• Thirty-four students were involved in ten community engagement activities, including immersive collaborations with Hancock County Drug Court, Second Harvest, the MLK Dream Team, and others. These hands-on learning experiences helped students apply their sociological training in ways that truly mattered to our partners and their communities.
• Twenty-four students presented their research at the Immersive Learning Showcase, and 15 students attended the North Central Sociological Association’s annual conference—13 of whom gave formal presentations. These achievements were supported in part by your contributions and by an AKD student travel grant, awarded to our chapter this year.
• We resumed study abroad programming, with nine students participating in a faculty-led trip to Costa Rica. This was just one of the many high-impact learning experiences made possible with Foundation funds.
• Our students completed internships with campus units like Human Resources and Financial Services, as well as external organizations such as the Muncie Non-Profit Support Network. In our graduate program, students contributed to high-level analysis in the Office of Institutional Research and Decision Support and in Dr. Cassidy’s Research Design Studio.

The quality of our instruction, curriculum, and student outcomes continues to be recognized on campus and nationally. Our innovative work on career readiness was featured in a forthcoming article in Teaching Sociology, the discipline’s flagship teaching journal. Our faculty also published six journal articles, a book, and four book chapters, and were honored repeatedly for their scholarship, service, and mentorship.

Thanks to a component of a $10 million gift from the Lilly Endowment to the Gregory S. Fehribach Center, our department is launching a multi-year collaboration to support students with disabilities in their transition to employment—an effort co-led by Greg Fehribach and Dr. Melinda Messineo.

We’ve also grown our digital presence: Instagram and Facebook engagement reached all-time highs, and we now connect with over 90 alumni through Cardinals Connect and hundreds more on LinkedIn, helping us track outcomes, share opportunities, and build professional networks for our students.

We are poised for continued growth and impact—but we cannot do it without you.

If you would like to contribute to this momentum—by mentoring a student, offering input on our curriculum, joining our Alumni Advisory Committee, or making a donation, we would love to hear from you. Please contact Dr. Melinda Messineo (mmessine@bsu.edu), our Alumni Liaison, or me directly (clmenning@bsu.edu).

To make a gift that directly supports our students, please click here to donate. Every dollar helps us provide immersive learning experiences, conference travel, scholarships, and career-readiness programming.

Thank you for being part of our community. We hope you enjoy this year’s newsletter and feel as proud as we do of what we’ve achieved—together.

With warmest regards,
Chadwick L. Menning, PhD
Professor and Chair
Department of Sociology