Program to increase Hispanic college professors is making waves

 

POSTED ON Aug 07, 2019

 

A select group of undergraduate students from Hispanic Serving Institutions heads back to school with experience in summer research programs, conferences, and support with enrolling in graduate school. The Hispanic Serving Institution Pathways to the Professoriate program is funded by a $5.1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and aims to prepare 90 students from Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) for Ph.Ds.

According to the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions, the Pathways to the Professoriate program aims to partner with HSIs — Florida International University, University of Texas El Paso, and California State University, Northridge — as well as research institutions in New York, California, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. The goal is to increase the number of Latino professors working in the humanities at colleges and universities across the United States.

Early in 2019, the Center for Minority Serving Institutions released a journal featuring essays by fellows of Pathways to the Professoriate. Read more about how El Paso native Johanna Lopez Velador,  a first-generation college student and older student who started college 10 years after graduating from high school, was recently published in the first issue of Pathways: A Journal of Humanistic and Social Inquiry.

Also find out how Francisco “Cisco” López, a Florida International University grad and current Ph.D. student, first learned about the HSI Pathways program.

Lopez Velador, who earned her bachelor’s degrees at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) in 2018,  was part of the program’s Cohort 1 and will start the second year of her doctoral program at the University of Iowa in fall 2019. This is the last cohort of the pathways program that started in 2014 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions (CMSI).