2026 American Counseling Association Graduate Student Ethics Award for Doctoral Students won by team of LWU students Mahalia Cain of Williamsburg, Kentucky; Amanda Gienow of Knoxville, Tennessee; Lynnsey Vandeventer of Danville, Kentucky; and Sibo Zhao of Bowling Green, Kentucky.
by Duane Bonifer
COLUMBIA, KY. (02/23/2026) It will be several years before four Lindsey Wilson University graduate students earn their doctorate degree in counselor education and supervision, but they are already making a name for themselves in the counseling profession.
The quartet of Mahalia Cain, Amanda Gienow, Lynnsey Vandeventer and Sibo Zhao recently won the 2026 American Counseling Association Graduate Student Ethics Award for Doctoral Students in the ACA Graduate Student Ethics Competition.
In the national competition, students were given a challenging fictional professional scenario and asked to examine it using the ACA Code of Ethics and information from other professional counseling literature.
The purpose of the national competition is to educate the association’s student members on ethical issues in the counseling profession by having them apply their academic knowledge to a real-life setting.
Cain said the results of the 2026 competition demonstrate the high quality of Lindsey Wilson’s doctoral program in counselor education and supervision. Lindsey Wilson doctoral students also won the national competition in 2019 and 2020, and master’s students won it in 2015.
“It was a huge honor to represent Lindsey Wilson University,” said Cain, who is from Williamsburg, Kentucky “We have a really great cohort, and it was great to work together as a team and put out some of the work that the program has put into us. Our success is a reflection of our backgrounds and also what we are learning in the program.”
‘Divided and conquered’
Students are not permitted to work with faculty members on their submission, but the Lindsey Wilson students received advice about how to approach the competition from alumnus Jay Tift ’23, who is now a lecturer at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. Tift was a member of a team that won the national competition in 2020 when he was a Lindsey Wilson doctoral student.
“It’s really cool that we are first-year doctoral students,” said Gienow, who is from Knoxville, Tennessee. “That really says a lot about our professors.”
Two LWU professors who the students said especially influenced their work were Gregory Bohner and Daniel Romero.
“Dr. Bohner’s and Dr. Romero’s mentorship and ethics in particular gave us the confidence to put ourselves forward to do this,” said Vandeventer, who is from Danville, Kentucky.
The students worked on their project remotely over the Christmas break, with Gienow serving as project editor of the 10-page submission.
“We really worked well together as a team,” said Vandeventer. “We kind of divided and conquered a lot of the areas.”
Vandeventer said that another factor that contributed to the quartet’s strength is that “we all have strong ethical backgrounds and we all have different professional backgrounds.”
Cain said that while the group’s members felt good about the quality of their submission, they were anxious to learn the results of the national competition.
“After we submitted our presentation we had a lot of anxiety about it, but we had a lot of confidence in what we had produced,” said Cain. “We felt like we would at least place.”
It didn’t help that the announcement of the results was delayed by about a week, compounded by a dream Zhao had.
“I had a dream that we finished in second place,” said Zhao, who is from Bowling Green, Kentucky. “Then we received the news, and we sent messages to one another celebrating.”
A team of Lindsey Wilson University counselor education and supervision doctoral students took first place in the 2026 American Counseling Association Graduate Student Ethics Award for Doctoral Students. It’s the third time in the last eight years that a Lindsey Wilson team has won the doctoral student competition. The 2026 winning team is, from left: Mahalia Cain of Williamsburg, Kentucky; Sibo Zhao of Bowling Green, Kentucky; Lynnsey Vandeventer of Danville, Kentucky; and Amanda Gienow of Knoxville, Tennessee.
Lindsey Wilson University is a vibrant liberal arts university in Columbia, Kentucky. Founded in 1903 and affiliated with The United Methodist Church, the mission of Lindsey Wilson is to serve the educational needs of students by providing a living-learning environment within an atmosphere of active caring and Christian concern where every student, every day, learns and grows and feels like a real human being. Lindsey Wilson offers 28 undergraduate majors, five graduate programs and a doctoral program. The university’s 29 intercollegiate varsity athletic teams have won more than 120 team and individual national championships.
(Duane Bonifer – Lindsey Wilson University)