OSU professor recognized for financial education
Friday, November 20, 2020
The Association for Financial Counseling and Planning Education (AFCPE) named Dr. Kate Mielitz, Oklahoma State University human development and family science assistant professor, the Mary Ellen Edmondson Educator of the Year.
The Educator of the Year award honors exceptional service through teaching, outreach and mentoring. Mielitz’s experience, ranging from providing individual financial counseling to teaching OSU classes like family resource management, stood out from the more than 1,450 AFCPE members worldwide for her experience serving the most vulnerable.
“As a private financial counselor, I often work with people who are in financial straits, who are struggling sometimes to put food on the table,” Mielitz said. “I help them prepare to build a financial foundation, create a budget and use credit as a tool.”
Mielitz spent years as a financial counselor to U.S. military families before pursuing a doctoral degree in personal financial planning and becoming a professor. Now, she researches the unique financial needs of demographics including college students, recovering substance abusers, men transitioning into work-release prisons and families experiencing homelessness. She is on an AFCPE task force to support financial practitioners in implementing research-proven financial counseling methods and is set to become an AFCPE board member in January 2021.
“I fell in love with seeing people who had faced financial hardship realize they still had control and that they could make the choices they need to make in order to move in a more positive direction,” Mielitz said. “That is really what has inspired me to be in this field and stay in this field for so long.”
Mielitz brings this financial counseling experience to the OSU classroom. She worked with faculty in the Department of Human Development and Family Science to launch the Certified Financial Planner™ certificate, an 18-credit hour certificate designed to prepare students for AFCPE certification.
“In the College of Education and Human Sciences, we are trained to put the person first, and that’s a valuable skill when managing money,” Mielitz said. “Money is simply a tool, so when we put the person first, we’re able to help them improve their lives.”
Mielitz challenges her students to consider perspectives of individuals with fewer resources through assignments such as reading “Evicted” and conducting a “shoebox stress test,” in which students visualize the impact of a financial crisis such as a job loss by removing essential items from a shoebox representing their financial budget. While Mielitz is working to convert her shoebox stress test into a phone app, it is currently available to financial counselors worldwide as a Google spreadsheet.
Even as her students prepare to provide financial advice, Mielitz says many are learning to make financial decisions ranging from paying apartment rent to applying for credit cards and insurance for the first time.
“My students give me the opportunity to share something I love,” Mielitz said. “Students are absolutely vested in understanding how to set themselves up for financial success because college students just by nature are vulnerable as they are starting out.”
Those “aha!” moments – whether in the OSU classroom, in workshops sharing with AFCPE practitioners how to implement research, or providing individual financial advice to individuals in crisis - give Mielitz inspiration.
“This award is about my students, some of whom I’ve taught for several years now,” Mielitz said in the award video. “Every single one of them has had such a huge impact, and seeing what they do, seeing how they embrace and take the information I am sharing with them into their own lives and then out into the world.”
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MEDIA CONTACT: Brittany Bowman | 405-744-9347 | brittany.bowman@okstate.edu