Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Chanel Rodriguez
Assistant Professor and Faculty Advisor, School of Counseling
Tell us about your background.
I am a first-generation American, born in Orlando, Fla. My father is Iranian and my mother is Cuban, so I had a very diverse and multicultural upbringing. I attended the University of Central Florida and got a degree in general psychology. When I was ready for graduate school, I wanted to focus on clinical mental health counseling and earned my master’s from Georgia State University. I then found a passion for educating the next generation of counselors, so I pursued my Ph.D. in counseling and counselor education from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I am proud to be an Assistant Professor in the School of Counseling at Marymount, teaching students in the Master’s of Counseling program who are specializing in Clinical Mental Health Counseling.
What drew you to clinical mental health counseling?
I was lucky because I knew what I wanted to do from a young age. Some people get to college and change their major many times, but that wasn’t a problem for me. Since I was 14, I knew I wanted to be a clinician. I was bullied and discriminated against a lot during my middle school and high school years in Florida, because there weren’t a lot of people like me who were both Cuban and Iranian. After those experiences, I wanted to be a counselor who worked with kids like me. I wanted to be a resource to support kids who go through what I went through.
How did that evolve into becoming a professor?
What’s funny is that I initially didn’t want to be a teacher — I just wanted to be a counselor. But in graduate school, I wanted to do more. I was working at a multilingual clinic with children of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers who were doing play therapy and talk therapy. I saw such a great need in this community and didn’t feel like I was able to do as much as I wanted to in the position I was in. And I thought, ‘how can I have a bigger impact on these kids and adolescents?’ Looking at the academic landscape where I was, there were no Latina or Middle Eastern people in higher education, particularly in counseling. If there’s less representation, there’s less instruction on how to provide services to diverse populations. So I went and got my doctorate so I could teach other people how to serve those communities.
How has your experience teaching at Marymount been so far?
This is my fourth year here and I have really enjoyed it thus far. I’m very fortunate to be surrounded by such incredible fellow faculty members and hardworking and passionate students. Being in academia can be very hard — it gets stressful, but my Marymount students always inspire me to keep pushing forward. The students love learning and want to be better citizens and counselors. It’s amazing to see them grow personally and professionally from the beginning of the program to the end. The University’s prime location gives students access to some incredible internship sites and it’s always amazing to see the students learning and growing in the field. I feel like it’s the whole package, and the small community and one-on-one relationships I get to form with students is what makes it so enjoyable to be at Marymount.
What do you emphasize most in your teaching?
I teach a course on multicultural counseling, and I emphasize to students that multicultural counseling is ethical counseling. When students know how to reach people of different backgrounds, they can provide a higher quality of care. While we need multilingual counselors to reach underserved communities, that’s just part of the equation. We also need counselors who understand the cultural nuances of their clients’ backgrounds. That way, counselors can speak to the whole person and their needs.
What does it mean to you to work at a diverse university that is a Hispanic-Serving Institution?
It’s pretty amazing to have such a diversity of leadership at Marymount and our leader, President Becerra, who is a strong Cuban woman. When I came here, it was really inspiring to see someone who looked like me and someone from a similar background be at such a high level in academia. I think her leadership has brought Hispanic excellence to the forefront of the University’s image as a Hispanic-Serving Institution. It shows how valuable Hispanic perspectives, knowledge and creativity can be to enriching the experience at Marymount and in our larger communities.
