黑料专区

Professor of Psychology Dr. Don Poe participated in his last Pfeiffer graduation ceremony earlier this month. He says he owes his distinguished career to several factors. The first was his response to a false start in the 1960s during his first two years at Duke University. He had enrolled in its College of Engineering (now the Edmund T. Pratt Jr. School of Engineering), having followed the advice of his high school guidance counselor in northern Virginia.

The counselor had told Poe that the country needed more engineers. Poe wouldn鈥檛 become one of them. After his sophomore year, he showed his father his poor grades and told him that he hated engineering. 鈥淚 think it hates you back,鈥� Poe鈥檚 father said, showing a sense of humor that Professor Poe not only inherited but would also make an attractive hallmark of his lectures at Pfeiffer.

Ava Lowder 鈥�28, a rising junior at Pfeiffer from Mt. Pleasant, N.C., is a psychology major who took several courses taught by Poe. She said that he communicated not only with humor in the classroom but also with 鈥減assion and authenticity.鈥�

鈥淗e captured people鈥檚 attention when he spoke,鈥� she added. 鈥淗e had many unique stories that people genuinely wanted to listen to, and he knew how to connect those stories to classroom material as well as meaningful life lessons. He also created an environment where students felt comfortable participating rather than being afraid of making mistakes.鈥�

Poe鈥檚 move away from engineering to psychology took hold during an excellent introductory course in psychology at Duke, from which he earned a B.A. degree in the subject, in 1968. The course included six hours of research and several experiments, for which Poe was the subject. 鈥淚 fell in love with it,鈥� he said. 鈥淚 concluded that studying people was great because I love people.鈥�

Poe also holds two advanced degrees in , which he earned after a stint in the U.S. Navy: a master鈥檚 degree from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and a doctorate from Cornell University, which he earned in 1980.

He tried very hard to make his introductory courses at Pfeiffer, where he began teaching in 2004, just as appealing as that very first Duke course. And in large part he has succeeded: psychology consistently ranks fifth or sixth at Pfeiffer, in terms of the numbers of students majoring in the subject. They鈥檙e drawn to it for several reasons: It can be really interesting, its required semester hours (40) enables students to make it part of a double major, and, as Poe became adept at communicating, it is , not just counseling and experimental psychology.

鈥淚鈥檓 just trying to show them again and again that all this stuff that we talked about isn’t just for the exam,鈥� he said. 鈥淵ou can use it.鈥�

The students contemplating careers involving research could find an excellent example in Poe, who has published numerous papers and given invited addresses on a range of subjects, from 鈥淐ustoms Officials and Their Search Decisions鈥� to 鈥淭he Salem Witch Trials.鈥� 

The piece on the search decisions of (1980), written with Robert Kraut, has been described as 鈥渁 landmark study鈥� examining how people evaluate truthfulness in real-world scenarios, specifically analyzing the behaviors that influence decisions to search people going through customs. Among other things, it found that search decisions were driven less by actual guilt than by perceived comportment (nervousness, demeanor).

Although Poe can point to numerous academic accomplishments at Pfeiffer, he says he鈥檚 most proud of the social relationships he has forged with his students and colleagues. He loves singing and playing the guitar, for example, having become a mainstay of a faculty bluegrass band called Brain Trust.

He recently spent an hour or so with Lowder talking about her interests and recommending books she might read to learn more. He鈥檚 an inveterate reader himself, mostly of nonfiction. One of the books he suggested was Poe鈥檚 own , which she described as 鈥渟imilar to a trivia book but it includes short stories, not just questions and answers.鈥� 

Poe has attended the weddings of five or six students. He has 398 Facebook friends and guarantees that at least 95 percent of them have a connection to Pfeiffer. 鈥淚鈥檓 accepting applications for a couple of more Facebook friends from the Pfeiffer family,鈥� he joked recently. 鈥淧feiffer grows on you,鈥� he added. 鈥淲e call ourselves a family, and after a short while, I came to believe it. Basically, all of my friends are at Pfeiffer. It鈥檚 just been the perfect fit for me.鈥�