Megan Wagner graduated with her bachelor’s from Marquette University in Milwaukee, and then joined the Peace Corps and moved to Guyana. After a few years with the Peace Corps and making a life in Guyana, she decided to move back to the States. In January 2015, she chose sweet home Alabama as a landing spot at the advice of a friend she’d met in the Peace Corps who is a researcher at the Tuscaloosa VA.
By March 2015, Megan had secured a position working at the Capstone International Center at The University of Alabama as a coordinator, assisting associate provost Dr. Teresa Wise with day-to-day administrative items and advising Fulbright students (UA is proud to be a top producer of Fulbright students).
“We’ve been in the Fulbright eye for about five years, and I’ve worked here for about five years – I think that’s a correlation,” Megan joked.
Recently, Megan was promoted to the role of assistant director of International Partnerships and Scholarships; this came about from UA’s participation in ACE International Lab, a project aimed at diversifying the campus so that UA students will be able to have a global experience without necessarily studying abroad. Megan also teaches a 200-level humanities class at the University, Introduction to Global and Cultural Perspectives.
How do you go from coordinator to assistant director and instructor? Megan credits her master’s degree in Communication Studies with a specialization in Organizational Leadership, which she earned 100% online through UA Online.
“The promotion and the teaching – it’s all because of the master’s, which is really because of Dr. Wise’s investment in me. She hired me when I had no institutional knowledge and had just been in the jungle for five years, but the Peace Corps meant something to her. It meant project design and management and being able to work without supervision. And her investment in me for the past few years – a drop in the bucket in terms of her career – has changed the trajectory of my career for the next 35 years. I’ve built up a resume and now I have all this confidence that no matter where I go from here, I have a base of what I’m capable of, and it’s all due to Dr. Wise’s investment in me, much of which was encouraging me to get my master’s while I was working full-time.”
Megan stood out to her classmates in the program as the research guru. But she wasn’t always the expert she is now – she started the program unsure of how to begin research, but she found the resources she needed to be successful.
“In my first class,” she explained, “they assigned a 20-page paper that needed 10 scholarly journals. And I had never been to the library’s website when I started the program. I’d been out of school for eight years, and five of those I didn’t even have electricity. They’re debt years in terms of information gathering. I knew nothing.”
Megan visited the library’s website and found the list of liaisons, including communications liaison James Gilbreath, who she calls “the champion of her story.”
“I emailed him and explained where I was: I just started graduate school and haven’t written a paper with citations in eight years. Don’t know where to start. Can you help me? He was so excited! He wants to be utilized by students, and he’s there to help,” Megan said.
James taught Megan how to use the library’s databases, which are available to all UA students, including UA Online students. He taught her how to use the search functions to narrow her search by time, topic, source, media type, etc. He taught her how to find an article that would be helpful for her research, and then how to find related articles that had cited the original article as a source.
“He taught me stuff I never would have known if I hadn’t worked with him. That’s when I started working smarter and not harder. You can spend a lot of time finding lots of articles and reading them, and then you can’t even use them.”
Megan has even begun teaching her classes how to use the databases like James taught her. Megan said that she couldn’t have been as successful in her master’s program without James’ help.
“This is his job. It’s why he’s a liaison; his job is to help research. We aren’t researchers. We’re students. I had a full-time job and was involved in lots of other things. I would take two classes at a time that often had two large papers due at the same time with different topics. James was really helpful in saving time and helping me find exactly what I needed.”
Megan encourages all students – her main campus students and any distance student – to take advantage of the resources available to them. “Even if you’re sitting in a house in Nebraska, taking a class for the first time in forever – how are you going to write a research paper without the help of the library? They are there for YOU. Find your library liaison and start with them!”
To connect with a library liaison, visit the UA Libraries website. If you are a current student and want to begin using databases, log in through myBama and navigate to the Library tab. Distance students are also eligible for the Interlibrary Loan program and can have resources shipped to them.
Published: August 30th, 2020