Nikki Zumbach Harken

she, her, hers

Assistant Professor of Instruction

Internship Director and Co-Director of Cornerstone

Nikki Zumbach Harken
Location

Lang Hall 323

Phone
319 273-3707
Email
Nichole.harken@uni.edu

Nikki Zumbach Harken

she, her, hers

Assistant Professor of Instruction

Internship Director and Co-Director of Cornerstone

   UNI Communication Studies Internship

Dr. Harken serves as the Internship Director for the Department of Communication and Media and  the co-director of UNI’s Cornerstone course. Her publications include: the Media Career Guide for Bedford St. Martin’s Press and Next Step for Innovative Ink, both which prepare students for jobs in the 21st century.

Nikki teaches a range of courses for the department, including courses focused on speaking, writing, research, and leadership. She finds her students to be exciting, engaging, and entertaining and likes to be innovative and inventive in the classroom, creating mutually beneficial learning environments where her students can be creative, engaged, and produce high quality work. Her goal is to help students find their purpose and passion, to nurture those things, and help them realize 'it's not how smart you are, but how you are smart.' 

As a Courier reporter wrote about Nikki’s teaching in 2013, “If anybody could make a dry lecture on research citations digestible for freshman college students, it's Nikki Harken. The instructor of a course for first-year students at the University of Northern Iowa flipped a discussion of APA citation style, a common way of referencing sources in academic writing, into a giggling game of Jeopardy.”
 
Nikki has received numerous awards including six “Apple Polisher” awards from UNI students, the United Faculty Above and Beyond award, and received a Panther First award for service excellence. She has served as an honorary sideline coach for men's basketball, women's basketball, and football and has been nominated for the Liberal Arts Core Excellence in Teaching MWOne  Advising, and UNI Above and Beyond awards. Nikki has a strong belief in serving her community, which she sees as her duty and delight to foster the creation of systems that encourage personal responsibility and success and disrupt systems of inequity. She is the recipient of a Veridian Community Engagement Fellowship (2016) and has certifications in Green Dot, Mental Healthy Allyship, and QPR.
 
Education
  • Ed.D. Higher Education: Student Affairs, University of Northern Iowa
  • M.A., Communication Education, University of Northern Iowa
  • B.A., Communication/Theatre Arts Education (7-12) & Elementary Education, University of Northern Iowa
 
Research Interests
Dr. Harken's research is rooted in university/college exit programming - essentially, what students experience (knowledge, emotional, social) as they leave the university and how to develop systems that better serve students during their last moments in higher education.