Monique Boudreaux, associate professor of psychology, is a busy woman who balances her time between teaching at Nicholls and working with the FBI.
Boudreaux is originally from California where she went to undergraduate school at the University of California in Los Angeles. She received her master’s degree at Harvard University in counseling psychology. She then returned to UCLA and earned another master’s degree and a doctorate.
Boudreaux moved to Louisiana after she met her husband while working on her doctoral dissertation about crimes against children and kidnapping at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va.
“I moved here because I met a Cajun boy,” she said. “He was in law enforcement, and I was there for an internship. I moved here to Houma, and I have been living here for about 16 years.”
Boudreaux is still affiliated with the FBI. She is on their research advisory board where they still include her in their research on crimes. She travels twice a year to the FBI Academy in Quantico.
“They have been wonderfully generous with me in working with my geographical challenges,” she said. “The FBI agents that I have met at the Academy are amazing. They are so different and open where they have incorporated me into their lives. The FBI itself is a family unit and to this day, some of the agents are like family.”
In her free time, Boudreaux likes to spend time with her kids, work out and read.
“I am a sports-oriented person,” she said. “My daughter plays soccer, so I am on the soccer field a lot with my daughter. I also like to swim.”
“When I started in college, I was a pre-pharmacy major,” she said. “Most of my family were pharmacists, so that was something that I thought would be interesting.”
Boudreaux realized that she did poorly in the subject and took a liking to her psychology class.
“While taking all my pre-requisite classes, I took a psychology class, and I loved it,” she said. “My professor was an incredible mentor that transmitted psychology material to become engaging. That turned my interest into a life changing decision on changing my career. I literally changed my major the next semester.”
Boudreaux enjoys being a professor as much as working with the FBI.
“Every semester you have different people in your classes,” she said. “I love to see what they are going to throw at me every semester. It is fascinating. Some people have come up to me and said, ‘you taught me something different,’ and that is all I care about.”
Boudreaux has been working at Nicholls for eight years.
“My favorite Nicholls memory is when it was my first semester teaching here and my son was in Pre-K,” she said. “A parent came up to me and said you must be busy because your son says you work at ‘Pennies.’ I explained to her I worked at Nicholls, and I realized my son mixed up Nicholls as the coins, pennies and nickels.”
