Bio — Annie Everett

Annie is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in higher education at The Pennsylvania State University.

Her research focuses broadly on the relationship between institutional effectiveness, academic quality, and student learning, with a focus on how the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion influence individual student success and institutional outcome setting.

Goethe Institut (Munich) poster representing a map of Germany (taken by Annie Everett).

My college experience began early, through dual credit coursework in high school. A fascination with imagined communities (Anderson, 1983) and the process of cultural norm setting lead me to pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in history, with a particular focus on German nation building in the early nineteenth century.

Crosswalk painted with orange and white checks in Knoxville, TN on the University of Tennessee campus (taken by Annie Everett)

Work as a teaching assistant at the University of Tennessee exposed me to a variety of experiential learning pedagogies (Kolb, 1984), including Barnard College’s Reacting to the Past curriculum. An intellectual interest in norm setting translated into practical discussions of student learning outcomes and course assessment techniques within an experiential learning environment, which ultimately launched a professional interest in academic standards setting. I have continued to serve as a teaching assistant at The Pennsylvania State University in order to build first-person experience in curriculum design and teaching towards student- and program-level outcomes.

Selfie image of Annie Everett, wearing a maroon face mask and Texas State University employee badge

After exiting the graduate program at UT Knoxville, I sought professional employment as an administrator on a college campus. Successive administrative roles at Vanderbilt University, and then Texas State University, exposed me to an expansive level of student service and policy implementation experience. I completed a second master’s degree in public policy while working full-time at Vanderbilt, with an explicit focus on higher education policy. My professional and educational expertise melded in potent ways during the COVID-19 pandemic. As senior administrative assistant for the Honors College at Texas State University, I created and implemented college-wide policy regarding budget, curriculum, personnel, and space management to complement TXST's pandemic response.

By completing the Ph.D. in higher education at The Pennsylvania State University, I seek to enhance my praxis as both scholar and practitioner. Experience in data collection and policy document analysis through my work with the InformEd States research team has allowed me to explore the impact of policy design on a student’s ability to access benefits. In partnership with Dr. Rosinger and other InformEd States colleagues, I developed an index to measure the level of administrative burden in Tennessee’s state financial aid programs (Burden et al., 2012). As I advance towards the dissertation prospectus, I hope to articulate a research program that examines institutional effectiveness through a survey of stakeholder perceptions. Specifically, I seek to survey student perceptions of “DEI” policy in relation to academic quality as a measure of both student learning and institutional success.

2022 School of Criticism & Theory Fellows

Over time, my professional and research interests have been recognized both nationally and internationally, through organizations such as the State Undergraduate Research Fund (SURF), the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service), and Cornell University’s School of Criticism and Theory. While enrolled at Penn State, I have been recognized by scholarships at the program, department, and college level.

From May-June 2023, I served as the 2023 Fellow for the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA).

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References

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso.

Burden, B.C., Canon, D.T., Mayer, K.R., & Moynihan, D.P. (2012). The effect of administrative burden on bureaucratic perceptions of policies: Evidence from election administration. Public Administration Review, 72(5), 741-751. DOI.

Kolb, D.A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice Hall Inc.