McDaniel in the News: Faculty advisers double as first responders

Biology professor Katie Lynn Staab is one of several faculty advisors from colleges across the country featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education article, “How Faculty Advisers Can Be First Responders When Students Need Help,” by Alexander C. Kafka in the Oct. 9, 2018, edition of the highly regarded subscription-only newspaper. The Chronicle article references the tradition that faculty advisers often mirror their own advisers from college, as does Staab, who was a first-generation student at Mount Saint Mary’s University.

From the Chronicle:

“Many effective advisers will tell you they learned from and in some ways emulate the advisers they had as undergraduates. Katie Lynn Staab, an assistant professor of biology at McDaniel College, in Westminster, Md., was a first-generation student when she went to Mount Saint Mary’s University.

“When speaking with her students, ‘I’m just authentic about my own background,’ she said. ‘My parents didn’t go to college, no one was talking about photosynthesis over the dinner table.’ If I can do it, she tells students, you can do it.

“In college, Staab got a job in the lab of David Bushman, an entomologist who was working on caterpillar physiology (and who is now president of Bridgewater College, in Virginia). She had the soft skills — reliability, punctuality, a frank and professional demeanor — ‘and I guess he saw my potential,’ she recalled. He would check in hourly on her experiments and brought her to her first conference, in Fort Lauderdale, which was also her first trip on an airplane. She presented on the pupation of an agricultural pest called the corn earworm. ‘I was on top of the world,’ she said. ‘It really lit that fire.’

“Staab tries to offer similar opportunities and encouragement to students like Ornella Ngameni, who graduated from McDaniel, is working in a sample-analysis lab for government contracts, and plans to go to medical school and become a brain surgeon. Ngameni moved to the United States from Cameroon when she was 8. Her school barely had any lab science, she said, and when she had Staab as a professor at McDaniel, ‘I would go to her office every day and she would sit there with me for as long as I needed.’"

Read more in The Chronicle of Higher Education, with a subscription.