For the third straight year, CSUN’s entire HSI Pathways to the Professoriate student cohort has received full funding to attend graduate school.

CSUN is one of three Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) partnered with The Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions and supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to host the HSI Pathways to the Professoriate program. This program is meant to support undergraduate students in the humanities and related fields at HSIs by preparing them for and supporting them through Ph.D. programs — with the goal of increasing the number of Latinx professors.

This year, the program helped nine students, including Clarissa Campos Clarissa Campos ’20 (Sociology) achieve their dreams. A first-generation Latina student who will be attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Campos said she never believed she would have the means to attend graduate school. Thanks to the funding package her doctoral program offered her, Campos is planning to study mass incarceration, police brutality and the prison abolition movement.

“I’ve learned so much about myself, academia and the type of researcher I want to be because of all the guidance I received from just about everyone associated with the [HSI Pathways to the Professoriate] program,” Campos said. “Even when I doubted myself, they never did. I feel so unbelievably lucky to enter my doctoral program with such a strong support system already in place. The best part of this entire experience is that it’s only just the beginning, and I have so much more to learn.”

According to Heidi Schumacher, HSI Pathways coordinator, the CSUN program’s 100% success rate — every student who has applied to a graduate school has been accepted and funded — is the result of the hard work of the students themselves, along with their faculty mentors and many campus partners.  There will now be 26 CSUN alumni of HSI Pathways in doctoral programs across the country.

“I am delighted that these brilliant and deserving students have all been admitted to doctoral programs,” Schumacher said. “Along with the students in our first and second cohorts, these CSUN graduates will help to transform the landscape of the humanities and allow the professoriate to better reflect the students in the classroom.”

This year’s cohort is:

Clarissa Campos: American Studies; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

​Liz Chavez: Comparative Studies; The Ohio State University

Kevin Ginosian: Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English; The University of Arizona

Virginia Gomez: Gender Studies; Indiana University Bloomington

Ashlee Monton: American Studies; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Dani Murillo: Sociology; University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Genesis Pia: Sociology; Rutgers University

Kevin Ramírez: History; New York University

Danielle Snali: History; Binghampton University

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