The College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University created two new awards this year to acknowledge faculty and staff who make exceptional contributions to mentoring students outside the classroom. These two Outstanding Undergraduate Mentorship Awards are nominated by students, endorsed by their chair or director, and selected by a student committee.

These awards – the Outstanding Undergraduate Mentorship Award in Advising, Student Success, and Career Learning and the Outstanding Undergraduate Mentorship Award in Research and Creative Practice, Co-Curricular and Extracurricular Activities, and Supporting Student Belonging – were presented at the 2025 College of Arts & Letters Faculty and Staff Welcome Reception on Sept. 29 at the Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center.

The inaugural recipients of these awards are:

• Jennifer Gansler, Senior Academic Specialist in the Department of Romance and Classical Studies, Outstanding Undergraduate Mentorship Award in Advising, Student Success, and Career Learning.

• Natalie Phillips, Associate Professor in the Department of English, Outstanding Undergraduate Mentorship Award in Research and Creative Practice, Co-Curricular and Extracurricular Activities, and Supporting Student Belonging.

Jennifer Gansler

Jennifer Gansler was nominated for the Outstanding Undergraduate Mentorship Award in Advising, Student Success, and Career Learning by the co-chairs of the La Casa Living and Learning Community, which is a new on-campus living and learning community at MSU that opened this fall where Spanish is the primary language. Gansler serves as Faculty Advisor for La Casa.

In their nomination letter, one of the students wrote that “Jennifer Gansler has been a constant in the creation of La Casa and has taken time out of her regular schedule to assist in connecting the four of us co-chairs to the resources and faculty on campus that has helped make this project possible…When we have run into roadblocks, she pushes behind the scenes for us to be taken seriously, and always treats us as peers that she is hoping to learn and grow from…On top of all this, she has allowed us and even given us the majority of the credit for this initiative of La Casa when she was the one who pushed CAL to support the funding and proposed the idea which really highlights her selflessness in this whole project…She refuses to sit in a singular box when it comes to being a mentor and makes sure that she is not only checking all the boxes, but double checking that we are fully supported.” 

Another student wrote that “Jennifer Gansler has uplifted our voices since the beginning. She described an initial goal of letting La Casa be student-led, and she has embodied that goal every day since. She’s offered us the opportunity to be decision-makers and leaders on campus, a capacity that very few undergraduates have the privilege to be offered. She even lets us take all the credit for this award-winning program, when she has really been the backbone since its inception. She’s also incredibly reliable. Every time we come to her with questions, struggles, or blunders, she listens and helps without judgement.”

Natalie Phillips

Natalie Phillips was nominated for this award by students she has worked with and mentored in the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab (DHLC), a collaborative space for interdisciplinary research that Phillips founded and is the co-director for.

This past year, Phillips managed more than 15 undergraduate students and one graduate student working across three projects exploring aesthetic responses to poetry, analyzing the enculturation of instrumental music processing, and archiving the works of art that everyday people created during the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of those students wrote that “Dr. Phillips is well-respected by her colleagues, students, and peers for the excellence of her scholarship as well as her unparalleled commitment to undergraduate research and education. Her strengths lie in her insistence upon a lab structure that disrupts traditional hierarchies, her transparency with students, and her willingness to advocate for the needs and interests of all her undergraduate mentees.” 

The student added that “Dr. Phillips has created a model for what the future of arts and humanities scholarship can look like, setting forth a cohort of scholars who are motivated to radically democratize their research in an effort to combat the exploitative nature of traditional academic work… Her work promotes CAL’s culture of care, emphasizing the humanity of every student with whom she works. She also prioritized cross-disciplinary connections, ensuring that each of her students, regardless of major, has the opportunity to connect the lab’s research to their individual academic interests…My time at Michigan State has been fundamentally shaped by my opportunity to work with her, and my future scholarly career would have been a pipe dream without her guidance. I submit this nomination not only as a professional courtesy but as an attempt to give back to Dr. Phillips a fraction of what she has done for me and my peers.”

By Kim Popiolek