Dr. Deanna Devlin
Criminal Justice Department School of Arts and Sciences
Each semester, the RAM Program partners with faculty mentors throughout FSC’s four schools. Through mentorship, RAM scholars have the opportunity to conduct original research and learn invaluable skills in their future career field. We had the chance to speak with Dr. Devlin in our Faculty Tell-All exposé.
What are some of your research interests?
I focus specifically on school safety issues. In particular, one of the school safety strategies that I evaluate is the use of school police officers in schools. I try to see if having officers in schools impact the level of crime in the school or any other unintended consequences. Some of my research looks more specifically at the roles that officers are actually serving and evaluating the impacts of these roles.
How has your remote experience been?
In terms of mentoring my students, we were going to develop a survey and go to different
classrooms. The students would have learned how to code that data using those paper
surveys, but in this format, we are using Qualtrics instead. Even though we couldn’t
do things as we originally planned, technology allowed us to solve that problem in
a new way that might have been better than what we thought of before. So overall,
remote has brought out new opportunities for me to mentor students in a way I might
not have done before.
How has mentoring students been in general?
With the students I mentor now, we have weekly meetings and we talk about ways that
we are going to handle the study. Obviously, people prefer to be in person for a lot
of reasons, but the remote format hasn’t posed any real challenges. We still have
been able to accomplish everything we need to do and we still have the ability to
answer the research questions with the tools that are accessible to us in remote learning.
How was mentoring over the summer?
Mentoring over the summer was my first dive into mentoring students during the pandemic
in a remote format. All my previous mentoring experience had been more in person.
We focused on what was the best way to deliver the information and we had a lot of
meetings so we could talk through things. I would make tutorials for the student just
so he could refresh on the steps to do next. That’s something we came up with because
we didn’t meet as much. I would have never thought to do that, but being in a remote
format has brought new ways we can use technology.
What advice would you give to other faculty members who are interested in mentoring
undergraduate students in research?
• “It’s a rewarding experience.”
• “Do not only think of yourself as the mentor, but think of yourself as the mentee because the student can teach you a lot through this process.”
• “Remember that it’s a team effort to conduct the best research and achieve the goal that you’re looking to achieve.”
If you're interested in becoming a Faculty Mentor, please contact Dr. Lisa Cullington for more information. Email
