2023 Inspiring Graduate | Kevin Mullet
December 9, 2023 - Mary Beth King
Kevin Mullet earned his first college credits in 1983 while a U.S. Navy photographer aboard the USS Saratoga. Over the next four decades, five universities — online and brick-and-mortar, and three changes in majors, he continued his education and will receive his Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology with a minor in Journalism and Mass Communication this month from The University of New Mexico.
During those years, Mullet also met and married his wife, they had two children, and he worked for 30 years in information technology and as a photographer. But he found something lacking.
“Some of my over 200 undergraduate hours were achieved burning the midnight oil when I had jobs that held little or no work/life balance. Many of the hours I attempted, I just fell flat on my face, trying to do too much, too well, too late. Over the course of those decades, I acquired an education in my own neurodivergence and gradually learned how I learn best, not just how a syllabus or course objectives dictate that I learn,” Mullet said.
Mullet noted that he was born in 1961, the year the Berlin wall was built, an event many of his UNM classmates know about only from history textbooks. The decades have given him perspective and insight into his pursuit of education at UNM.
“For quite a while now, I've been the oldest person in the room in all of my classes, and probably older than the combined ages of any two or three of my classmates,” Mullet observed. “I say this not to spotlight my age, but to spotlight my perspective. I choose topics for projects, or which courses to take, not exclusively to check off items on a degree plan list, to please an authority figure, or to increase my value as an income-earner, but to further complete the jigsaw puzzle that represents the person I want to be. I had no idea what transitional justice was before I took the course, and it certainly checked no box on my degree plan, but I thought it might help provide insight into an Undergraduate Anthropology Honors program research project I was writing. That course changed the course of my life, and now I want to spend the rest of my career pursuing transitional justice.”
Mullet wants to explore the intersection of transitional justice and computing, Artificial Intelligence, and the use of data, and plans to attend graduate school at UNM — probably either a Ph.D. program in Political Science or Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology.
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