless, the department has remained a leading advocate for diversity on campus, working with student groups and individuals to raise awareness of diversity issues and support UT’s diversity institutions and personnel. The department is launching a new concentration in critical race and ethnic studies, and it organized the New Directions in Critical Criminology conference in 2017 to examine the unequal treatment of disadvantaged populations. The department’s curriculum addresses issues related to race, gender, and globalization, with faculty scholarship in areas including transformative justice, immigration, and inequities in worker conditions in global tourism. Its student body increasingly reflects its commitment to diversity: last year, 80 percent of incoming graduate students in sociology were from underrepresented groups.