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be bold
“I really enjoyed teaching and knew I wanted a career heavily focused on it,” says UCI anthropology associate professor of teaching Angela Jenks on her career trajectory. She was named the 2019-20 recipient of UCI’s Academic Senate Early-Career Award for Teaching.
AWARD-WORTHY WORK Angela Jenks, UCI anthropology, earns an Academic Senate award for teaching in a field she almost didn’t pursue
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ngela Jenks had planned to be a doctor. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, her exposure to post-college career options had been somewhat limited to the traditional “doctor, lawyer, teacher” occupations she’d encountered in her small town up-bringing. Her first semester in college, she took Introduction to Archaeology admittedly on a whim, guided more by her interest in Indiana Jones – and a need to fill a general elective - than anything else. But like the big-screen hero often did, she ended up with a lot more than she’d bargained for.
“I instantly fell in love with anthropology,” says Jenks. “It gave me the foundation to answer questions that I didn’t know I even had, and now as a teacher, watching that same thing happen for my students is extremely rewarding.” She combined her interests with a Ph.D. in medical anthropology, and now as an associate professor of teaching in the Department of Anthropology at UCI, she specializes in the study of disease, health, and healing from a sociocultural perspective. Jenks was named UCI’s 2019-20 Academic Senate
Early-Career Faculty Award for Teaching recipient, an honor that recognizes her as one of the campus’s top teachers. For Jenks, it’s validation that her redirect from an M.D. to a Ph.D. was well worth the risk. Digging in “Anthropology is something that’s unfamiliar to most new students, like it was to me,” says Jenks. Students come into class – often taking a foray into the field to fill a required elective - with a pre-conceived notion of bones and stones or, sometimes still, Indiana Jones. These ideas are quickly upended
