In this Alumni Spotlight, we catch up with Career-Track Associate Professor Sarah Whitley, who graduated with her PhD from WSU in 2012. Sarah serves as the undergraduate course assessment coordinator for the Department of Sociology, and a career and internship advisor for graduating sociology students.
Thomas Rotolo: Tell us about how you got into sociology, how you ended up at WSU Sociology, and your general career trajectory.
Sarah Whitley: What led me to sociology was mostly my lived experience of living in poverty and seeing a lot of inequity in terms of the education system and the justice system. My brother was incarcerated when I was in high school, and I started taking courses in the evening through my community college, and I took criminology, because of what was happening with my brother. It was the first time I had been exposed to the sociological imagination. Applying theory to some of my lived experiences, my criminology professor suggested other sociology courses, so once I graduated high school, I took about 8 years to get through my undergrad, as I worked full-time and took classes part-time. I took classes in California at San Diego State University, and I finished up my undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma. I moved back to California and worked in some nonprofit organizations. I worked for the Anti-Defamation League in a program that counseled adolescents convicted of ate crime, so as they were coming out of juvenile detention, one of the requirements for probation was going through that program. I liked working in nonprofit, but I was interested in doing something else, so I reached out to some of my professors who had pushed me to think about academia as a platform of teaching and sharing the discipline with other students. All that led me to WSU.
Thomas Rotolo: Tell us about your experiences in the department when you first arrived at WSU.
Sarah Whitley: I chose WSU because I originally wanted to work in environmental sociology. But once I got here, I was a TA for Irenee Beattie, and her Sociology of Education course drew me into that area. My master’s work combined my interests in education and environmental sociology, looking at state curriculum for environmental education at the elementary and secondary level. After the master’s, I started to focus on poverty, examining food insecurity, and that was informed by my experience of growing up food insecure and wanting to examine data at the individual level. I was really impressed by Jenn Sherman’s work. I had a great mentoring relationship with her. She trained me for qualitative research and was a mentor when I left WSU and took my first faculty position at Fresno State. That is a model I provide for our undergraduate students, so I try to be closely tied to our alumni, offer additional opportunities and connections with them, even when they leave WSU.
Thomas Rotolo: How did you end up in your current position?
Sarah Whitley: I had an opportunity to come back to Pullman, so I reached out to the department to see what opportunities may be available, and I reconnected with the chair at the time, Lisa McIntyre, who said yes, we need you! I moved into a career track position, and my position is largely centered on teaching. I serve as our department assessment coordinator to ensure we are complying with our assessment efforts by guaranteeing that our students are practicing critical and creative thinking, learning quantitative and symbolic reasoning skills, building strong communication skills, and so forth. I also do a bit of research, so I am working with undergraduate students to collect peer data on food insecurity here at WSU. This bridges the opportunity of giving students experience in research and not just hearing about it, but actually doing it, which I am passionate about.
Safiya Hafiz: I am curious as to what new adventures you are excited about regarding teaching.
Sarah Whitley: I am really excited to have students engage in research, especially in groups to work on teamwork and collaboration skills, which can be challenging. I am passionate about service learning in my classes and giving students experiential opportunities. I want students to know the skills they are developing at WSU translate into marketable skills, and that there are many types of career tracks they can pursue. I help students build their portfolios to market their skills, and the capstone and culminating project helps do so because it is an integration of knowledge across discipline. I design and administer the capstone class in our department. Recently, I polled students on what they were most interested in, and overwhelmingly students mentioned employee well-being. Currently, students read a book on sociology of work and then create handbooks on different aspects of employee well-being. This is along the lines of organizational psychology, but I have them pull from sociology, and students have many options from handbooks for employees or employers, and they can tweak it to their interests.
Thomas Rotolo: Tell us how the department has influenced your approach to teaching.
Sarah Whitley: Something I really appreciate is that the department gives graduate students many different types of responsibilities and skills. I had wonderful mentors, and I strongly recommend that graduate students utilize their mentors. The mentorship here was great when I was a graduate student, from those who are still here like Jenn Sherman, Julie Kmec, and others who have come and gone, like Jim Short or Gene Rosa, and Irenee Beattie. I remember being a TA for SOC 101 with Lisa McIntyre, which was a great opportunity because she gave us support and freedom as discussion leaders. But, I had some imposter syndrome and didn’t see myself as an instructor because I was so shy. Lisa really pushed me into doing the job, but she also gave me a lot of resources, and that was really important.
Thomas Rotolo: Ending on a fun note, what do you enjoy doing outside of academia?
Sarah Whitley: I am a dog person; I love spending time with my dogs. I have started moving more towards competition and training with my dogs. I also enjoy spending time in my garden. I like to be out in the woods and hiking. I spend some time with groups focused on animal and dog rescue, as that is near to my heart, and I like staying close to community organizations and nonprofits.