The assignment seemed simple enough. Get a piece of paper and write down your dream job.
“I wrote down aviation,” says Shelby Sykes, an O’Neill Public Safety Management major.
In fall 2022, Sykes was in Stacy Lozer’s Career Development class. As the students worked on their latest assignment, Lozer told them to also write down potential barriers and other careers connected to their dream job.
With each section Sykes drew, he was creating a map of how to arrive at his career goal.
Chris Daley was searching for a program to support leaders in child and family welfare agencies around Indiana.
“The people who run child and family welfare agencies get into the work because they want to do good in the world,” he says. “But they don’t always have the leadership training necessary to take themselves or their organizations to the next level in serving their clients.”
Daley is the executive director for the Indiana Association of Resources and Child Advocacy, representing 100 agencies from across the state. He wanted a leadership training program for IARCA’s Institute for Excellence that would provide core information needed to help leaders keep their organizations functioning well.
“It’s incredibly difficult to keep your doors open when you’re doing child and family welfare services,” Daley explains. “We want these organizations to be around a long time until children and families no longer need them. At the same time, they can only help their clients if they have a durable and sustainable business.”
O’Neill Assistant Professor Christian Buerger was attending school in East Germany when the Berlin Wall was torn down and Germany was reunified.
“The transitional period that followed afterward was extremely difficult,” he recalls.
During that time, everyday life began to change quickly for Buerger and the reunification brought new challenges for him and his family. The school he attended in East Germany didn’t offer the classes he needed to take to attend college. But after the West German system of school choice was implemented, his family was able to find a better setting for him. But even that wasn’t without its challenges.
The catalyst for Alicia Dinkeldein’s (BSCJ’22) current career came during her Principles of Public Safety class in 2019. O’Neill Assistant Professor Peter Federman was showing a video of Skid Row, a well-known homeless camp in Los Angeles. The video focused on the community-based approach officers take in getting to know the people who live there and connecting them with resources.
The personal connections caught Dinkeldein’s attention.
“I realized that was what I wanted to do,” she says. “I wanted to make one-on-one connections with people to figure out what they truly needed so I could help them.”
What she saw in class that day eventually sparked a new position she would create from scratch. At the time, Dinkeldein was not only an O’Neill student earning her Criminal Justice degree, she also was working for Indianapolis EMS Ambulance Service.
Dinkeldein became part of IEMS’ community response team at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, following up with people who called 911 but didn’t meet the criteria for ambulance transport due to IEMS’ Treat from Home protocol.
“Some individuals we encountered were homebound with transportation insecurities and needed assistance with getting food and medications —they weren’t ambulance-level emergencies,” she explains.
In 2011, Eric Grommon was on the hunt for jobs after completing his Ph.D. the previous year. He envisioned himself working within government organizations focused on research and analysis in the criminal justice field, but then an opportunity to work at O’Neill popped up on his radar.
“I got a nudge from colleagues who said O’Neill seemed to be a place that would give me opportunities to work with practitioners to figure out how the justice system impacts the community,” he recalls.
In the 11 years since he arrived on campus, Grommon has used his role as an applied criminologist to focus on corrections, the reentry of justice-involved individuals, and the evaluation of justice system programs, policies, and operations.
“Professor Grommon has a passion for improving governance and societal well-being, and has pursued exemplary, impactful research during his career,” said Siân Mooney, dean of the O’Neill School.
In January 2023, his dedication to advancing the criminal justice field led to a new honor. He was named a Paul H. O’Neill Professor within the O’Neill School, a professorship established in 2019 through a $30 million gift from IU alumnus Paul H. O’Neill.
