In Sept. 2022, criminal justice majors Timia Bonds and Katelyn Drown created the Crime Lab Club to provide students with practical experience through hands-on criminal justice activities on Union’s campus.
The weekly meetings will feature guest speakers and presentations centered around a criminal justice topic before providing correlated applied exercises.
“It’s mainly to boost our skills and our knowledge,” co-president Katelyn Drown said. “Having the applications and sort of classes [within the club] is definitely going to be able to help us and give us knowledge that we wouldn’t have if we hadn’t formed the club.”
With criminal justice being a newly added major to the university as of 2020, the interest in the subject at Union is still growing. As of right now, the curriculum contains a mixture of psychology, sociology and criminal justice classes.
“We talked to our [academic] advisor, Dr. Davingon, and were like ‘we need more applied classes’ and he told us it would be a while to get more classes added to the schedule,” the club’s other co-president Timia Bonds said. “He was like, ‘In the meantime you could start a club to make up for that and supplement [the program],’ so that’s what we did.”
Along with the work of these two students, the additional help of faculty such as Phil Davignon, the advisor for criminal justice majors, and Johnny Jines, the club’s official faculty advisor, has been essential to the club’s beginnings.
“We’re really blessed with our advisors and who wants to help out with it,” Bonds said. “They’ve been very hands-on about helping us.”
In the upcoming semester, the club has a mock crime scene planned on campus in collaboration with local forensics professors and a professional forensics lab located in Memphis.
The Crime Lab Club is open to the entire student body and is a resource for majors and non-majors alike to be able to learn more about criminal justice outside of the classroom.
“It’s meant to be fun but also educational,” Drown said. “It’s not going to be a class lecture type of thing, but it’s showing people what to expect in their future careers.”
The club plans to meet every Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. in either the Bowld Student Commons or the Sociology Department.