2022 Cohort – Institute for Recruitment of Teachers

NCORE: May 28 – June 1, 2024

IRT Associate Director and Manager of Programs Catherine Wong attended the 36th Annual National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in Higher Education (NCORE®) held on the island of O’ahu, Hawai’i. The IRT has attended NCORE® over the last few years, engaging in the five-day conference focusing on community engagement, exchanging knowledge and ideas as it relates to race and ethnicity on campus, and meeting up with IRT alumni and colleagues.

Do you have a conference whereby you feel that you can show up as your full scholar activist self without being second guessed, silenced or stereotyped? Do you have an annual conference or national forum that allows you to embrace your growing edges with other fellow changemakers?

NCORE® has been that conference for me since my entry into higher education more than 2 decades ago. I feel fortunate to have found a conference where critical dialogues are the norm, not the exception, where friendships grow from collegial relationships, and where creativity is a collective effort. Therefore having NCORE® select my home state of Hawai’i for its conference site for the first time in its 36 year history and during API month was wonderfully affirming and exciting.

Alumni Accolades, June 2024

Paula Groves Price, IRT ’95
Congratulations to Paula who has received the Zenobia Hikes Award for an administrator in Higher Education. The award recognizes a woman of color with a distinguished career in higher education demonstrated by scholarly endeavors or administrative and professional accomplishments. Paula is the Dean of the College of Education at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.

(L-R) Paula Groves Price, IRT ’95 and Brittany Zorn, IRT’13

IRT Cohort Finalizes Graduate School Plans

IRT Scholars have worked closely with their advisors reviewing admissions offers and fielding invitations for interview and campus visits in order to make the most informed matriculation decisions they can. Decisions have been made! We congratulate all of our current scholars for their work and energy throughout these past months. Congratulations and best wishes in your next step on your professional journey!

Being a part of the IRT program has been transformative not only for how prepared I am to pursue doctoral studies, but also fundamentally how I see myself.
Sophie D’Souza, IRT ’22

Admission Season Perspectives

IRT Arts & Sciences Specialist Brittany Zorn, IRT ’13 and Education Specialist Leislie Godo-Solo, IRT ’91 share their thoughts with IRT Scholars.

The first couple months of the New Year is always my favorite time of year- and no, it’s not because I’m an Aquarius Sun or because New England winters are the prettiest of anywhere (ok not JUST because of these things). The start of the New Year is my favorite time of year because it is admissions season!

For IRT scholars, the first six months of their IRT engagement is rigorous and time consuming; conducting school list research, making connections with graduate school folks, curating application materials, and crafting close to a dozen quality statements of purpose keeps scholars busy from June through December. Admissions season is the time when all that hard work pays off and scholars begin to see the fruits of their labor in the form of invitations to interview or visit campus and offers of admission. It’s always a season of some uncertainty and great celebration. The shock, joy, and relief that students often feel when the offers (and the dollars!) start to roll in is something I am grateful to share in each year.

While admissions season brings lots of exciting news, it also comes with a new set of stressors. Through the pre-application season, scholars are often most concerned with packaging themselves legibly to graduate programs- the emphasis is always on the scholar seeking approval (admission) from these graduate programs- but the post-application season introduces a new dynamic. Once an offer has been extended the power of approval (accepting an offer or not) is shifted into the hands of the scholar. After months of scrutinizing program websites, scouring faculty profiles, and drawing insight from one-to-one conversations so that they might be judged worthy of entry into a program, scholars are now faced with determining whether these institutions are in fact worthy of THEM.

Alumni Accolades, March 2023

Dr. Aria Halliday, IRT ‘11 spoke at the University of California, Berkeley on a panel called “On Erotic Mastery: Pornography, Hip Hop Feminisms, and Transness” on March 1, 2023. The panel was hosted by Dr. Peace and Love El Henson, as part of the Black Studies Collaboratory Open University spring symposium.

Current UC Berkeley Ph.D. student Paul Salamanca, IRT ’18 attended the event and is pictured with Aria above.