Sadie Wilks, 2025 C-I Teaching & Service Excellence Award recipient
June 02, 2025
When Sadie Wilks steps into the classroom, she brings more than lessons—she brings real-world experience, deep care for her students, and a passion for strong communication. As a Senior Instructor in the Manship School of Mass Communication, Sadie draws on her 17 years in public relations to help students build confidence and clarity in how they express themselves.
Her commitment hasn’t gone unnoticed. Manship Dean Kim Bissell calls her “a steadfast advocate for student communication skills development,” noting that her teaching “plays a pivotal role in enhancing students' multimodal communication skills,” and helps ensure “students not only learn these vital skills but also gain the confidence to apply them in real-world contexts.”
Sadie joined LSU in 2015 and quickly recognized that teaching required new tools. She attended the Faculty Summer Institute in 2016, which, as she puts it, helped her “transition from practitioner to educator” and connected her with resources and a teaching community that she still values. She later returned to the Institute as a presenter, calling it “one of the highlights of my teaching career thus far.”
Since then, Sadie has brought Communication-Intensive (C-I) strategies into 26 course sections, especially her Public Relations Writing and Public Relations Campaigns classes, which are certified written and technological communication. She’s also a go-to resource for colleagues working to improve communication in their own courses and served as a C-I Teaching Fellow during the 2023–24 academic year.
Her support for students doesn’t stop when class ends. She has mentored 14 students who earned LSU’s Distinguished Communicator medal—an honor that reflects excellence in written, spoken, visual, and technological communication. As former student Ryan Castellon put it, “there is truly no faculty member as in-touch with the tools students need to be successful.”
About the C-I Teaching & Service Excellence Award
The C-I Teaching & Service Excellence Award (formerly the Outstanding CxC Faculty Award) recognizes an individual who, through teaching, research, faculty teaching development, or CxC program efforts, engages and champions C-I pedagogy across campus in an exemplary manner. Any LSU faculty member—tenured, tenure-track, or non-tenure track, full or part-time—actively engaged in the CxC program and C-I teaching and learning, and who has not previously received this award, is eligible. Recipients receive a $1,500 award.