In the spirit of Black History Month, NU has teamed up with the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Foundation to establish a fellowship program in an effort to increase the number of minority undergraduate students who go on to pursue a Ph.D.
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the MMUF program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to research in one of 20 designated areas, including sociology, history and computer science, before entering graduate school.
Andrea Abel, MMUF coordinator and coordinator of special projects in the Office of the President at NU, said the program is about contemplating what undergraduate research is and how a student can add to it.
“You come in with a topic or area of interest, and you really become an expert,” Abel said. “A lot of students use this as their senior thesis, but it really becomes much larger than that.”
In the program’s first year at NU in 2009, Communication senior and current Mellon Mays fellow Marcus Shepard received e-mails notifying him that he had been recommended to apply to the program. He decided to attend an information session, which further piqued his interest, he said.
“I decided to apply because it seemed like it aligned with what I was interested in doing,” Shepard said.
Since freshman year, Weinberg sophomore Anthony Iglesias planned to apply for the program through encouragement from his current Mellon fellow friends. He’s been perfecting his application due this Friday in high hopes of becoming a fellow himself and pursuing his doctorate.
“My goal is to help students of color step up in higher education,” Iglesias said. “And I think the one key thing for that is solidarity among students of color throughout the educational system.”
This year about 100 students were e-mailed about the program through recommendations of faculty and administrators, and roughly 45 students came to the program’s informational session, held Jan. 26. Each year, the program typically selects 10 students to interview from their pool of about 20 applications, though only five students become fellows.
