Author: jbonasera

IRT Alum Podcast, Kat Stephens, IRT ’13

Kat, a second year doctoral student in the higher education program at UMass Amherst, shares her thoughts in being a Caribbean scholar and woman of color academic in her regular podcast Caribbean Scholar Tings.

PODCAST LINK

Her research interests include high-achieving community college students and their transfer choices, and higher education choices of Afro-Guyanese women in Guyana, desiring to study in the United States. Further interests include bi-cultural socialization of Afro-Caribbean descendant students as they navigate American graduate programs.

 

Alumni Accolades – April 2020

~2018 Cohort~

(L-R) Christopher Perez, Program Director, Office of Graduate Diversity & Inclusion at the University of Maryland and Briceno Bowrey, IRT ’18 currently in his first year of doctoral studies in History at the University of Maryland. #IamIRT

~2017 Cohort~

Mariahadesse Tallie, IRT ’17
Mariahadesse wrote her first children’s book entitled, “Layla’s Happiness,” published by Enchanted Lion Books. She is currently a Ph.D. student at Brown University.

 

 

 

 

 

Continue reading “Alumni Accolades – April 2020”

Reflections – Dr. Francis “Kito” Tobienne, Jr., IRT ’05

 

It was my final year studying and taking only honors courses in English through the Honors College at Michigan State University. I was looking into graduate study and came across one K. Kelly Wise and the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers (IRT). Accepted into their 2005 cohort, I remember attending the college fair at IRT on the campus of Phillips Academy, Andover and being told to stop by the Purdue University table  by then Mr. Wise. Why? It was his alma mater and I had the intellectual DNA to become a Boilermaker. That was in 2005, and in 2007 and 2013, respectively I obtained my Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Purdue University! En route, I have received literary and teaching awards, grants and stipends, the distinguished Purdue Doctoral Fellowship and even published a book: The Position of Magic In Selected Medieval Spanish Texts as a Master’s student through Cambridge Scholars Publishing. I do not share these accomplishments to boast in my own strength and erudition but to boast in the guidance and advising of now Dr. (Hon.) K. Kelly Wise and his team.

With the IRT’s mission and dedication of it’s programs to assist minorities with high intelligence and high intellectual promise, the IRT has flourished and my story is both witness and testament to that! I owe the IRT a lifetime of thanks.

Continue reading “Reflections – Dr. Francis “Kito” Tobienne, Jr., IRT ’05″

Adom Getachew, IRT ’08 – The New York Times

Adom Getachew, IRT ’08 contributed to The New York Times article, “Reflections on 1960, the Year of Africa” published on February 7, 2020.

Getachew is a Newbauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s  Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. She is the author of “Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination.”