MSHE Alumni Newsletter Winter 2024 | Interview with Heather Bacon (MS ’11)
Disclaimer: The views expressed in Heather's interview are her own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Northwestern University.
MSHE Graduate Assistant Eric Zhao (MS ’24): Can you tell us a little bit about your career background? When did you graduate from this program? What have you been doing since then?
Heather Bacon: I did my undergraduate at the University of Illinois. I have a BS in psychology from there. Then I worked in nonprofit for a little bit and then I came to the Higher Ed program in fall of 2009 and I finished the program in March of 2011. While I was in the grad program, I was really fortunate I got to do several really wonderful graduate internships. I worked with the Orientation department at Northwestern as well as AccessibleNU. I also did an advising internship in the Medill School of Journalism in their undergraduate advising group.
Since then, I came to McCormick, the School of Engineering at Northwestern, a few months after I graduated the program. I started in McCormick in September of 2011 in an Assistant Director role and I have moved up in the undergrad engineering office from there, so I've been really fortunate that I work with great students and great people, and I really love it here in my land of the engineers.
Eric: Okay, thank you. And my second question is, can you tell us a little about your connection, work, or passion related to the areas of mental health and wellness?
Heather: Yeah, so as a psych student in undergrad, I had considered going in a route that would take me more toward counseling, patient care, that sort of thing. But ultimately education just felt like a better fit. I wanted the chance to be able to work on policy. I like curriculum. I like being involved in some of the more administrative pieces of what goes into working in higher ed and I realized that the structure of a role with more of a counseling slant wasn't really the right fit for me. So I have a really nice mix of one-on-one work with students as well as policy and programming work. So it's a good combination for me.
Eric: Thank you. And our third question is, what do you see as being some of the biggest issues in mental health in higher education these days?
Heather: Yeah, that's such a huge thing and I could talk about it for hours, but higher education, like the rest of society, is made up of people. And so I think what we're seeing in society more broadly is showing up in higher education as well. it's no secret that mental health is a huge area of concern nationally at this point and specifically, numbers around anxiety and depression have really gone up and we certainly see that play out for students in the higher ed context as well.
Eric: What has your experience been like advising students through a crisis, and also based on your experience, what can be done to help students before it gets to the point of being in a huge crisis?
Heather: Yeah, so I think I'll take those in two pieces, because I think what a role is for a person in an academic sphere when the crisis is already happening, and steps to hopefully help lessen
the likelihood of that happening are two different pieces of what can come up in this type of work.
So, when we’re talking about mental health crisis, the immediate need is not the academic need. A person experiencing a mental health crisis needs to get mental health support as the first step. So from the academic side, that is really our first concern – is to help if, for some reason, it shows up on our radar before it shows up on the radar of someone who is more in that true mental health space. We want to help make sure the student gets connected there as quickly as possible and then we can figure out academic questions as a secondary step to that. So I would say that's a big piece of the immediate management that comes up on the academic advising side. I will be working to help get the student to that support and liaising with student affairs on the short-term process for addressing things. And then move into what it means from an academic standpoint. What plays out on the academic side will depend largely on the situation and what the student is able to reengage with or not and those types of things. So often it's providing information on what options are or aren’t available from the academic side, those types of things.
The second part is what can be done to try to prevent things reaching the point of crisis. A big piece is normalizing help seeking and I think there's some good news here. I think help seeking, at least in the mental health area, has started to become more normalized culturally than it was even than when I started. Students tend to be much more comfortable having conversations about accessing mental health support than they used to be. Many of them are already looking to have those things in place as they're entering in some cases. So I think there's a lot more comfort with talking about mental health more broadly. And then I think another positive thing that plays a role is the opportunities to engage with meaningful connections with other people and have a sense of community, all of those things play a huge role in mental health. Whether someone is experiencing any mental health concerns or not, humans need that sense of belonging and community. And finding your place in a university setting can take time. We talk a lot about helping students find their fit within a broader campus community. And there are ways that that takes shape on the academic side as well as in student . But I think now that we're at a point where university functions post-COVID are largely back to in-person options, that’s a huge help. We're able to be in a room with people again. I think we’re seeing and feeling the benefits for having those points of connection again..
Eric: What is your advising approach?
Heather: I try to take a very individualized approach to advising since each student's identities, backgrounds, and other student considerations will be different. I really try to enter each conversation with a student not making assumptions that I know anything about their situation based on identifiers that I may be able to see in a system. Asking open ended questions so that students can guide the direction the conversation takes. For example, when working with a student who may have some really difficult circumstances that they're navigating, I don't want to make assumptions about what financial resources they have to address that situation. I don't want to make assumptions about what their home environment looks like. I want to start with questions and let them paint as broad or narrow a picture as they feel comfortable with and then address things that fit what their needs are as they are articulating them to me rather than me trying to articulate that to them.
Eric: Have you seen a difference in overall student wellbeing and health post-Covid?
Heather: Yeah. I would say in the initial stage when we were first getting back to some in-person engagement but not full in person engagement, there was definitely a transition period where there was just honestly kind of a sense of awkwardness. People sort of forgot how to function in more social spaces. People had not been used to sitting in a room with each other before class started or a meeting started. What do you do in that time? Just some of those lighter social skills. Definitely we saw a change there. As we get deeper into this period of time where we're back to being in classes in-person, we're seeing some of that comfort return with some of those softer skills. We're certainly not out of the woods in terms of the emotional impacts of having gone through something as significant as COVID. There are still students and faculty and staff very much dealing with the various ways that that impacted them very deeply in the pandemic. So, certainly, it is not over , but there are some bright spots as well as people are able to be connected a little bit more deeply at this point.
Eric: Do you think some of the well-being issues that students in McCormick experience are unique to STEM majors or is it just general to any college students?
Heather: You know, I'll say I certainly hear my colleagues who work with students outside of STEM talk about many of the same concerns. I think there's an intensity that comes in a lot of the STEM programs. The academic loads are heavy, so when there is a concern that comes up for someone, sometimes the impact can hit a little bit more quickly because the classes are just moving very rapidly and the load they're taking is typically pretty heavy. I think maybe the speed with which something moves from being a small concern to a more moderate concern can be a bit quicker, but overall the trends we're seeing, both the concerns and the good things we're seeing, I would say, I hear my colleagues outside of STEM talk about as well.
Eric: What can colleges or universities do to help support the mental health and wellness of students, faculty and staff.
Heather: Yeah, that is an enormous question. I could talk about each population in that for probably an hour, but I think one of the things that unifies all three of us as populations across students, faculty, and staff is that we're all people. People cannot be productive or produce 24/7,365 days a year. We all need boundaries around our time. We all need downtime. We all need to take care of ourselves. We all need a balance of meaningful work and relationships and fun and all of those things. I think it is critical that we each own our wellbeing and how we're managing the balance of those things.I also think a university community that stands behind that believes taking care of yourself is a positive thing is really important. I think from the student side, because that's primarily what we've been talking about, schools like Northwestern are in a very privileged place relative to many higher education institutions. We're able to offer a lot of resources that institutions with less money frankly cannot do in the same way, not out of not wanting to, but just practically. They don't have the same range of options. So I am very grateful to be in an environment where there are options to be able to provide support to our students