Huge congratulations go out to Gemini Creason-Parker who was awarded the 2025 Outstanding Mentoring Award for Graduate and Professional Students!! This award recognizes her great mentoring of undergraduates in her research. These awards seek to honor Graduate and Professional Students who have demonstrated outstanding success in mentoring undergraduate students or peers at Texas A&M University. Awardees will be recognized at Graduate and Professional School annual mentoring celebration ceremony. Here is some of the eligibility criteria for the award:
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Distinguished record as a mentor of undergraduate students or peers, positively affecting academic, social, psychological, and career developmental outcomes.
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Reputation for facilitating student learning by making complex disciplinary ideas understandable and meaningful to students.
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Establishment and maintenance of high academic standards.
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Positive role modeling as a professional, with personal integrity, high ethical standards, and achievable standards for personal excellence.
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Exemplary, consistent and ongoing guidance of mentees regarding resources within and outside the university, conflict resolution, and advocacy.
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Substantial and positive influence on mentees’ academic and professional pursuits that may include teaching, research, co-authorship on publications, co-presentations at conferences, or other relevant scholarly activities.
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Embodiment of the competencies associated with successful mentoring including: maintaining effective communication, aligning expectations, assessing understanding, fostering independence, promoting professional development, and supporting well-being.
Gemini Creason-Parker has been an Aggie Research Program team leader, and eventually worked with a team of total 28 undergraduates — whom she trained over several months in quantitative and qualitative coding methods to analyze Law & Order: SVU over most of the series run (including crossover episodes that fell within her rubric). Gemini's dissertation describes the project as follows: "This dissertation examines how SVU portrays rape cases and how it engages with rape myths in dialogue. The lead researcher developed a coding framework based on eight validated rape myth acceptance scales and prior scholarly literature. A team of undergraduate students coded rape cases across 24 seasons and transcribed myth-related dialogue from the first 10 seasons. While SVU is assumed to challenge rape myths, this study critically evaluates whether it disrupts or reinforces these harmful stereotypes."
As Gemini's mentor, Dr. Sarah Gatson writes: "From my work with her, I have seen the sophisticated and rigorous training materials she developed, as well as how she supported her team in developing into lead authors and presenters themselves, as she also garnered funding to take several of her team members to present at conferences." Gemini's undergraduate students have presented at Southwestern Social Science Association's Annual Meeting, American Society of Crminiology Annual Meeting, and twice at Student Research Week at Texas A&M University.
Congratulations, Gemini, on such a wonderful, and well-deserved honor!