“Without the support of MMUF, I would not have attended graduate school,” says Nai-Lah Dixon ’21.
Ms. Dixon is talking about Dartmouth College’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program. She has been involved as an associate fellow since her third year. This program helps undergraduate students from underrepresented communities prepare for academic careers in the humanities and humanities and social sciences.
Now a doctoral student in human development and social policy at Northwestern University, Dixon is studying how underdiagnosis of learning disabilities in black children impacts academic success and other outcomes. I’m researching. She is one of eight MMUF graduates in history to begin their doctoral studies this fall.
“Many students have high potential and research talent, but they may not realize how this will translate into advancement in their education and career,” says the MMUF mentor. Michelle Warren, the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of Comparative Literature. He has been attending Dartmouth since 2010.
“This program serves as a bridge, identifying high-potential students and giving them a foundation to increase their chances of success while at Dartmouth and persistence after graduation.”
The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship was created in 1988 by the New York-based Mellon Foundation. The program builds on the legacy of the late Benjamin Elijah Mays, a scholar and educator known for mentoring generations of social justice activists, including Martin Luther King Jr.
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This program acts as a bridge, identifying students with high potential and giving them the foundation for success.
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Michelle Warren, Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Director
Dartmouth was one of the first schools invited to participate in the program, which now partners with nearly 50 institutions.
“Students look around campus and see that the student body is more diverse than the faculty, but why that is is abstract,” Warren said. “This program gives concrete, tangible explanations of how professorships are built, how people get from point A to point B, and teaches them that they can do it too. This makes academia more accessible, clearer, and more empowering.”
Fellows receive stipends and funding for research and conferences starting the summer of their sophomore year. The program provides opportunities to develop the skills needed to succeed in an academic career, including mentorship, an extensive network of colleagues and advisors, research and writing training, and guidance through the graduate school application process. Community and mentor support continues long after graduation.
“MMUF is so important because it really trains the next generation of scholars and brings diversity to academia,” said Scott, who graduated from Dartmouth College and moved to Washington, D.C., before deciding to attend graduate school. said Dixon, who worked at the Vera Institute for Justice, a nonprofit based there.
Although not all fellows go on to graduate school, the program shows strong results. Of the more than 200 Dartmouth MMUF graduates, more than two-thirds have earned graduate degrees of any type, and more than 30 have gone on to careers in academia. During his tenure as MMUF director, Warren has seen 73 percent of the program’s graduates enroll in doctoral programs. This is more than double the national ratio of bachelor’s level graduates to doctoral enrollees.
“I’m an example of this program working,” says Shandine Brown ’20, who will begin a doctoral program in art history at Yale University this fall, conducting research related to Native American art. . “I never thought I would be able to get a PhD because no one in my family had ever done one.Professor Warren helped me with my application with a lot of encouragement that I needed. He guided me through this.”
Shandine Brown ’20 was exhibited here at the Hood Art Museum when she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow at Dartmouth College and began a doctoral program in art history at Yale University this fall. (Photo provided by Don Hammerman)
After graduating from Dartmouth, Brown, a member of the Navajo Nation, completed an internship at the Center for Advanced Study of Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a fellowship in Native American Art at the Rhode Island School of Design. Completed. After working as an assistant curator at a museum, he decided to return to graduate school.
Brown is one of five Native American MMUF graduates who have started doctoral programs in recent years, three of whom are participating again this year, an “unprecedented level of participation.” , Warren said, is the result of the program’s conscious outreach to Dartmouth’s Native American community. Dartmouth has one of the highest numbers of Native students among MMUF participating schools.
“I can’t say enough positive things about Warren and Sarah Biggs Cheney, MMUF associate coordinator and senior writing instructor,” Brown said. “They influenced not only my work as an academic and professional, but also as a person. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to pay them back. And when I told them that, they said, ‘ Now, when you graduate, your job is to mentor other students.” ”
In addition to the fellowships funded through Mellon, which supports five new fellows each year, Dartmouth College will uniquely award three additional associate fellows, like Dixon, who majored in sociology with African American studies. is providing funding.
“Associate Fellow funding allows us to expand our reach at MMUF and is a true catalyst for success across all programs,” Warren said.
Dixon calls the Associate Fellows program “vital and lifesaving.” The first member of her family to attend college, she faced many challenges early in her career at Dartmouth, including a major illness in the family, and was not accepted to MMUF when she applied as a sophomore. she says.
“The initial rejection from MMUF allowed me to focus on the exact research questions I wanted to ask and the answers I was trying to find,” she says. She refined these questions during independent research with now-retired Associate Professor of Sociology Deborah King, who encouraged her to reapply. That’s when she said, “I realized that Professors Warren and Cheney had a clear direction and trajectory that I wanted to follow. It was exactly what they were looking for.”
In addition to Brown and Dixon, Dartmouth MMUF alumni starting doctoral programs this year include:
Emily Bowerman ’23, History, University of Notre Dame Hayden Elafay ’24, American Studies, New York University Daniel Modesto ’24, American Studies, University of Minnesota Alejandro Morales ’24, Comparative Literature, Brown University Sidney Nguyen ’21 , Anthropology, New York George Stein23, Linguistics, University of Michigan
MMUF alumni who recently earned their doctorates include Oscar Cornejo Casares ’17, who earned his doctorate in sociology from Northwestern University and is currently an assistant professor of Latin American studies at Davidson College. Mark Griffith ’19, received his PhD in sociology from Harvard University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the Sexuality Project at Northwestern University. Winifred Daniel Jones ’17 received a PhD in English from the University of Chicago. Estefani Marin ’17 earned her doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Irvine and accepted a position as assistant professor of ethnic studies at Lawrence University. and Jessica Womack ’14, who earned her doctorate in art history from Princeton University.
