Karen Bartlett

‘So, a long, long, long time ago, I was a student here, but then I transferred to University of Texas at Dallas, where I got my bachelors and my master's degree. When my husband, who also teaches here, Dr. Daniel Bartlett, finished graduate school, we looked around at what the job situation looked like, and Lamar looked like the best possibility. We have family here, so we moved back here, and within a few months, we were both working at Lamar, and have been here since 2003 in some capacity….Well, Lamar University has a strong sort of focus on community and family, and so in individual departments, like, for example, in this English Department, we are family. And so, I think that Lamar does that well, and I think that they have a basis to encourage us to treat our students in that same way, so that we can show care and compassion to our students and to let them know that we're with them on this journey, because it can be a very challenging and a very trying and certainly an expansive and a very transitory kind of journey.’