Katy Jaekel loves – and believes in – her work.
“College provides a really important pathway for so many people,” says Jaekel, an associate professor in the Department of Counseling and Higher Education.
“It’s not about vocations. It’s not about careers. For me, colleges and universities offer opportunities for people to explore the world around them, to engage in critical thinking, to meet other individuals and to really grow and transform,” she adds.
“And if I am allowed an opportunity to teach about that, and to experience that on this campus, then I can’t imagine anybody who would pass that up. What an amazing opportunity our jobs are.”
Jaekel’s students and colleagues think just as highly of her.
She is the recipient of NIU’s 2022-2023 Distinguished Graduate Faculty Award, which salutes outstanding scholarly achievements and contributions to graduate education at the university and provides recognition during the fall Graduate School commencement ceremony.
The tribute is well deserved, says Department Chair Suzanne Degges-White, who calls Jaekel a kind, helpful and genuinely warm-hearted human being whose “professional identity is clearly built on empowering others to reach their potential.”
“When Dr. Jaekel is in the classroom, she creates an incredibly positive community environment for her students. Her teaching, her service and her scholarship all support her efforts to advocate for others and mentor others as they grow academically and professionally,” Degges-White says.
“Perhaps what is most striking about the way in which Dr. Jaekel is able to mentor her classroom students is that she models what she is teaching about in how she teaches it,” she adds. “She clearly is a master teacher who fully understands why she is doing what she is doing while she is doing it.”
Evidence of that power is measured in her alumni.
“Few people who are able to maintain the positive attitude and approachability and helpfulness that Dr. Jaekel exemplifies every day on the job,” Degges-White says, “and her commitment to mentoring the next generation of professionals in higher education and student affairs is visible in the success of our students after graduation.”
Yet despite the accolades, Jaekel is humble.
Her first response to the honor is to share the credit or to talk about the societal and difference-making importance of the education provided by her department – of teaching about helping skills, or student success, or identity, or connecting with learners, or the history of higher education, or how colleges work.
Accordingly, “I think the biggest takeaway is that I didn’t win this award. My program won this award,” Jaekel says.
“For every dissertation that I served on, I had at least two other faculty members who served on it with me. And while I have had a lot of doctoral students graduate, I didn’t do that on my own. I don’t teach in a vacuum,” she adds. “We are a collaborative program, and if I did anything well, it was because of the work that they did and the support they gave me.”
That said, she is “incredibly grateful.”
“I love what I do more than anything in the world, and so it’s weird to win an award for that, and it’s weird that I would be just me singled out. I think it should be all of us,” she says. “I’m just going to continue serving students and giving them what they need. I’m going to continue working hard for NIU. This is a place I greatly believe in, and I wouldn’t choose to be any other place.”
Why?
“Graduate education at this institution, in particular, is incredibly important because it’s our graduate students who are staff members also,” Jaekel says.
“They’re working in the residence halls. They’re working in all of the student support areas that make college possible for undergraduates,” she adds, “so investing in our graduate students is really important because they’re assisting undergraduate students and other students who go here in their own journeys.”
Jaekel’s journey began at Iowa State University, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and her Ph.D. in Education with a specialization in critical multiculturalism.
At Iowa State, she served as assistant director for First-Year Writing, helping to administer that curriculum to more than 7,000 undergraduates while also training and mentoring novice college educators to teach it.
She also was a Women’s and Gender Studies instructor, teaching Queer Studies and LGBTQ-themed courses, and served three years as program coordinator for the Dialogues on Diversity program that examines power, privilege and diversity.
Coming to NIU in 2015, she began teaches courses on diversity, critical multiculturalism and pedagogy.
Her research focuses on first-year student experience, LGBTQ students experience in the classroom and the preparation, training and development of novice postsecondary educators. She also writes about using critical pedagogy in the classroom to support the learning of non-dominant students.
The philosophy Jaekel imparts to her own students is simple yet profound.
“One is to do no harm and to mitigate harm where we can and, two, that it’s always going to be OK,” Jaekel says.
“We live in a world where things feel very high-stakes. My students are very anxious about being imposters or not making it or not being good enough,” she adds. “But they are good enough, and it’s always going to be OK. We can always figure this out. They do belong here, and the field of higher education does need them. That’s what I hope they take away.”
