The Center for Minority Serving Institutions Hosts the Second Annual HSI Pathways to the Professoriate Cross Institutional Conference
Philadelphia, Pa., February 4, 2019 — This week, the Center for Minority Serving Institutions (CMSI) will host the second annual Cross Institutional Conference for its HSI Pathways to the Professoriate program. The four-day conference will bring together 60 Fellows from two cohorts of the program and include interactive sessions that have been crafted to help Fellows in the program better understand the path to the professoriate.
The conference, which is both a culmination of the second year of the program and a post-graduate convening for the program’s first cohort, will take place February 7, 2019, to February 10, 2019 at the University of Pennsylvania. Over the weekend, Fellows in the second cohort will present their year-long research to their peers — with Cohort 1 Fellows as session chairs, interact with current Ph.D. students and faculty in their field, and participate in hands-on workshops that will provide them with the tools to be successful in graduate school.
“This conference is special because it brings together two cohorts of Fellows,” shared Paola “Lola” Esmieu, the Associate Director for Programs at the Center for Minority Serving Institutions. “This year’s event will focus on enhancing community throughout the program and will allow Fellows to formulate lasting connections that can be useful as they navigate the academy.”
The Cross Institutional Conference will offer Fellows practical and relevant advice on the challenges and opportunities that they may encounter in their graduate programs. Similar to last year’s conference, this conference will include Latinx guest presenters and keynote speakers who have successfully maneuvered academic spaces.
The event’s keynote address will be delivered by Frederick Luis Aldama, a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Latino and Latin American Space for Enrichment (LASER) at The Ohio State University. His keynote entitled, “Latinxs in the Humanities: Blazing New Transdisciplinary Paths,” will explore how the Latinx experience leads to the convergence and emergence of transdisciplinary knowledge in the humanities. Along with the keynote address, there will be sessions on positive mental health management, writing and publishing for academic journals, and a graduate school panel featuring Fellows from the first cohort of the program. There will also be a series of demonstrations from faculty mentors in the program that will encourage students to consider their pedagogical style.
“Not only is this conference an opportunity for Fellows to learn, it is also an opportunity for faculty mentors, coordinators, and all those associated with the program to gain insight into how to best support Fellows as they transition to graduate school,” said Marybeth Gasman, the Judy and Howard Berkowitz Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and the Director for the Center for Minority Serving Institutions.
Supported by a $5.1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, HSI Pathways to the Professoriate was created to increase the number of Latino faculty members in humanities. The program is coordinated by CMSI in partnership with three Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) — Florida International University; the University of Texas, El Paso; and California State University, Northridge — and five majority research institutions — New York University; University of California, Berkeley; University of Pennsylvania; Northwestern University; and University of California, Davis. Each year, HSI undergraduate students are selected to take part in an intensive summer research program, while also receiving mentoring, and support for applying to and enrolling in graduate school throughout the academic year. Throughout the five-year program, CMSI is also conducting assessments as to how selected students are navigating the HSI Pathways program and, once admitted, their graduate programs. CMSI aims to uncover the challenges and impetuses along the pathway to the Ph.D.
About the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions
The Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions brings together researchers and practitioners from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and Asian American, Native American and Pacific Islander Serving Institutions. Based at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, the Center’s goals include: elevating the educational contributions of MSIs; ensuring that they are a part of national conversations; bringing awareness to the vital role MSIs play in the nation’s economic development; increasing the rigorous scholarship of MSIs; connecting MSIs’ academic and administrative leadership to promote reform initiatives; and strengthening efforts to close educational achievement gaps among disadvantaged communities. For further information about the Center, please visit www.gse.upenn.edu/cmsi.
About the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Founded in 1969, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation endeavors to strengthen, promote, and, where necessary, defend the contributions of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse and democratic societies by supporting exemplary institutions of higher education and culture as they renew and provide access to an invaluable heritage of ambitious, path-breaking work. For more information, please visit https://mellon.org.
