Assistant Professor Queen Lane works with students in her Student Success Strategies class. (Court Johnson/Wake Tech)

While her students take a quiz to determine whether they perform best with hands-on activities by watching or listening to a lesson, Assistant Professor Queen Lane slips on a T-shirt they emblazoned with inspiring slogans.

"If It's Late, Make It Great"

"One, Two, Three Is It For Me"

"If It Don't Apply, Let It Fly"

Earlier in the First Year Academy class, Lane asked the students to note all of their bad habits and create slogans to inspire them to turn them around into positive ones.

"We can redefine ourselves," she told the class. "You can change your script."

Part teacher, part cheerleader, Lane works hard to inspire students to be the best possible versions of themselves.

"Rebrand yourself," she said. "You're in college now. Start fresh. Do new stuff. Seek positive feedback from people who want the best for you."

Students say they take the lessons to heart.

"The stuff she talks about – behaviors, bettering yourself – I'm able to apply that in other courses and outside school as well," James Burke said.

"She's close to students, and not just in class," Derek St. Onge said. "She actually cares about students and really enjoys teaching."

Lane not only enjoys teaching, she revels in it. She won a 2025 Excellence in Teaching Award for her efforts.

"I love the idea of helping people get connected to information," she said.

A self-described "information guru," she earned an MBA and started her career as a consultant – she still works with small businesses from time to time. Finding that a lot of her consulting work involved teaching, she switched to the classroom, teaching undergraduate business courses. She also taught high school in Atlanta and Cincinnati before moving to Raleigh to be closer to family and joining Wake Tech in 2019.

The First Year Academy works with students whose high school GPA was under 2.2 to get them up to speed for college courses.

"I gravitate toward students who need more tools and patience," Lane said. "I always want to help the underdog."

In addition to being part of First Year Academy, she heads Wake Tech's Eagle Start Summer Bridge program. The six-week program offers students foundational math and English classes and workshops focused on academic success strategies before they start their first semester.

"Wake Tech really works to help students," she said, noting that, when she taught high school, she encountered a lot of students who had trouble learning because they faced a lack of food, housing or both.

Lane, who also has a degree in psychology, has been studying how people learn for years. She says she practiced various forms of play therapy on her own children and incorporated what she learned into her own teaching.

She uses activities like painting slogans on T-shirts and handing out boxes of M&Ms to students so they can create images of their dream homes to engage students and get them excited about learning.

"Our goal is to help them connect to be successful," she said, "so I'm trying to build those connections."