Whenever she needs a break, Niamh Tattersall heads to the Cottrell Amphitheater to a table beside the Waterfall Garden. And there, where the only sound is the whoosh of water, Tattersall sits.
“It’s that moment of peace,” she says. “I can sit and be.”
It’s not very often Tattersall can sit and be.
She’s made the dean’s list for the past six semesters, and she’s the assistant resident director at Caffey Hall, the on-campus home to more than 300 students, and a member of Alpha Chi Omega sorority and four honor societies.
She mentors HPU’s international students – she’s a native of England – and wherever she goes, she gets her share of questions about her first name and how to pronounce it.
“It’s Eve with a N – like Neve,” she tells anyone who asks. “It’s Gaelic.”
At HPU, Tattersall asks tough questions and broaches tough issues. She’s a hearing officer, a Student Justice and president of the Title IX Student Organization, which works to educate students and raise awareness on campus about sexual assault.
Tattersall is HPU’s Extraordinary Leader for the month of September. Her accomplishments and her campus involvement illustrate why. But to hear how she deals with a student in challenging situations, you get a real sense of who she is.
She listens to understand.
Digging Deep, Helping Others
Inside a classroom at Phillips Hall or Norton Hall, Tattersall gets ready for another student court. She’ll present the case on behalf of the university to a court that can include as many as three students and two faculty members.
Once she begins, she commands attention.
Her English accent gives her a sense of gravitas. But really, she commands attention because she is always prepared. She asks questions, she listens, and like putting together pieces of a puzzle, she connects for everyone how the student’s troubles came to be.
That’s how Peyton Davis sees it.
She’s a learning excellence specialist at HPU and the former assistant director of student conduct. She helps students who are hearing officers learn how to decipher the information they receive.
Tattersall, Davis says, does her job incredibly well.
“She’s not afraid to ask the tough questions,” Davis says. “I’m just really impressed by her. She just does it. She believes in holding students accountable.”
Tattersall believes in that. In May, she’ll graduate with a double major in both criminal justice and psychology. She has a penchant to be inquisitive, to dig deep. As a hearing officer, she sees her role as a way to help students, not punish them.
“Some of the hardest conversations are the most worthwhile conversations, and that can make our campus a healthier, more worthwhile place,” she says. “Isn’t that what we’re here for?”
Lessons Beyond The Classroom
As a sophomore, Tattersall helped start the Title IX Student Organization.
As a junior, she was elected by her sorority sisters in Alpha Chi Omega to be their vice president of new member education, and she played an active role in raising awareness about domestic violence and helping a domestic violence shelter run by the Family Service of the Piedmont.
This summer, as part of HPU’s Summer Undergraduate Research Institute, she interviewed at least 30 male and female inmates at the High Point Jail as part of a research project supervised by Dr. Thomas Dearden, an HPU criminal justice professor.
At the same time, she worked as a research assistant at The FMRT Group, a psychological services company headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Tattersall has learned the importance of being flexible. She grew up that way.
Because of her dad’s construction management job, Tattersall has lived in Bahrain, England, Israel and the suburbs outside Detroit and Chicago. When she was a teenager, her parents moved her and her three brothers to Livingston, New Jersey, where they live now.
When time came for college, Tattersall wanted a small private school on the East Coast with small class sizes, majors in both criminal justice and psychology and learning opportunities way beyond the classroom.
She found all that at HPU.
“Being here has taught me to use your surroundings and your resources to improve yourself and help others,” Tattersall says. “And be happy.”
And happy, she is. Take one of her best memories. She spent five days hiking the South Island of New Zealand, toting a 40-pound backpack and drinking tea out of tin pot twice a day.
She did that with her older brother, Pierce. HPU helped make that happen.
The Global Reach of HPU
Last spring, thanks to HPU’s Study Abroad program, she spent a semester studying at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
Afterward, she joined Pierce on their South Island hike. She later explored the Great Barrier Reef with her HPU sorority sister, Kristen Brokaw, and discovered a spider the size of her head and sand the color of her hair.
In Indonesia, she climbed an active volcano with a 75-year-old tour guide at 3 in the morning and stood so close to elephants at a sanctuary in Thailand she could see the scratches on their leathery skin from the chains they once wore.
Tattersall is no stranger to world travel. She’ll be 22 in January, and she has visited 30 different countries and five different continents. But last spring’s trip was a memory maker, part of her bucket list. And what did she learn?
“To think big and look at everything in a different way and not make judgements,” she says. “People everywhere live their lives in a different way and think in a different way, and it’s key for us to understand those differences.”
Tattersall’s family taught her that. HPU did, too.