Professor Nathan Innocente is an Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) of Sociology and teaches at the Mississauga undergraduate campus. He was recently profiled in the Medium, UTM's student newspaper. The full article is available on the Medium's website. Here's a short excerpt:
The face behind the popular SOC100
Sociology assistant professor Nathan Innocente’s current research focuses on white-collar crime
Have you or your friends taken SOC100? How many of them are pursuing a major or minor in sociology? Until I mentioned it to him, Nathan Innocente, an assistant professor at UTM’s Department of Sociology, never thought of himself as one of the few professors who can claim to have taught nearly every UTM student, as a result of teaching Introduction to Sociology.
Last week, I sat down with him to discuss his journey to academia, as well as the remarkable popularity of SOC100. Surprisingly enough, I have not taken SOC100.
Innocente describes his journey to academia and becoming a professor as “accidental” and “serendipitous.” He began as an undergraduate in criminology with hopes of pursuing law enforcement as a police officer or an RCMP member.
After about a year and a half in, Innocente’s career plans changed. He considered applying for law school, various government positions, and even contemplated a career in the military. Innocente credits one of his professors for suggesting the idea to pursue graduate school instead.
“I came to U of T to do a Masters in criminology, and then I ended up getting a job at a criminal justice sector NGO, so I was doing criminal justice research. At that point, I had still considered academia, but I liked the job that I had,” says Innocente. “I decided I would pick up some extra courses in the sociology department because they had so many methodology courses that criminology didn’t have at the time, like statistics and field methods, [and] survey methods. Then, almost by accident, I ended up getting another Masters in sociology. I liked sociology quite a bit, so I decided to apply for a Ph.D. and move into academia full time.”
Innocente has taught SOC100 for four years at UTM. When Innocente joined the UTM faculty, he consulted with professor Jayne Baker to learn how to run the course... Read the full article on Medium