Not your typical mentorship

“I want them to know they have a professor who cares about them as a person, and believes in them as a student and scholar.”

At first glance, Associate Professor Jessie Hewitt’s mentorship of Annalina Lowden ’26 might seem a bit surprising. Hewitt teaches history courses, while Lowden is a Johnston student aspiring to become a clinical mental health counselor.

But as Hewitt and Lowden have found, a professor’s focus and a student’s major don’t have to match up exactly for mentoring to click. “It’s fun for me to have an advisee who isn’t necessarily going into a career directly related to history, such as teaching or librarianship,” Hewitt said. “Annalina really cares about incorporating insights from history into her future career in the mental health field.”

Hewitt has extensively researched the relationship between disability and gender in the 19th century, exploring the Hospital Archives in Paris and diving deep into the intersection of psychiatry and politics. Lowden first met Hewitt while taking her History of Disability class, and “liked her approach with history and how these issues were treated,” she said. “I could compare this with what I was learning in other classes.” Wanting to dig further into the topic, she later signed up for Hewitt’s History of Madness seminar, further enriching her understanding of mental health’s historical contexts.

Hewitt appreciates that Lowden has “professional goals, but is exactly what you want in a liberal arts college student—someone who has particular ambitions but is also intellectually flexible enough to realize you don’t need to confine yourself to one discipline. It enhances what you are learning if you move around the edges.”

Lowden is a behavioral specialist at Laurel Park Behavioral Health Center in Pomona, working with patients who have schizophrenia. Learning about the condition in Hewitt’s classes and how it once was treated “definitely inspired me to want to go into that field,” she said. This confidence is exactly what Hewitt hopes to instill in her mentees.

“I want them to know they have a professor who cares about them as a person, and believes in them as a student and scholar,” Hewitt said. “I want them to get the strongest, most solid foundation and succeed in life.”