Her Campus: What is your position? How long have you held it?
Jess Lucero: Right now, I’m an assistant professor of social work at Utah State University and I’m in my fourth year here.
HC: How did you end up in the position?
JL: It was a long path, but I’d say I kind of started out at the University of Wyoming. I started doing research with one of my social work professors when I was a junior as a social work major, and really I hadn’t even thought of graduate school until I started having conversations with him, he was a really great mentor to me. I applied for graduate school at the University of Wyoming. I was originally a science and math person but then I got involved with advocacy things and found I was interested in social justice things, but still loved statistics. So I got my degree at UW in Social Work and did most of my work with woman. I started at the SAFE Project and when I moved to Ohio I started doing more community work and worked for Working America, which is a community organization and the Red Cross. So then I got my PhD at Wayne State in Detroit, and when I did my doctoral studies my community interest expanded from there. A doctoral study is geared toward research. I spent spent years working on my PhD until I went into the market to do research on community development and how neighborhoods affect our opportunity structures. That’s the pathway I guess that got me to where I am.
HC: Can you tell me a little more about your research?
JL: My research focuses on how place affects us. So how environmental factors shape our individual lives. So instead of a behavioral, psychological approach of looking at individuals, I look at opportunity structures and life chances. So part of that is quantifying how the places in which we live affect us socially and psychologically. There are some offshoots, but they’re centered around context. One is housing, not just quality and condition of housing, but especially access to housing and discrimination and getting people into housing that’s good quality. And I’ve always kind of had a foot in the violence field. I still do research on dating and domestic violence kind of broadly and how we can look at those from a community perspective.
HC: Changing gears a little, what are your duties in your current position?
JL: I teach, and my job is sort of broken down into percentage components. 40% is spent on teaching; 50% on research; and 10% on service at my college and university. But something that’s kind of tricky with how I approach my job is I keep my students in the loop between my research and my teaching. I usually involved my students in some way in community-based research. So there’s a big bridge between my research and teaching.
HC: Where are you from originally?
JL: I am from Afton, Wyoming.
HC: How did you end up at UW?
JL: I just knew I wanted to go there. I did High School Institute as a participant as a sophomore in high school, and from pretty early on, I knew I wanted to go to Wyoming. Most kids didn’t want to go to Wyoming, but I was like, “I’m going to the big city!”
HC: We talked about it a little, but what degree did you obtain from UW, and what years did you graduate?
JL: I obtained a Bachelor in Social Work from the College of Health Sciences at Wyoming in 2007; I got my Masters in Social Work in 2008 at Wyoming as well. My PhD is from Wayne State in Social Work, obtained in 2012.
HC: How did your experience at UW help you get to where you are now?
JL: I never would have considered this path at all if it weren’t for good faculty people, but there are a lot of really supportive folks at UW. I think just having undergraduate research opportunities was really important for getting me on this path. In a lot of ways, I am always on the lookout for people who are interested in what they’re learning and how I can foster their interest, as well as ways to get them thinking about these kinds of options. Being a first-generation college student, I didn’t have a lot of know-how in navigating college education, and I remember especially in my PhD program not knowing what was going on. Having faculty members was so crucial and that really started at Wyoming.
Jess floating down the river with with her youngest daughter, Eleanora Lucero, her mom, Shelley Hunsaker, and her sister Sagan Hunsaker.
HC: What is the best advice you can offer a woman going into your field?
JL: I would say the best advice – a little cliché, but it’s true – is about endurance. It’s a very long process to get your PhD, and I think it’s so important to reach out for help and mentorship. Even if you’re not the person who is going to immediately reach out to somebody, put yourself out there and find somebody who seems like they can take you under their wing a little bit, because that’s definitely what helped set me up to be successful and I think that’s true with any professor, and especially true to women. It seems mentorship is just sort of something that’s freely given to male graduate students at times, and I think women are a little more hesitant to reach out. It’s really important that you do that for your own professional development and growth and make collaborative partnerships.
HC: If a current UW student in your field had more questions about your journey to success, would you be open to talking with them? If so, what is the best way for them to reach you?
JL: Oh, totally! I would love that! Email me at Jessica.lucero@usu.edu
HC: Is there anything else you would like to share?
JL: It’s something I think about all the time here, especially because I’m in Utah which is culturally different, balancing family and academics. I see a lot of young women in my classes who might not see motherhood and career as being compatible. I’m about to have a third daughter, and I kind of love being pregnant because it’s a visual reminder to my students that you can do hard things and be a mom. This is a concern that expands across all academia, not just my own field. Being a mom and researching are compatible, and there are a lot of resources out there to allow these paths to be compatible. There is a lot of social support, but I want to kind of stress that those two things can be compatible if those are two things you want to choose, if you’re going into a research career. There is a huge drop-off when women get their PhDs and then the number of female scientists we have just drops off. The same in the social sciences, looking at who’s doing research and who’s doing more intensive research teaching positions. I want to be able to say, you can do both – you can still do things that take up a lot of your energy, it’s totally doable.