My research project surrounds the 150th anniversary of the Rackham Graduate School, which is happening in 2026. Two other students and I are working with our mentor, Emily Swafford, the Assistant Dean at Rackham. We are doing background archival research online and at the Bentley Historical Library in order to find interesting themes within the Graduate School’s history, the record of graduate school nationally and globally, and student experience at the University of Michigan. We are focusing partly on experiences which have historically been ignored, meaning those of minority groups: racial minorities, women, international students.
My role in this project is to parse through the endless information related to Rackham; I spend every day looking through boxes of files of papers at the Bentley and looking through websites on my computer. We want to find out what we already know about notable people, the historical “firsts,” and how larger events affected graduate schools. From there we can ask questions about what we don’t know and dig in that direction.
My priorities for this project are to spotlight the experiences of minority students, find novel, fascinating, understandable ways to connect all the information we are collecting, and to affirm why higher education and research institutions are important–and why we should put energies into improving them.
So far, the themes I am interested in include: the effect of war on research and demographics, trends of what is popular to study, the physical processes of applying for and completing degrees, and a connection between minority identities, higher education, and activism/advocacy. I also have enjoyed looking through Rackham Student News publications to see the graduate school from more of a student perspective. The relationships between students and The Institution are always prevalent and fascinating to me–student petitions, committees, elections, student government, clubs, flyers, etc.
With this project I hope to contribute to more people’s understanding and interest in the Rackham Graduate school, its people, and their research.