Kylie Harlan, M.S.

Kylie Harlan was born and raised in Sherman, Texas, the largest city in a county of rural towns near the Red River. This surrounding rurality meant her school's FFA chapter was a comfortable place to land during her freshman year of high school. At the time, her family was not directly involved in agriculture, although her grandmother was raised on a dairy in Tennessee where she would spend her holidays. While in high school, she began showing livestock through the FFA program. This hobby carried on for the next four years, and her two show heifers turned into a cattle operation that is now run by her family in North Texas. 

When deciding what college to attend, Harlan applied to four universities. Ultimately, the campus tour in Lubbock felt most like home to her, and she has been committed to Texas Tech since. During her undergraduate program, she was invovled in several organizations such as Agricultural Communicators of Tomorrow (ACT), Block & Bride, and served as president of Ag Council for Davis College. Simultaneously, she completed a handful of internships including interning with Texas Peanut Producers and the Davis College Congressional Internship in Washington, D.C. Harlan graduated Summa Cum Laude in December 2021, earning her B.S. in Agricultural Communications and double minoring in public relations and political science. 

Knowing she wanted a master's degree, Harlan began her post-graduate studies as a research and teaching assistant under Dr. Courtney Meyers in a position funded by the USDA Higher Education Grant, iVisit: Interactive Virtual Tours for Advancing Food and Agricultural Sciences. Upon graduating, an opportunity came up to apply as a lecturer in the Department of Agricultural Education and Communications. Harlan knew she had cultivated strong connections in West Texas and would get to continue working with the great people in the department, so she jumped in headfirst. 

Currently, Harlan is focusing her research endeavors on experiences in the classroom with her teaching appointment, mainly using qualitative methods through student reflections. She enjoys thinking of ways to implement artificial intelligence (AI) in academia and study its effectiveness. In collaborative projects, she has worked with graduate teaching assistants to determine how undergraduates perceive ethical AI policies and how they respond to them.