Lander University’s Department of Psychological Science and Human Services makes plenty of successful alumni every year. Many go on to graduate school, work in government and schools, and overall, they aim to help the world develop a deep understanding of who we are.
These same skills led one graduate back to Lander after her own graduation to help high school students understand who they are, and to help them get a head start on their future through dual enrollment.
Brittany Brissey is a Greenwood native and a proud alum of Greenwood High School. She wished to have a career where she could help people, and after earning her associate’s degree, she moved to Anderson before returning to Greenwood, and to her home away from home: Lander University.
Brissey — like many college students — switched her major a handful of times, from education to history to math before finally landing on psychology. For Brissey, the excitement about psychology came with finally unveiling the unknown.
She recounts, “Once I was hooked, I just couldn’t get enough. I just love learning about [psychology] and new phenomena and new theories. It’s just a very interesting and fascinating subject.”
This intrigue led her to getting involved on campus. She served as a student success advisor in the Student Success Center and as a psychology student tutor. Coupled with her exemplary academics, she entered the job field early with several internships.
While a student at Lander, she was an intern at Cornerstone, a local rehabilitation center, and Mental Health First Aid in Abbeville. At Cornerstone, she worked with the organization’s prevention team helping plan events to promote their mission. Brissey worked behind the scenes to see how events come together, and how they support their mission statement.
With Mental Health First Aid, she assisted with administrative work and caught a glimpse of the field. Brissey remembers, “I got to be really involved in everything. I got to sit in on trainings and see how it impacted and that was really exciting.”
Not only did her internship experience help her career prospects, but Lander faculty members also propelled her to go further. In 2020, she graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology before her mentors propelled her ambition toward graduate school.
Brissey decided to pursue her master’s degree in 2022 while working as a student success advisor for the School of Nursing. One department faculty member encouraged Brissey to pursue her master’s while working at Lander as an employee. Luckily for Brissey, her extensive psychology experience gave her a solid foundation for her Master of Education in Instructional Technology at Lander.
She says, “I used a lot of psychological principles that I learned in my bachelor’s program. I’m huge on development and learning pedagogy, so applying that to instructional technology where you make sure what you’re doing fits the need just fits.”
While the two may seem unrelated, her degree took her in the right direction, especially for her senior capstone project. Brissey’s project focused on lesson plans for a college seminar course. She created the curriculum from scratch, aiming to increase students’ metacognitive awareness about their own success. After graduating with a 4.0 GPA in 2023, she accepted her current role as the director of dual enrollment at Lander.
In her role, she assists high school students taking dual enrollment courses as well as organizing recruitment events in high school classrooms. Her experience at Lander gave her more than practical world experience. It also gave her core skills in problem-solving and communication, which have helped her talk to people she may have nothing in common with.
Brissey said, “It really helped me get out of my shell and get comfortable speaking.”
Her speech is a cornerstone of her role as the director of dual enrollment. She is constantly consulting with parents and students, and those core skills have helped her breakthrough many difficult conversations. She said, “You have to handle situations with empathy and firm guidance. I can understand where their brain is better. I learned a lot about education, and where students are and where we meet them and how to reach them.”
All of Brissey’s work and educational experiences have led her down an incredible journey of coaching students toward their own ambitions.
Since she was a high school student, Brissey has always been enthralled with psychology, and Lander University helped her foster that interest. As an alumna of Lander’s psychology program, Brissey’s career and her personal testimony speak volumes about its supportive faculty and successful students.