Alumni
Profiles of Success
Shevawn Bogdan Eaton Ph.D.
Director of ACCESS
Northern Illinois University
B.S. Microbiology 1977, Purdue
M.S. Counseling and Personnel Services 1980, Purdue
After receiving her Master's degree at Purdue and working for several years in student affairs, Shevawn Bogdan Eaton attended Indiana University, where she received a Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration in 1993. A resident of Dekalb, Illinois, Shevawn is currently Director of ACCESS at Northern Illinois University.
ACCESS is made up of three professional staff and over 100 student and graduate student employees with nearly a half million dollar annual budget that work to provide campus-wide tutoring as well as Supplemental Instruction and other academic support services on the Northern Illinois campus. In 1997 ACCESS combined its forces with Residence Life to initiate the University's first campus-wide tutoring center. There are now four such centers on campus, and more campus-wide services continue to be developed. Because college students traditionally have the greatest difficulty in math and science, Shevawn has made development of support services in these areas a top priority. "My years at Purdue taught me the value of studying/preparation in a certain way in order to be successful in these courses. The sciences demand a level of discipline that no other areas require so consistently. It is much more than just content."
In addition to her duties as Director, Shevawn previously served as President of the Midwest (now National) College Learning Center Association, and is a reviewer for the Journal of Student Retention in Higher Education. She is also very active on the NIU campus as a member of the University Assessment Panel, the Admissions Policies & Academic Standards Committee, and the Special Committee on Student Learning in Mathematics. She has previously served as a member of the NIU Presidential Commission on Persons with Disabilities, the University Class II Judicial Board, and the President's Task Force on Retention. In 1997 she founded a chapter of Chi Alpha Epsilon National Honor Society, which is an honor society for specially admitted students.
Though not working purely as a researcher, Shevawn feels her science degree from Purdue could not have better trained her for her role as a program evaluator. "I am comfortable with numbers and drawing conclusions from findings," she explains. "The context is different (from pure research), but the methods are similar." Her courses in Biology at Purdue proved to be "challenging, exciting and sometimes overwhelming. But the training of my mind, to be a thoughtful, analytical person, is what has stayed with me: Log-linear functions, documenting observations in laboratory situations, writing up conclusions, or calculus, for example, are all experiences that trained me to be a good scientist/analyst/researcher regardless of the discipline."
Shevawn summarizes her experience at Purdue by stating, "Working with faculty throughout my undergrad years taught me to understand their value systems and priorities for students. I feel that my degree has connected me to them more strongly. I studied with faculty at Purdue that faculty here know and respect. All of these things make me better in my job of helping students succeed. I have been very well-trained, and for this, I am very grateful to the faculty there."