Alumni Award Recipients

Susan B. Tiano
Faculty Teaching Award, 2009

Susan Tiano is professor of sociology and interim acting director of the UNM Latin American and Iberian Institute. She is the kind of prof who makes you wonder how your life might be different if you'd taken her classes.

She certainly would have sparked your interest . . . Susan's classes run the gamut from "deviant behavior" to "rich and poor nations." A former grad assistant recalls students wishing they could stay for extra periods just so they could find out a little bit more about, say, white collar crime.

She certainly would have raised your standards . . . Grad students know it as the Dr. Susan Tiano Standard: undertake everything you do with enthusiasm and drive, and always strive for the highest quality.

She certainly would have inspired you to look at the world around you and to work to improve it . . . She thinks internationally. "I hadn't thought beyond New Mexico and Albuquerque. She shows it's so much bigger than that!" says one student.

He had been concerned that academia was too far removed from the real world's problems but Susan made him realize that scholarship could be relevant to the real world. Ideas count!

Susan's ideas -- and the knowledge behind them -- are no doubt part of the reason that Governor Richardson selected her as Co-Chair of his Task Force on Poverty Reduction.

She certainly would have encouraged your research ideas and projects . . . One of her master's students says he needed encouragement to complete his thesis. Sensing that, she went to his office in full cheerleader mode and shouted, "GO! GO! GO! DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! STOP MESSING AROUND! Then she left.

She certainly wouldn't have let you just get by . . . A former doctoral student writes: "by choosing Susan as my dissertation advisor, I knew (1) that I'd have to work very hard to finish; (2) that with Susan's guidance and input, my dissertation would be guaranteed to be of only the highest quality and (3) that with Susan's name on the dissertation my academic qualifications would go way up.

She certainly wouldn't have skipped over that paragraph that increased the word count but didn't say much . . . She goes through your work with a fine-tooth comb, "but I never felt as though I was beaten up," says a student."

And she certainly would have taught you by example how to be humble, flexible, and generous . . . Again, in a student's words: "She makes fun of herself as an absent-minded professor, but she's brilliant. She shows that a top academic mind can be accessible and approachable."

And another: "She freely engages her students when no one is watching and when she seems to stand little to gain personally from the exchange -- because she is a teacher at heart."

And that about sums up why we're giving our Alumni Association Faculty Teaching Award to Susan Tiano. Both because she is a teacher at heart and because she changes the lives of her students for the better . . .