Her Campus Southern Miss recently welcomed a new advisor, Dr. Cheryl Jenkins. We wanted to get to know her better, and share her story with you!
Dr. Jenkins was born and raised in Laurel, Miss. and graduated from R. H. Watkins High School in 1991 (now known as Laurel High School). She decided to attend the University of Southern Mississippi because she was impressed with what was then the Radio, Television, and Film program, and is now the school of mass communication. Jenkins said, “After one semester in a radio production course, I realized I wasn’t much of a technical person and switched to print journalism. That was the best decision of my life.” Jenkins graduated with a degree in news editorial journalism and a minor in English from The University of Southern Mississippi in 1995. Shortly after, she got her first full-time position as a news reporter at the Hattiesburg American. While working there, she decided to pursue a master’s in mass communication at Southern Miss and completed requirements for that degree in 1997. Jenkins said that she was was at the paper for a little over two years when “I was encouraged by a former professor to pursue a doctorate degree in mass communication. The discussion made sense to me as I began to feel the urge to pass on the mentorship I received as a college student to those who came behind me.” She applied and was accepted into the mass communication doctoral program at Howard University in Washington, D.C. beginning in the fall of 1998. “At the time, Howard’s mass communication program produced the highest number of African-American Ph.D.s in the country,” Jenkins said. “It was the perfect choice for me.”
“I knew I wanted to eventually end up back in the South,” Jenkins said. “So after being at Morgan for a year, I started applying for positions in the southern region of the country.” She was hired as an assistant professor of mass communication at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans and was there until Hurricane Katrina forced her to evacuate to Houston, TX indefinitely. In Houston, Jenkins was an assistant professor in the School of Communications at Texas Southern University. She was at Texas Southern for two years when the opportunity to return to her alma mater became available. It was exactly ten years after she left Hattiesburg that Jenkins was hired as an assistant professor of journalism at USM. “I got the opportunity to actually work with professors who mentored and taught me as an undergrad and graduate student. The experience has been surreal. Of course, balancing research, teaching and service has its challenges, but giving back to a place that gave so much to me makes the effort worth it,” she said.
“I’m a very spiritual person, so I don’t think anything happens by chance,” Jenkins said. “I rarely settle on anything without deep contemplation about the opportunity… serving in the capacity in which I do is part of a larger plan to help and serve others.” She says that mentoring students and student groups “gives me the mentorship role I always envisioned a career academia would provide… If there’s one thing I dislike, it’s that I don’t have as much time to devote to that role as I would like. Being a professor at a research institution requires a high level of research activity, which is obviously very time consuming. I try my best to balance it out, but it can be challenging.”
So, what advice does Dr. Jenkins have for collegiettes just starting out? “I advise all that I can to follow your dreams. I’ve lived and taught in quite a few places around the country, and I’ve found that the biggest difference between students at these various institutions is the level to which they dream. It may be exposure or just proximity to resources, but that’s been the only difference. No one has been any smarter or more prepared. So, if you pursue your dreams, the other things eventually fall into place.”
We’d like to thank Dr. Jenkins for becoming our new advisor. We hope to learn a lot from her!