Our Graduate Students
We continue to develop our curriculum and have strong cornerstone courses in each of our emphases: Education, Policy Analysis, and Comparative Ethnic Studies. Despite budget cuts, we hope to continue to increase our graduate offerings, as we plan to introduce new experimental courses.
Our Master's Students have been heavily involved in the Annual Meeting of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS). Each year, at least 10 of our students present their research, serve as moderators, and attend the conference. This opportunity often leads them to develop relationships that lead to doctoral admission and working with NACCS scholars at other universities.
We have created an Applied Chicana/o Studies option for our students. This allows students who are not pursuing research careers to focus on applied work. Students can complete the Master's without doing a thesis or research project.
We have been admitting dynamic cohorts of students, including students from: Washington, Michigan, Nebraska, Oregon, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Boston, Mexico, Southern California, the San Joaquin Valley, Sacramento, and all over the Bay Area. Many of our students develop exciting work in applied Chicana/o Studies, including:
- Redefining Fatherhood through the experiences of Chicano fathers as they work to build new ways of supporting each other.
- Understanding Immigration through the stories of mothers and using innovative family talking circles.
- Developing strategies for helping deaf education programs to better understand and address the needs of deaf students who come from non-English speaking families.
- Building mentoring programs for Latino boys to help them find opportunities to address the struggles they face in school and in their communities.
- Creating programs for Latina teens to help them understand the factors leading to teen pregnancy and how to make informed decisions about sexual behavior.
- Exposing the ways in which raza communities engage in environmental justice work and how they help us envision more holistic eco-justice strategies to benefit communities.
Many of our students also complete Major Projects that bridge research and Applied Chicana/o Studies, while others complete Master's thesis.
Each year, several of our students are accepted into doctoral programs. This spring our students have been admitted to University of Texas, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, University of Utah, and University of Washington.
