New class profile: ‘Careers in Crime’

Hickman aims to help students understand what myths hold true to what the research says. She wants students to learn “how to find information to assess whether something really bears any relationship to reality
or not.”

The class is only offered twice a year and has a huge waiting list each time, Hickman said.

“It gets a lot more interest than we have capacity for,” she said. As an upper-division course, the class is open to anyone. Since it fills so quickly, Hickman pointed out that another option is the course titled “Careers in Crime.”

“For some reason, it hasn’t been getting as many students as we thought it should,” Hickman said. “But the students that have taken it so far just rave about how useful and interesting it is.”

“Careers in Crime” is a hybrid course, meaning the class meets once a week in person and the rest of the course is online. Hickman said that the online portion is great because of how easy it is to make the information available to students. They are able to watch videos and do readings at their own pace.

Hickman teaches with assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice Jody Sundt. They offer the class to give students an opportunity to explore the many careers that have to do with crime.

Hickman and Sundt bring guest speakers in to the class from all sorts of careers in the field. These people come in to talk about what it’s really like to work in their field.

For the online portion of the course, students are directed to actual websites where they can do job searches and find information about careers. What are these jobs really like? How much do these jobs pay? How do they affect your personal life?

Hickman said that one of the main reasons they began offering this class is because they found that students interested in careers in the field were not coming to the department and asking these questions until their senior year. And at that point, they had limited options to explore in order to find out what was right for them.

“So we wanted to try to offer this lower-division course to really get students on a path of using their time at PSU to explore and understand what’s out there,” Hickman said. “And how to make use of the freely available resources on campus and around the country to explore and ultimately get
a job.”