I also got the wonderful opportunity to present my thesis proposal at the Emerging Scholars Conference at the University of Michigan, which helped introduce me to more amazing scholars in my cohort and faculty across the discipline. While writing my thesis I was also awarded my first fellowship via the American Political Science Association's Minority Fellowship Program. To that end, I also recently accepted an offer to attend Princeton University this fall to pursue a ( fully funded!) PhD in American Politics with an emphasis on Black politics, class conflict, and political behavior. Last quarter I completed my senior honors thesis on Black respectability politics in the US Congress, and I plan to continue researching this and related topics in graduate school. Through a variety of research experiences and extracurricular activities here – including doing stories for the university radio station and working on a documentary about institutional racism – I found my home in studying American politics. Now, I'm finishing up my last quarter at UC Davis, where I transferred in 2019. Were it not for the scholarship the school awarded me to attend two years in a row, I might have never found my love for poetry and likewise my love of making music/rapping. Plus, Professor Collihan made it fun, which always makes learning and engaging easier (I'll never forget the classes I took with her as well)! Similarly, it was through the creative-writing festival hosted at ARC, SummerWords, that I learned how much I loved writing. While my other responsibilities ultimately prevented me from being able to go to the MUN conference, the experience of getting to work with others in an extracurricular academic context pushed me to continue doing so at UC Davis. Even though I was working in AmeriCorps as a VISTA and still at-risk as far as housing, I decided to join MUN – which is run by Professor Collihan – during my last semester at ARC. Likewise, growing up, the opportunities for academic clubs like Model United Nations (MUN) were pretty limited or inaccessible for me – but it was at ARC that I came to see their value. It was through these reaffirming experiences with the amazing professors at ARC that I, as someone who hated school growing up (I had something like 120 absences throughout high school), ultimately became the student and person I am today.
Professors like Frank Araujo, Kathleen Collihan, and Betty Chan all advised and mentored me at the most difficult and isolating times in my life, and I can never thank them enough for that. These difficulties ultimately left me homeless/at-risk for a large portion of the time that I was attending ARC, but both during this period and during the period which led up to it, I met some of the most amazing and inspiring professors who were always willing to stay after class to chat with me. Moving here alone brought with it some great struggles that I couldn't have foreseen at that age, but which had a profound impact on me personally. I started at American River College in January of 2016, when I was 18, after moving to Sacramento from Williamsburg, VA on my own. Jasanté Howard Alum / 2018 / Political Science / American River College "ARC gave me the toolkit and self-confidence to handle the academic rigor at places like UC Davis and Princeton." Kelvin will say to anyone who will listen that at ARC, the students feel like they are being supported. And, he says if you are first generation, low income or even simply new to campus, that caring is important because of the challenges students face. Kelvin says ARC strives to make sure students feel safe and secure both inside and outside of the classroom. Kelvin is committed to helping ARC be inclusive and diverse, and is interested in equitable policies, strategies, and practices to reduce the achievement gap.
Kelvin is majoring in sociology at ARC with the hope of discovering the social forces that prevent the upward mobility of people of color, a topic he unfortunately already knows a lot about.Īlong with working full-time to help support mom and his six brothers and sisters, Kelvin keeps his academic pursuits in good standing so he can be involved in ARC student leadership and participate as a leader/mentor at school. Kelvin Burt is an African American student who is studying to help other students of color living in poverty to find school, stay there, and finish. Kelvin Burt Student / Sociology / American River College "I believe that academic support for students of color is essential for their academic attainment.
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