A professor and coach, Jennifer McCrickerd was raised in the wilds of suburban Orange County California. She went to high school in Newport Beach and then Wellesley College because she wanted to go to medical school and Wellesley had the highest acceptance rate for women into medical school. She did not, however, connect this high acceptance rate into college with the difficulty of the pre-med program and a few weeks after one semester in college, realized that she needed to enjoy what she was learning while she was learning it and that she is not the sort of person who can easily suffer through things in the hope that it will pay off 8 years down the line.
In the following semesters, she entertained a number of majors (French, Psychology, Political Science, Economics) until settling on Philosophy as the department where the conversations she wanted to be participating in were most likely to be happening. She made the very large mistake of taking about twice as many courses in philosophy as she needed to (thus, ending up with the near equivalent of two philosophy majors) and then, given her clear affinity for taking philosophy classes, went to graduate school. Despite going to graduate school with only the intention of learning more about philosophy and, particularly, ethics, she learned, when given the opportunity to teach, that as much as she loved doing and reading philosophy, what she really loved is teaching philosophy and working closely with students to help them make the most of their lives.
Professor McCrickerd places herself within the tradition of American Philosophy (seeing as predecessors Ralph Waldo Emerson, Josiah Royce, William James, John Dewey and in her career has taught a wide variety of courses on ethics (AI & ethics, environmental ethics, business ethics, general ethics), higher education (history, present and future), and, sometimes, a course on dogs, another on pets, another on friendship, etc. Additionally, she was Director of the Drake University Honors Program for nearly 10 years. Her current scholarship is in the area of teaching and learning, specifically better understanding how college students learn, what is most beneficial to their success after college and ways that teachers can create environments that are most conducive to learning.
In she is trained as a coach working with students to prepare for or make the best of college, working with departments to enhance their functioning and working with members in higher ed administration to be more effective with their teams.