Associate Professor and Chair of Counselor Education Brigid Noonan followed a more circuitous path to an academic career than most faculty. She didn’t complete her undergraduate degree until she was 28, and, prior to pursuing graduate work at the University of Maryland, she held a variety of positions—on both coasts. She worked as a research psychologist at the National Institutes of Mental Health; she offered workshops on stress management, substance abuse prevention and HIV/AIDS in the workplace; she managed administrative operations for a financial consulting/investment banking firm; and she interviewed families for the VA Medical Center in Palo Alto.

In an interval between positions (and coasts, as she moved from D.C. to San Francisco) she lived inCosta Rica, studying Spanish and providing assistance to an elderly woman who had just lost her husband. Here, she met people from all over the world, and spent some time exploring the country on her own: “It is an entirely different world when you travel alone in a country where you don’t know the language. It forever changes you. Everyone should have this experience, at least once in a lifetime.”

In San Francisco, Noonan briefly enrolled in a Clinical Psychology program. It wasn’t a good fit. (“I hated it!”) But she loved San Francisco: even though she had to work multiple jobs just to pay the rent, she reflects that if she had moved there in her 20s, she probably would be there still. Instead, she reapplied to graduate programs—this time to programs that emphasized more relational and less data-driven approaches to counseling and psychology. She was accepted—and completed both the M.A. and the Ph.D.—at the University of Maryland–College Park. Her first academic appointment was at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, an historically black college east of Chesapeake Bay. A few years later she was offered a position at Stetson, and her husband—a lifelong and established resident of Maryland—willingly embraced the change such a move would bring. For that, she says, nearly a decade later, “I remain grateful to him every single day.”

At Stetson, Noonan teaches courses in marriage and family counseling, social diversity, human growth and development, and sexuality counseling. In her own work, she is interested in the pedagogies of counselor education—how students in CE programs are taught—as well as the internationalization of CE programs and the resulting imperative to take different cultures and non-western approaches into account when teaching students for the counseling profession. She is a strong advocate of ensuring that students enrolled in the program experience difference, whether through travel, which “gets people out of their boxes in transformative ways,” or by asking them to “spend time with someone utterly different from themselves—someone they don’t think they could work with effectively in a counseling relationship.” She wants students to engage and explore their fears about difference; she wants them to feel stretched by these encounters and experiences. As she tells students new to the program, “You will not be the same person at the end of the program. What you learn and experience with us will transform you.”

Noonan also maintains a small private practice in Orlando, specializing in adolescent issues, couples and family therapy, GLBT issues, and more. She finds that seeing clients keeps her nimble, directly enhancing her teaching and scholarship: “If you haven’t had the experience being a clinician, it’s hard to work as effectively with students.” She has chaired the Department of Counselor Education, overseeing programs in DeLand and Celebration, since 2007.

In addition to everything else she does, Noonan also makes physical training a priority, devoting close to 15 hours each week to exercise and training for various competitions. (To make the time, she generally gets up very early—around 5 a.m.)  An avid triathlete, she reports that she has always been athletic: growing up, she took ballet, swam, and competed in track. Now, she enjoys training alone—it offers a space and a solitude that sustains her. Recently, she completed an Iron Man 70.3, improving her previous time by one hour. She is currently training for the Iron Man 140.6 in Lake Placid, where participants will swim 2.4 miles, bike 112 miles, and then run 26.2 miles, covering a total of 140.6 miles.  Her goal is to finish in 14 hours. In early December 2012, she hopes to join the Stetson contingent for the Tough Mudder race in Tampa—but certainly after Lake Placid, that will be a piece of cake. (Dr. Noonan and many other Stetson faculty are featured on the Academic Affairs website.)

By Dr. Karen Kaivola, Associate Provost for Faculty Development

and Professor of English