2018-2019 Mentorship Participants

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Felix Jimenez:

Feliz is a first generation college student and indigenous Guatemalan Mayan. he is a fourth year majoring in psychology, his emphasis is on "culture development". His understanding of culture was greatly shaped by Baraba Rogoff who emphasized that culture is continually developing. Additionally, he is a research assistant in Dr. Rebecca Covarrubias Culture and Achievement Collaborative Lab. As of today he wants to thank everyone who has helped and challenged him to understand many things. 

In collaboration with the Student Success Equity Research Center (SSERC), we have launched a project that examines the different factors that contribute to differing retention rates in engineering and the ways UC Santa Cruz can eliminate them. As part of this project, Felix will participate in focus groups interviews, as a note-taker and co-facilitator, with historically-underrepresented students in STEM. He will then transcribe and code focus group data. While helping with data collection and preparation, Felix will also conduce a literature review to help inform our knowledge base about this project. This study contributes to the body of research on the challenges facing historically-underrepresented students in STEM fields, and will give insight into how we can address these challenges at UCSC. 

Rebeca Najarro: is a 4^th year undergraduate student studying Psychology and Sociology. She has always been
interested in investigating how the anti-immigrant climate has impacted resources, retention, and feelings of belonging for undocumented students in higher education. Since her first year, Rebeca has researched various aspects of this question throughout her involvement in research programs, labs, and seminars. As a first-generation Central American immigrant, Rebeca feels strongly and passionately about activism that uplifts marginalized communities. Research is one of the many forms of activism in which she believes that we can come together and push for social change. With love and commitment to her community, Rebeca aspires to become a school social worker that serves students from under-resourced schools in downtown Los Angeles. She hopes to live the rest of her life helping underrepresented communities overcome any and all barriers they encounter. In her free time, she really enjoys listening to music and going to concerts as a form of self-care. Some of her favorite artists are Frank Ocean, Duckwrth, Smino, Goldlink, and Masego. 

Rebeca’s project description:
The UCSC Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) Initiatives aim to cultivate a sense of belonging and a pathway for success for students from diverse backgrounds, with a particular focus on Latinx students. One critical HSI initiative is the Regional Family Conference, a free, half-day conference that provides workshops and programming on the college transition experience for Latinx first-generation college students and their families. In collaboration with HSI, we will evaluate the effects of this conference using open-ended responses and interviews from students and families. Rebeca will be focusing on analyzing and coding these qualitative data. Currently, Rebeca has played a critical role in transcribing interviews and in beginning to develop a codebook of themes. Throughout this year, she will continue to attend focus groups with students and transcribe interviews. Rebeca will also be instrumental in entering, preparing and cleaning quantitative survey data from students and families. The overall goal of this work is to assess how the conference helps facilitates the cultural transition to college for Latinx first-generation students and their families. Rebeca’s efforts on this project will support the goals of our research lab and the larger work with HSI.

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Sonia Arzola: 
Sonial Arzola is a transfer student. She is from Tijuana, Mexico but now resides in San Diego when not in Santa Cruz. She is double majoring in Sociology and Spanish Studies with linguistics emphasis. She is a Merrill Affilate who applied to the Merrill  Undergraduate Research Mentorship program because she wanted to get more involved with her Spanish professor who has been her role model to follow. Also to have the opportunity to learn more about Spanish syntax and morphology since these topics have been of great interest to Arzola. Besides, working together with her mentor she hope it'll help her to strengthen her language with academic knowledge which will help her with the pursuit of her master's and doctorate.

Merrill Fellow Maria Victoria Gonzalez Pagani:
María Victoria González Pagani has been a faculty member at UCSC since 1992. She previously taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She is a Merrill fellow and a member of the Languages and Applied Linguistics Department, and presently directs the Spanish Studies major. She specializes in content-based language instruction and the incorporation of new technologies to language teaching. She is the co-author of Tradición y cambio: Perspectivas sobre la cultura latinoamericana (McGraw-Hill 2005),  Al corriente (McGraw-Hill 2004), Spanish without Walls (hybrid online first year Spanish course), and the author of Donde quiera, cuando quiera (Distance learning AP Spanish Language course) among other online courses. She teaches in the Spanish for Heritage Speakers Program, which she also directs, and courses at the upper division level in the Spanish major such as Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics, and Humor in the Spanish Speaking World, on which topic she is writing a textbook.

Project Description:
As part of a larger project, Sonia will be researching different approaches to topics of her interest in Spanish syntax and morphology which present challenges to teaching. She will learn how to turn the theory into clear pedagogical explanations. In addition, she will collect samples that illustrate actual language use related to these topics. Together we will prepare a battery of pedagogical materials that will be very useful for the students in the Spanish Studies major.

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Geneva Monteleone: 
Geneva Monteleone is a fourth year student double majoring in Politics and Psychology. She has a longstanding interest in the American political system and the ways that the fields of comparative politics and psychology can be used to inform American public policy. Geneva explored these interests by interning as a Robert T. Matsui Congressional Fellow for Senator Dianne Feinstein in Washington D.C., and then in Senator Feinstein’s field office in Los Angeles. She also recently returned from studying abroad, where she studied political science in France and England, and conducted research in her capacity as an intern for a London consulting company.

Merrill Fellow Eva Bertram:
Eva Bertram is an Associate Professor in the Politics Department at UCSC.  She studies American politics, public policy, and political economy.  Her areas of research focus include economic inequality, poverty, and social policy.  Her published works include two books:  The Workfare State: Public Assistance Politics from the New Deal to the New Democrats, and Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial.  She serves on the Board of Directors of the Community Action Board for Santa Cruz County, and on the Advisory Board of the UCSC Blum Center on Poverty, Social Enterprise, and Participatory Governance.  Before joining the UCSC faculty, she worked for more than ten years in Washington, D.C. in the nonprofit sector and for a congressional committee.  She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University, and her B.A. from Swarthmore College.

Project Summary:
Geneva and Professor Bertram will work together on two parallel lines of Professor Bertram’s research on poverty, inequality, and work in the United States.  The first examines the causes and consequences of the rise of contingent and non-standard work in the context of growing economic inequality.  The project seeks to historicize and politicize these trends, by examining contingency and precarity not simply as the outcome of market forces, but as politically contested and facilitated by state actors and institutions, who over time have determined the regulatory and legal contexts that govern work.  Geneva’s interest in this subject grows in part from her experience in studying zero-hour contracts and related issues in the United Kingdom.  The second project examines poverty in Santa Cruz County, and the strategy of the county’s community action agency to assess and address it.  Of particular interest is the agency’s attempt in 2017-18 to create a community-engaged needs assessment process for the county, and an equity-based lens for developing policies and programs to confront local poverty and inequality.

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