Throughout her career Dr. Karen Parker has worked with child victims of sexual assault, youth foster-care and veterans. These experiences have influenced her thirty years teaching higher education. She has been an associate professor of psychology at Texas A&M University-Texarkana since 2020.
Dr. Parker worked 20 years for non-profit organizations. She decided that it was time for something different as a result of a traumatic event she experienced while working at a group home for boys. She had gotten close to one of the boys and decided to get him a fur companion. “I had gotten [the boy] a pet rabbit, and then he ended up going into a foster home and he left the pet rabbit back with the boys. Two of the boys were rebellious and had a lot of stuff going on. They killed the rabbit,” she said.
However, the beginning of her career in the counseling field was just as jarring as the end. She recalls her most memorable case being one of her first ones involving a three year old girl that had been raped. The case was memorable to her because of the severity of the matter and because she was able to provide comfort to the girl. “In I guess two-three months she crawled up in my lap and laid her head right here in my chest. That was telling me that my relationship with her and my rapport were important for her and she felt like she trusted me. One of the most moving moments in my entire career,” she said.
Dr. Parker’s research has been bringing focus into art inspired by her own experiences. Her PhD dissertation followed her journey navigating the grief of the passing of her wife through the paintings she did while her wife battled cancer. This experience influenced her dissertation and encouraged her to write her own ethnography. Ethnographies are scientific studies of people and their cultures from their point of view. Dr. Parker’s auto-ethnography focuses on the prejudice she experienced from the medical community during her wife’s cancer treatment. This auto-ethnography was published in the “Journal of Feminist Family Therapy” in 2021. Dr. Parker emphasizes the importance of narratives and auto-ethnographies in research saying that “a lot of times you can read research that has a thousand people that they interviewed or that they get a questionnaire on, but a personal story makes that research real.”
The transition from high school to college treats everyone differently, but for most it represents the growing pains of transitioning into adulthood. Jordan Ortega is an eagle guide, the marketing manager of the Hispanic Student Organization (HSO), and a student worker at TAMUT’s bookstore.
Like many others, Jordan expected college to be somehow like highschool. “I didn’t expect to be as involved,” he said “I just went to [high] school, got it done, and that’s what I was expecting [in college].” However, the experience that awaited him was far from those expectations. Graduating with a class size of 900 students from MacArthur High School, the shift to a small school seemed to not only benefit Jordan, but also everyone and everything he has had an impact on. Recalling one of his first memories at TAMUT meeting new people during SOAR, he said “It’s a moment that I never thought would lead to something else.”
A year later, Jordan has found himself getting to know new people everywhere he goes. After joining the HSO thanks to his professor Dr. Luz Mary Rincon, Jordan has taken a crucial part in the growth of the organization. “I asked [my friends] to join, and we were all a big part of how this club came to grow, […] we just had events, recruited some people, sent out emails asking them to join and now we have 20 to 21 members,” he said. Last spring the organization had two events during TAMUT’s Spring Fling Week, ‘Aguas Frescas’ hosted in the campus’ soccer field, and later in the week a ‘Kickback at the Park’ event hosted in Bringle Lake Park. This semester they have participated in TAMUT’s Spotlight on Texarkana and have scheduled events for Hispanic Heritage Month, including a Hispanic Heritage Trivia night on September 16th and a ‘Loteria’ event on September 26th.
Growing up with four older siblings and two younger ones, Jordan sometimes finds it conflicting to have his family acknowledge the changes he has gone through his first year in college. Working two jobs, being a member of the HSO board, and renting his own apartment have all been experiences that have allowed him to transition into adulthood. But being back home, it feels that nothing has changed. “I had to be like a little kid again. I had to ask for permission, I had to act a certain way, I was expected to do certain things, to be a certain way” he says, “I love my parents, I love my siblings, but I also love getting to be myself and getting to do my own things, and not having to prove to my parents or siblings [that] I’m an adult now.” In order to cope with it, he has decided to remain true to himself and everything he has learned while being in college, “this is who I am, this is what I’ve learned, this is what I’m gonna keep doing. If they don’t like it, well I feel like I have the right to do my own thing” he said.
